Dracula/Harker’s Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is the 1890’s equivalent of present-day clinicians/culture warriors, such as Drs. James Dobson, Laura Schlessinger, and Ben Carson, who infamously use(d) their medical, psychiatric, psychological, and therapeutic training to legitimize and promulgate their homophobia. To show the extent of their bigotry via my Van Helsing, I have interspersed the action of Dracula/Harker—Part II with the following excerpts from his address to the fictional Dutch Chapter of the International Society of Christian Mental Pathologists.
Like Jehovah’s Ransom, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, we too bring good news to a fallen world that comes of wilful natures brought low by weak minds given over to sin. And of the countless sins that have beset Mankind since its expulsion from Eden, none have proved more societally corrupting than the malignant mental malady of sexual inversion—a perversion of the natural order so virulent and pernicious that quarantining the terminally degenerate in prison is necessary to protect the uninfected and contain the latent infected. Just think of all the recently tried, convicted, and incarcerated unnaturalists, whose names—thanks to public records and opinion: the state and the street, if you will—are now synonymous with “gross indecency,” and you will realise the threat this epidemic—no, this pandemic!—poses and both our moral duty and professional obligation to prevent it.
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If you think me overstating the societal consequences of sexual degeneracy, I can prove otherwise by citing the case, only recently brought to my attention, of an unabashed, debauched deviant of the worst order.
These are the particulars: The inveterate invert in question is a fifty-nine-year-old Englishman, who, reportedly once of good repute and not insubstantial means, could, until only a few months ago, have been mistaken for one of our august members. However, to his relations’ mortification and peers’ incredulity, he, one day, for no apparent reason, simply began to doff all vestiges of respectability—and then even decency—by taking up the life of the most dissolute kind of libertine: a profligate pervert. So unbelievably flagrant and unapologetically shameless did he become that initially the police and subsequently the courts were compelled to intervene to safeguard public morals from the social contagion of his disordered, if not diseased, mind. In the end, the wretch—his own worst witness—publicly proved himself beyond a doubt irredeemably obdurate. Hence, the Crown secured a conviction on multiple counts of the grossest indecency, whereupon the judge, mercifully forgoing a prison sentence, committed him to a lunatic asylum, where I, having been consulted, found him no less—if not even more—incorrigible after learning he had been discovered preying upon his male attendants!
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Having addressed the depth of the degeneracy and breadth of the contagion of sexual inversion, I now come to the most important topic for us moral men of medicine: treatment. Fortunately for you, my colleagues in Christ, as the Lord, in His grace, has afforded me the opportunity to consult on the case of one among the worst afflicted, I now stand before you ready to share my latest findings on the subject. But before I do, because the eradication of pestilence forces us to look upon and deal with it directly, we must first gird our loins—a most unfortunate turn of phrase considering the topic—in that we have no recourse but to discuss the distasteful form and dreadful function of the male generative organs. For truly, being the quintessence of Man’s fallen nature, having surely devolved from God’s sacrosanct image on account of Adam’s original sin, they are, at all other times, best kept out of sight and out of mind lest they tempt and shame us again and again and, in the end, ruin us all.
This having been said, any cure for this mental malady most definitely does not lie within the mind itself because, as is incontrovertible, insanity is immune to intellectual argument and moral persuasion alike. Such aberrant impulses and behaviour being beyond the reach of reason, they must be physically—if not forcibly—curtailed and corrected. To this end, the options available to us medical practitioners include the mechanical, the chemical, and, as a last resort…the surgical.
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Whether, as conventional medical thought postulates, the solitary vice of self-pollution manifests the latent congenital perversion of sexual inversion or directly causes an acquired case—or, as our unconventional peers would have us believe, is merely coincident—the treatment of the latter entails preventing the former either by quelling the urge to indulge in the aberrant, unwholesome, and immoral behaviour or by entirely eliminating the capacity for it. To these ends, let us review, by the categories of mechanical, chemical, and surgical means, the methods at our disposal.
First, mechanical means enable us to accomplish two fundamental imperatives: the restraining of a man’s hands and the constraining of his manhood. Methods of restraint include the alienist’s standard appurtenances of muffs for hands, manacles for wrists, and strait-waistcoats for arms, while methods of constraint encompass spermatic trusses for the loins, locked cages for the genitalia, and galvanic shocks and spiked rings for tumescence.
Second, chemical means likewise afford us two opportunities to exercise control and instil correction in the restraining of a patient’s temperament and the constraining of his erotomania. Restraint involves sedatives, such as chloral hydrate, laudanum, and morphine, while constraint entails anaphrodisiacs, such as bromide salts, monobromated camphor, and belladonna, alongside herbal depressants like lupulin, salicin, and conium.
Third, for being the recourse of last resort, surgical means furnish us two final remedies: the restraining of the unruly flesh itself and, that failing, the removal of it to liberate the chronically afflicted once and for all from their unnatural instincts and, in doing so, spare them the ruination, dissolution, and damnation that can only result from their degeneracy. In resolute pursuit of this most virtuous goal, methods of restraint consist of blistering of the glans penis, cauterization of the urethra or urinary meatus, and infibulation of the foreskin, while methods of removal extend to circumcision, vasectomy, and, ultimately, in the direst cases, castration.
Have no doubt, though the Dobsons, Schlessingers, and Carsons of the world may say they love the sinner but hate the sin, these passages are their love letters.
"Dracula/Harker: A Gay Gothic Romance Inspired by Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'" by Mark Zidzik 