I've spent so much time on Gothic as part of my life, it feels odd to admit that I've never written a full auto-biography (only bits and pieces, in my own book series). To compensate, this video series retraces our steps, walking backwards to tell you a story that—like Shelley's Frankenstein (1818)—can only be told backwards (my usual writing style). And given I've written so many books at this point, I can afford to be more conversational/abridged when talking about myself (a sanguine calculus, if ever there were).

(source: "Persephone's Academic History" from "About the Author"; see, also: "On Giving Birth," 2023)

Interview with the Vampire (opening)

"So a vampire can cry."

—the reporter, Interview with the Vampire (1994)

"Interview with the Vampire" takes place primarily on YouTube. In doing so, it documents my YouTube and academic work from 2014 to 2022—meaning everything that led up to me writing my book series, to start with. It was initially inspired by my recent reaching out to Andrew Rakich aka Atun-Shei Films about their upcoming vampire movie, which then got me reflecting about my own work on vampirism; re: "State Vampirism" (2026) and how I wound up where I'm at—paradoxically writing about vampires when they're not even historically my favorite monster (re: "Modularity and Class," 2024). This is hardly the first time I've done this (e.g., "Back to Jadis' Dollhouse," 2024), but is the first time I'll be doing it outside my aforementioned book series; i.e., in a more SFW format, with all of the gifts (and curses) foresight offers. To understand how I'm more vampiric than I care to admit (even if witches are more my style), "Interview" explores: my older video essays on YouTube (e.g., on Alien: Isolation [my defense of the game and personal review] and The Babadook, 2014), but also undergraduate work, graduate work and symposiums in the mid-2010s, followed by my interview series on "Alien: Ore" (2019) and love for horror media tied to YouTube and my horror blog* (which I formed in 2015, and eventually had to use for grad school; e.g., my blogposts on the 2013 British zombie show In the Flesh, below).

*All of this is the precursor to what would become my Monster Volume and its three modules: Poetry, the Undead and Demons.

(source: "In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 1," 2018)

In doing so, I want to give you, dear reader, a special opportunity to reflect in ways vampires classically can't (or zombies for that matter, categorically braindead and/or hunted as homo sacer, above). That is, queer folk are treated as "invisible" despite having a vault of theatrical codes to paradoxically draw upon, making us both performatively overdressed and epistemologically anemic, "on the Aegis" (re: Athena's mirror shield having a vampiric quality I've written extensively about, regarding Medusa; re: "State Vampirism," abjection, and my extensive work on ludo-Gothic BDSM; see: "Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM"). But we needn't be so blind, and I want to explain how and why tied to my own work on vampires (and witches, which I frankly tend to identify more with, especially Gorgons)—specifically how it evolved into itself. Rome wasn't burned in a day, but it also happened with people participating in ways they aren't always master or even fully aware of (the closet). For me, the state is white, straight and male (re: "Understanding Vampires," 2024)—meaning to modular degrees that draw upon imbricating persecution language (re: "Idle Hands," 2024); i.e., that iconoclasts camp in duality to reverse abjection, ergo state vampirism: by using dead metaphors (often Freudian ones) that we effectively graverob/poach for ourselves (Gary Oldman ain't got nothing on my transformation, below).

(exhibit 63a [from "Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy," 2025]: Me still in the closet [and long before I came out]: from Kurt Russel to Jesus to Johnny Cash in under a week [and whose "pull" would only compound as time went on, below—meaning I wasn't born wicked, but made that way through a variety of other baddies feasting on me: going from "once bitten, twice shy" to "give me some sugar, baby"]!)

(exhibit 0: Left: Artists, top: Zeuhl and and Persephone van der Waard, in Manchester England, 2018 [cited: "Non-Magical Detectives," 2025]; bottom: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard [cited: "Going Mask-Off: Showing Jadis' Face," 2025]. Middle: Artist: J. Scott Campbell. Right: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard [cited: 'Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu's Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM," 2025]. As I write in "Dead on Arrival" [2026]: "Sometimes you slay the pussy and sometimes the pussy slays you [nerds fuck/enjoy monsters regardless of sex and gender]. I've explored my exes' abuses of me in the past, but also what they taught me and gave me to weather future storms" [source]. To it, whatever "arrows" or vampire's curse I initially received from this Salem's lot, I took and turned into a gift to pay forwards; i.e., flow = function [not aesthetic] and I'm using my scars to reverse abjection with. The undead are if not anything strong—doing so much "heavy lifting" through the poetic power they offer as fresh fertilizer and creation: true birth happens after exiting the womb [what trans folk call "a second puberty" with gender-affirming care].)

