Category: Bram Stoker

• Bram Stoker: His Internalized Homophobia Externalized in “The Censorship of Fiction”

  Whereas twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker’s 1872 letter to Walt Whitman confessed his yearning for comradeship with like-minded unconventional men, and forty-nine-year-old Stoker’s 1897 publication of Dracula, with its dueling depictions of comradely and predatory male interactions, revealed the author’s anxiety over Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trials and imprisonment for “gross indecency,” sixty-year-old… Read More

• Gay Dracula’s Closeted Author Bram Stoker

  In a letter that apologizes for itself at length, twenty-four-year-old Bram Stoker wrote to fifty-two-year-old Walt Whitman in February 1872: These soulful sentiments, penned almost twenty years before Stoker started drafting Dracula, inform its most homoerotic passage, in which Dracula rages at his so-called brides regarding Jonathan Harker: “‘How dare… Read More