Our focus here is vampires, tied to my life and times: the girl who wrote "State Vampirism" and how she got there; i.e., as a "late bloomer" in adulthood, going from good-girl Dorothy Gale—a '90s neurodivergent theatre kid, budding sexologist, and awkward loner with few actual (non-imaginary) friends, and one who loved Alien, Castlevania* and Metroid (1979, 1986)—to total baddie Elphaba Thropp, having the whore's revenge in about twelve years (not including childhood, which we'll also discuss); re: "putting the pussy on the chainwax," as my book series (and latest volume) borrows from Key & Peele. The black mirror is a powerful device—one to expose all manner of bad actors in ways we reclaim upon ourselves, "scratching" our foes to see how they cry and bleed (the magic mirror argument; e.g., "Essay #10.5: Black Moderates Don't Challenge Fascism (re: Th3Birdman)," 2026). Matter shapes consciousness, consciousness maintains matter, and on and on it goes.

*Fun joke I heard once, during a Super Castlevania IV (1994) speedrun: "Why did Dracula not keep a mirror at his castle? He couldn't see himself using it. Ah-ah-ah!"

I digress. Vampires = gay ninjas, or a Trojan-Horse way into the house in weird-hot, uncanny ways (what Freud called "unheimlich"); i.e., "payback's a bitch" both ensconced in darkness visible and more accustomed to seeing under conditions of state alienation and persecution that have fascists and Commies sharing the same stages, bodies and costumes (eat your heart out, Sinners). Imagine wearing your normal alien outfit during a Halloween party, like Dracula or Superman but also Medusa (the OG whore; re: "Always a Victim," 2025; see, also: Elizabeth Hadley's "More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood," 2024). Sex work is generally abject, so these kinds of pretenses allow for people to dress up and engage in highly preferential (and magnetic) code; i.e., sex, drugs and rock 'n roll* but also pulp media at large (re: Gothic = trash).

*Re: Trojan Horses; e.g., Chumbawumba's "Tubthumpers" (and various evocations of it) being anti-fascism in disguise leading to more obvious cases: "The Day the Nazi Died" (1998). Code is code, cryptonymy (and camp) something to work abjection out with in duality (a concept we'll unpack more, in a moment).

No one reads Batman for the heroes (no one cool, anyways—possible exceptions being made for the Adam West version, a "vamp" in his own right but still outshined by the villains). Instead, people are attracted to vampires (and similar vengeful, "terrorist" beings) dissecting nuclear prescriptions in dialectical-material "pull." In turn, my prompting of others—deliberately using vampires instead of sex work and trans rights—suddenly saw me not being gatekept, meaning in all the usual ways the straights (and puritanical tokens) historically abuse; i.e., for "being political" or "making things gay" (essentially male privilege/a tolerance for the homosexual theatre nerd and/or "cruising" metal head; e.g., on par with Shakespeare, Rob Halford or Tim Curry's Doctor Frankenfurter but also various "slasher," vaso-vagal-style scapegoats like Stoker's antisemitic Dracula or Angela Baker from Sleepaway Camp, 1983). But the campy allegory (and subversive political function) remains; i.e., making Marx ironically gay—a man whose entire canon existed in a time when the language of queerness was entirely abject/monstrous-feminine (and still is for many Marxist-Leninists, below).

(source: comments for YouTube Community post: Persephone van der Waard, 1/29/2026; cited: "The Price of Rice in China," 2026)

Vampires are vice characters whose abject experience—one of alienation and fetishization to differing degrees and ratios—is hideously attractive to self-righteous dickheads like Marx (meaning imitators of the man himself and those who survived him, above). So cataloguing and wedding my experiences to my early YouTube work (video essays) and graduate/postgraduate work, after my book series, should give my viewers some idea of what being in the closet is like, and likewise inform them on how we overcome that/challenge state vampirism in highly liminal, subversive ways per medium (e.g., videogames; re: "Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning," 2025); i.e., while fully or partially inside the closet (which the state and its nuclear model are). You can't just say "go read Marx" (or Stalin, Mao, etc), then, because all of those men were queerphobic (and Foucault has his own problems [re: "Preface," 2024], though I enjoyed Butler well enough). And now that my book series is complete, I may comfortably articulate my own lived experience when camping state vampirism as I developed it: from childhood, to some extent, but mainly from 2014 onwards (and my attempts to branch out and experiment; re: exhibit 0). The homewrecker with a dirty little secret (as vampires and other antisemitic tropes deal in), I'm excited to share it with all of you! Just screaming with delight, really!

That being said, this remains "just the tip" of the vampire's fangs (or witch's broom)—merely the introduction. From there—and using an episodic style that Marilyn Roxie always told me to use and one I mostly avoided until now—the rest of this series is piece-by-piece: covering one aspect of my gay academic past, per meal. It includes various anecdotes, too, interspersed between my older essays and blog posts as I cover them; e.g., my love life and meeting cuties who radicalized me (all in a SFW-if-censored format, of course). In the video version of this post, we'll read "My [Older] Body of Work" (2021) and "YouTube Videos (Symposiums)" (2026), then start reading them throughout the series (which again, I'll do primarily on YouTube). We'll be semi-chronological, though I may jump around a bit—probably starting with "Sex, Metal and Videogames" (2021) as it outlines much of what we'll be talking about, followed by my aforementioned "Alien: Ore" series (as it highlights an interest in indie horror media tied to Atun-Shei and my return to my roots: where my interviewing the entire cast and crew of "Ore" had to be approved by Fox, but remains part of my postgrad work all the same).

In doing so, I'm giving you the secrets of the vampire: how I learned to do two things at once, namely consume Gothic media as simultaneously trashy and thought-provoking in the same breath, we "psychosexual bimbos from outer space" giving and taking as needed. Knowing what I know after I walked backwards into Hell once more (only to find it waiting for me, on my return), perhaps I'll have saved you a trip in the bargain (or encouraged you to go forth, yourselves). Time is a circle, the Gothic (and its Promethean Quest and/or Faustian bargain) going in and out of the past to make concentric labyrinths, mise-en-abyme. Consider this your vampire's vanity but also Ariadne's thread, working with shadows to break Capitalist Realism "on the Aegis." Yours. It's beautiful, yes, but also paradoxically ugly (and Numinous, tied to bigger things eating us that we can't see, below). The two go hand-in-hand, speaking to interesting lives and times most people only hear about, under capital, and which Gothic revives "in small," vampires or otherwise (the blood admittedly grossing me out, but also drawing me operatically in, Dayman-fighter-of-the-Nightman).

(source: Anthony Breznican's "The Undying Mystery of Max Schreck—the First Nosferatu," 2024)

Vicarious or otherwise, use what I holistically impart here to change the world for the better, yourselves. Predation is predation, but who is preying on whom? Gothic concerns the social and the anti-social—what Mumia al-Jamal describes in an interview with F.D., Signifier as follows: "something to use for liberatory purposes, or it [capital and the state] will use it against us for destructive purposes" (timestamp 17:53); re: state's rights vs worker rights, on all registers: the movement of money (a form of theft) through nature, the stopping of which is death for capital and the state (re: Patel and Moore, see: "State Vampirism," footnote 1). But death is nothing to us, after all, getting ourselves pregnant (that female Gothic, as Moers put it, but foisted onto male and intersex bodies, too): suck what must be sucked, doing so in duality to deconstruct, defy and disrupt the state's singular interpretations and monopolies, turning their worlds upside-down (re: the whore's revenge during ludo-Gothic BDSM chasing palliative-Numinous forces to fight fire with fire)! You have all power to do so, born with it in ways that predate God and capital (re: Medusa). "If it bleeds, we can kill it" to "For a ghost, you bleed just fine!"

Table of Contents

• Concerning State Vampirism
• Disclaimers
• My Initial Message to Atun-Shei
• Making Trouble: Ann Rice, Bloodlines, and Charting New Destinies "in the Blood"
• There's Some Whores in This House; re: Sex Workers Ahead!
• On the Strength We Draw from Our Fellows; or, the Book Volume This Series Shall Inevitably Become
• This Series (as It Unfolds)

Concerning State Vampirism

(artist: Karen B.; cited: "The World Is a Vampire")

This piece (essay or otherwise) is part of a larger series on state vampirism. As I conceive it, state vampirism = feeding through the state mid-abjection*, be it openly capitalist or Marxist-Leninist. These are largely questions of aesthetic, whose Promethean (self-destructive) function extends to other configurations "of Omelas"; e.g., Zionism. Furthermore, there's overlap between my anti-Zionist work and my work critiquing Marxist-Leninism/state vampirism alongside capital, so consider reading both.

*Which state predation and revolutionary action both rely upon to function; i.e., "on the Aegis" as something to further or reverse, mid-vampirism, through paid/unpaid labor (re: me, vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva). To that, abjection (us versus them/alienation and fetishization) is one of four main Gothic theories my book series utilizes—the other three being hauntology (retro-future), cryptonymy (show/hide) and chronotopes (time-space) alongside smaller theories; e.g., Jerrold Hogle's ghost of the counterfeit† and Barbara Creed's monstrous-feminine (Gorgons and Amazonomachia, as I study it). As a queer sex worker and academic, I dialectically-materially prioritize abjection and vampirism through unpaid labor—chiefly sex work as exploited by Cartesian dualism and its harmful, maximalist binaries under Capitalist Realism, treating nature as monstrous-feminine (re: "Nature Is Food," 2024)—but mention the other theories, too (access "Four Main Gothic Theories (the Four Gs)" in "Paratextual Documents" for their longer definitions). In essence, capital/the state rape by design, which unpaid labor prevents by breaking Capitalist Realism mid-abjection; i.e., reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM (rape play) when having the whore's revenge (which "State Vampirism" explores at length): "to break the profit [and productivity] motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes" (source: "Rape Reprise," 2024).

†Re: "Raising Awareness" (2025),  footnote 1.

Disclaimers

"Dead on Arrival" is part of my Sex Positivity book series, which continues after its June 2025 finale in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers, all of whom I credit on my Acknowledgments pages and Sex Work page. This piece doesn't focus on sex work itself, but widespread exploitation; i.e., in a shared predatory system, "whoring nature (and workers) out" in highly abject ways.

(artist, left: Bay Ryan; right: Persephone van der Waard)

For the Visually Impaired: I read this essay out loud on my YouTube channel ("Essay #10: Dead on Arrival; or, J.K. Rowling's Autopsy (and Those Who Shill Her)") and its short follow-up ("Essay #10.25: 'Don't Tag Me'; or, Th3Birdman Shows His Ass")

Disclaimer Regarding Essay Contents: All opinions are my own; i.e., as part of my research, conducted alongside my book series, Gothic Communism (2023). The material within is written/speaks about public figures and popular media for purposes of (sex) education, satire, transformation and critique, hence falls under Fair Use regarding copyright and free speech regarding defamation/obscenity laws (the Miller Test; source: Justice.gov). Click here for my entire series disclaimer. Lastly many of the links on this page lead to my age-gated 18+ website where my entire work on Gothic Communism is stored and exhibited.

CW: classical artistic nudes and bikini-style pin-ups; fascism, genocide and rape*; police brutality and carceral violence; transphobia, enbyphobia, homophobia and furryphobia (werewolves and shape shifters), fear of crossdress and BDSM, racism, shadism, fatphobia, classism, xenophobia and ethnocentrism/Anglocentrism (e.g., Brexit and anti-Scottish independence), aporophobia, Hibernophilia, animal cruelty, child labor/abuse/soldiers, pedophilia, ageism, forced transformation and torture (e.g., bury your gays/conversion therapy), sanism/ableism (mental and physical health), anti-Indigenous sentiment/appropriation, Islamophobia/Orientalism, antisemitism, whorephobia and sexism (cis misogyny or otherwise)

*Meaning (from my definition) "to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them," generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) […] Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale" (source: "Psychosexual Martyrdom," 2024). 

Concerning Keywords: My arguments rely on various keywords I've previously coined, which here present in bold while color-coded (usually only once, while stressing their keyword status; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM, Metroidvania, or the palliative Numinous, etc). While some are given here, in abridged form, "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" (2024) provides all neologisms, in full.

A Letter from the Vampire

I'm the prince of phantoms
[...] My telepathic powers
Weave you in my spell (source).

—James Rivera; "To Sleep, Perchance to Scream" from Nosferatu (1989)

(source thumbnail: "Interview with the Vampire: Inviting ‪@AtunSheiFilms‬ to Interview Him/Review His Upcoming Work," 2026; see, also: source skeet [on the Poe Museum and other aspects of my Gothic past and routinely reexploring it] from vanderWaardart, 4/26/2026)

Speaking of, this series starts with a letter. That is, from Frankenstein to Dracula (1897), vampire stories (or things comparable to vampire stories) start with letters; i.e., that—unto themselves and everything they entail, composite-wise—reference this or that in epistolary ways that go in and out of fashion; e.g., Ann Rice's famous novel from 1975, which I knew better from its 1994 film adaptation (with Cruise and Pitt, above). Needless to say, the tropes were all present and accounted for when I—like Dracula to Jonathan Harker—reached out to Atun-Shei and gave them something interesting to write in their diary. So I want to include that, here, before proceeding:

Atun-Shei,

My name is Persephone van der Waard, and I'm a Gothic academic, author and critic/trans sex worker and activist who specializes (more recently) in vampire poetics; i.e., as metaphor for state predation, mid-abjection (re: "State Vampirism," 2026). I wanted to ask if there's a place to watch your upcoming vampire film, The Vampires of New Orleans—meaning either in part or in full, as I value the work you do greatly. This includes your work on animal rights, anti-racism and Indigenous struggles, but also Gothic as a whole. One Gothic nerd to another, I would very much like to review The Vampire of New Orleans (or interview you about it) as part of my state vampirism compendium [concerning your hybrid academic-meets-theatre-kid approach].

For context, I recently saw you announce your upcoming vampire flick and it piqued my interest; re:

You: Vampire movies can be creepy, sexy, atmospheric and fun... they're rarely legitimately frightening. [...] Y'all have no idea what's about to hit you, good lord, this movie's gonna blow your socks off.

Me: You know what, mister? I'll take you up on that. When it releases, I'll review it and add the review to my work on critiquing capital/state vampirism.

In other words, vampires = undead and the undead are a metaphor for capital, specifically its feeding (through trauma) mid-abjection (from Julia Kristeva, 1980). Frankly they have been since before Marx [re: Medusa and whores, the world's oldest profession ergo label struggle], but certainly after him and his famous spectres' dialectical-material critique. This ranges from myself and my work, in the 2010s and 2020s, but also Creed and Derrida in 1993, George Romero in the 1960s and '70s (and Matteson in 1954 and similar works; e.g., Bodysnatchers or The Thing from Another World, etc), Lugosi's 1932 White Zombie as arguably the first zombie film in the modern sense* (not including Whale's Frankenstein from a year prior)—all of them preceded by Marx' Gothic paraphernalia, in the mid-1800s (1848 with his manifesto and spectres, and 1867 with Kapital and vampires), and tout le monde beaten to the punch by Mary Shelley's seminal [teenager] 1818 novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus† (as I've written on extensively after finishing my book series, whose Undead Module dedicates to zombies, vampires and other undead poetics). In Gothic, there's also an overarching element of vaudeville and exploitation, which liberation shares the same language, bodies and costumes with, in duality (thus speaks subsequently to your tactical frivolity—clowning theatrically on fascism/reversing abjection [re: me, vis-à-vis Kristeva but also Creed's monstrous-feminine] by literally wearing Nazi "mil spec" outfits in your own work‡).

*See: "Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters" (2004).

†Which I recall you covering yourself, in "The Sexual Politics of Frankenstein" (2025), though I haven't seen it yet.

[‡The "bash the fash approach," a kind of tongue-in-cheek kayfabe that takes fetish gear and uses it ironically for revolutionary purposes versus classically false or counter-revolutionaries; e.g., Mercedes the Muse versus someone like Autumn Ivy (see: "Toxic Schlock Syndrome," 2025); i.e., reactionary/moderate in centrist stories under Bretton Woods and neoliberalism decaying towards fascism under Capitalist (and Socialist) Realism. It's all cut from the same proverbial cloth, which has value in monstrously poetic ways; re: from Tolkien to us--specifically me and my friends' work  camping the canon through the monstrous-feminine: "From 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' (1936) to my own body of work, camping Tolkien's canon while drawing on his "Tookish" side (re: 'My Tolkien Scholarship,' 2025). Witches are monsters and monsters have power the state cannot exclusively control; i.e., through violence, terror and morphological expression as two-way streets (re: 'The State: Its Key Tools')" (source: "Dead on Arrival," footnote 12).

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)]

To conclude and reiterate, I would like to see your work and synthesize it to my larger corpus thereof (re: "State Vampirism"). Feel free to reply with the necessary details, if you wish to take part. I also do horror interviews, if you'd like to do something more conversational (e.g., "'Alien: Ore' (2019) Q & A, Kailey and Sam: Meet the Directors," 2019).

Yours,

—Persephone

I know what foreplay is, and when someone is selling something they're proud of. To follow their lead, or top from below? I chose the latter, if only because I didn't want to scare Atun-Shei off. But therein lies the rub—the lonely vamp looking for connection and accidently scaring off someone else who isn't as freaky as they are:

It happens. But maybe in this case, Atun-Shei will come to my castle and have a look around? Fingers crossed!

Making Trouble, Cryptonymy-Style: Ann Rice, Bloodlines, and Charting New Destinies "in the Blood"

"I'm an intellectual" (source).

—Melody Vassoff, interviewed by Linda Meloche* after releasing her poetry book, In Drought Time: Scenes from Rural and Small Town Life (2005)

*Who also interviewed my grandfather, a Holocaust survivor and Dutch resistance remember.

A note on cryptonymy and bloodlines, vis-à-vis the echoes of this-or-that that give rise to fresh blood (made from old parts). From Milton's Satan to Shelley's Creature, rebels chart new destinies while swimming in oceans of spilled blood (to "pull a Bathory" versus "a Moses," a Red Army sort parting the Red Sea to free Palestine alongside all oppressed peoples in a shared pedagogy "healing from rape":

Like Omelas, the point is walking away from Egypt if that means not genociding other people, not towards it! Israel is a ploy to buy cheap loyalty in furtherance to capital's continued raping of others—Jews included! This will certainly ruffle some feathers, but I'm a Satanic atheist; i.e., there is no God, only workers vs the elite and whatever deities either fabricates for their own purposes. My doing so happens while speaking to those harmed by refusing to look past matters of a "purely" ethnic character. It was never about "pure ethnicity" but dividing and conquering more broadly using that and other means of persecution through various networks, thereof. Jews don't have a monopoly on holocaust, and as Zionism shows us, they can tokenize like any other minority group to police nature with; i.e., non-white skin, white masks; e.g., the Inca's imperial subjugates and the Conquistadors. Betrayal is betrayal. It's only ever a question of who and why (source: [from my anti-Zionist/anti-racist work]: "On 'Anti-Semitism' versus 'Antisemitism,'" 2024).

(ibid.)

In turn,

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren't diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing.

So, in cryptonymic terms (to show and hide at the same time), I wish to "ungag Medusa" on the black mirror—to set her free and have the whore's revenge (regardless of gender) as intersectionally consciousness and solidarized in tactical frivolity. Whores witness things to testify to, later. In turn, we heal from rape by playing with "rape" in quotes, which vampires per the dialectic of the alien neatly encapsulate (and why we keep returning to them: echoes of ourselves, released and resonating recursively in oft-parental, "long-lost" sibling ways working out through rivalries of a friendly to not-so-friend sort, above). It isn't tunnel vision, but forbidden sight opening (as Blake would put it) "the doors of deception" (also, my mother's a huge Jim Morrison fan, but I digress). So did I emulate my mother but also, in the same token, women like Mary Shelley all the way back to Medusa: as rebellious sex-to-asexual symbols of power that remain, nonetheless, keenly psychosexual (and psychomachic, etc, on the social side of development). Nature is classically female/monstrous-feminine, and game recognizes game; i.e., as passed down, one whore-in-the-whorehouse (the secret dark princess in a black castle) to the next. Trauma is difficult to avoid, often billowing outward and collocative through sudden outrageous violence: the cartoon haunted by the real deal, parody/pastiche, but still drinking the Kool-Aid (or chocolate milk, below).

(cited: "Yesterday's Leftover Rice")

Furthermore, there is always another castle to reify and raze, mise-en-abyme (and often in the neo-medieval rivals modern Gothic celebrates; re: "Scouting the Field" and "Giger's Xenomorph," 2023 and 2025); i.e., all vampires come from older vampires, the flexible bloodlines in and out of fiction speaking to us and ours onstage and off. We're all made of the same "meat" as something to enrich or reduce us, accordingly. For example, my mom—in hearing about The Vampires of New Orleans—immediately asked, "Does it have anything to do with Ann Rice's novels?" So I figured I may as well add the film synopsis here:

In an announcement video,^[1] writer/director Andrew Rakich explained how the idea for the film originated in a short story he wrote about a character closely based on Louis du Lac from Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles novels. In the books, Louis is a 18th century Louisiana plantation owner who becomes a vampire and refuses to take human life. In Rakich's short story, a similar vampire character has the same moral qualms but does not consider people of color to be human, and therefore fair game for bloodsucking. The film expands this concept to include other vampires which Rakich described as "historical figures in arrested development," such as the serial killer The Axeman, who prey on the vulnerable in modern New Orleans, as well as a "Black Van Helsing" who emerges to fight them^[2] (source: Fandom).

In keeping with that—and in pulling on the thread of destiny as something to seize the day (and means of production), mid-abjection—consider here a taste of the cryptonymy side of the equation (which I write about alongside abjection, all the time; see: "State Vampirism"): secret whores trapped between virgin/whore binaries that vampires cryptomimetically camp; i.e., an exhibit about the open-secret troublemaker who, mother to me and Gothic Communism as a Numinous echo of the Gorgon, inspired my shenanigans (and Atun-Shei's; i.e., Ann Rice and her vampire novel's racial and queer allegories being tremendously productive, then-and-now): Mom, the strongest person I know, but also the most complicated. Weird attracts weird; to learn from the past, we must interrogate its Wisdom (of the Ancients and Ancestors; re: "The Value in Showing Intersectional Solidarity When Combating Fascism," 2026)—meaning in the flesh as memento mori, reborn in endless interviews with vampires who birth us (and us others, on and on)! Time is a circle, one haunted by whores who refuse to stay silent (my mother being homeless, once upon a time, and teaching me the value in sex work as something to support; i.e., as the world's oldest profession, service, and struggle tied to monstrous-feminine poetics, but also the land; re: with her own book, In Drought Time).

(exhibit 1: Source, left: Chelsea Library, 2011; right: "It Began with a Whisper" [2025]. Vampires are, amongst other things, alter-egos—with women in Gothic fiction classically delineating through their desire of different "lover" archetypes [re: Cynthia Wolff, 1979; see: "Radcliffe's Refrain," 2024]. However, they're also our blood ties, meaning where we come from and, to some extent, where we're going. In my case, I'm the spitting image of my mother. Such "dead ringers" are uncanny insofar as we resemble however partially a secret side of someone tied to somewhere; i.e., a ghost who proceeded us bound the same ancestral home's traveling burial site [a space of rest that cannot sleep]: a rift or emerging dispute but also potential resolution when the chickens come home to roost/the past given flesh in so many ways hyphenating house and home [the classic plight of any Gothic heroine, facing herself as whore].

To it, there are no perfect victims or abusers. In my mother's case, she's a survivor who gave birth a little fighter who also faced and survived her own great trauma tied to a larger cycle [of generational trauma and theft]. Mom always struggled to give voice to her own abuse; being a rape survivor myself, she gave me a home after Covid for which I used to write my book series speaking out for both of us: "a room of one's own," as Virginia Woolf once famously put it. Cut from the same cloth, we shared the same expectations society put on us—albeit diametrically inverted in my case because of my sex, but me being a woman thus policed through transemasculation as a kind of vampire not unlike the "scarlet woman"; i.e., as both homewrecker witch and lady of the night going her own way to upend state models of psychosexual domination and control. For the state, whore = anything that fights back, which it tars in the same basic brush per all the contradictions capital affords—with cis women and trans men classically being feminized by heteronormative powers, anything "masculine" [monstrous-feminine] castrated or cut off like Medusa's proverbial head; e.g., staked, shot or burned at the stake, as trans women [framed as violent perfidious home invaders] classically are [re: "Policing the Whore," 2024].

[artist, left: Ben Wickey; middle: Joe Morse; right: artist: pagong1—cited: middle and right, in "Assembling Trauma and Questions of Betrayal" and "Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)," 2024]

Everyone loves the whore, nothing more policed than sex through force by state powers pimping nature. Holistic revolutionaries "free Medusa," liberating the sovereign [and all beings of nature] from state bondage—meaning under settler-colonialism, heteronormativity and Cartesian dualism, thus Capitalist [and Socialist] Realism; i.e., as Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism does, camping the canon alongside bad actors we can never wholly escape: to play with scapegoats, thus subvert the usual pimp-like violence they vengefully afford, onstage and off. Again, abjection cuts both ways, the good actor using the same devices bad ones do to deliver a wound; i.e., one our enemies don't always feel at first, but certainly will the next morning [eating their bloodline alive, below]: while "waiting upon nature's mischief!" So is revenge, phallic or otherwise, a notably bloody business—if only to articulate the flow that "blood" [actual or otherwise] normally travels, the polarity reversing while coursing in our veins/on our teeth [and from ours to others, to others, to others].

Vampires are, among other things, ghosts that feed and speak to trauma in different trope-ish ways; e.g., the abuser, the victim, the avenger all being survivors in some shape or form. Abjection = flow and flow goes both ways—the vampire a metaphor for capital-in-small, but also state decay as dualistically fascist and Communist to deeply liminal extremes. Things don't separate in Gothic; they elide, inviting operatically an endlessly troubling comparison, mid-dialectic, and one that allow for social-material critiques: danger discos "in the flesh" that translate/triangulate visually in highly performative ways [above]. One can focus on class, culture and/or race to varying playful degrees, the world-is-a-vampire. There's often, too, a wavering degree of troubling intuition, naked power and dark premonition [and metamorphosis]. And often, we do it while under the vampire's spell—drawn to trauma and predation in deeply hypnotic ways we can't help but play with, ourselves; i.e., like others before us did: the call not just "of the void," but of the ability to feed how we desire, all while commenting on forbidden things in semi-taboo language. Gothic is nothing if not flexible, die-hard [the Gorgon the enemy the state cannot kill, because it needs to move money through nature]. Under Gothic Communism, nothing is sacred except for basic human, animal and environmental rights; assimilation is poor stewardship [see: "The Power of Dreams" from "Yesterday's Leftover Rice (a lovely pun)" for more maxims and slogans, 2026].

[artists: Allegra Viper and August Harper; cited: "Leaving the Closet," 2024]

So we speak in ways that cryptonymically give us the ability to hide and strike, feeding and hunting "from the shadows." This includes Rice, herself, as deceptively ordinary [at least on the surface, above]: like ninjas, pirates, guerrillas, etc, as all reversing Capitalist Realism cryptonymy-and-abjection, by humanizing nature-is-alien [whore] in deeply theatrical ways [re: Radcliffe's Black Veil often splashed in red to denote healthy-if-cannibalistic appetites, also above]. "When in Rome," we burn "Rome" to the ground while haunting its venues: calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM through the language of moral panic; i.e., injected with irony as something that doesn't instantly betray itself. Instead, it oscillates—a "dance with death/the dead" and "masque of the Red Death," etc [with black and red being the colors not just of fascism and Communism, but power and death, vitality and corruption [radical change evoking the humors and so-called "fatal visions" to expand the mind (and other things) in pre-capitalist ways]. Playing with them is frightening and fun, felt vividly and obscurely among a variety of other warring sensations that—far from elide, divide into a variety of dance partners tied to ourselves and ours. Gothic castle = nightmare anti-home that—beyond Victorian policings of young maiden's desires [so-called "pearl-clutching" to hammer the point home]—task ourselves with the usual Numinously nightly subversions brought to light of day [re: darkness visible; see: "Castles in the Flesh," 2024].

In other words, learning is naughty through secret lessons; i.e., those imparted in campy forms, concealing a truer purpose. So the whore's revenge is a derelict one—to find and turn someone consciously undead [demonic, animalistic, etc, as capital gentrifies and decays to afford workers strange appetites; re: "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," 2024]. So we whores we rebel in a variety of voyeur/exhibit ways that vampires [and comparable virgin/whore beings, below] hyphenate/excel at [re: "Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy" and "Transgressive Nudism," 2024 and 2025]: those close to life-and-death, in big/little forms [size difference] during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[artists: Allegra Viper and August Harper; cited: ibid.]

Murder will out, babes; slay! Secret sluts, become the Great Destroyer states fear in ways they cannot pimp to serve themselves; i.e., with as much stealth or open-threats you desire/require to break the usual monopolies on yourselves [an angel in the streets, freak in the sheets, or vice versa]. People are here for a show, after all—to see venom and fireworks fighting poison with poison, fire with fire, etc. And if one of us "jumps [or doesn't jump] the shark" the way you prefer, find another piper to play Pied [or Pan's] dreadful tune.)

I digress. The different between Rice and Rakich (while keeping Rice's unconsciously rebellious characteristics, above), the latter—at least on the surface (again, I haven't seen the film yet)—plays with the same theatrical devices; i.e., to allow for greater intersection (and insurrection, sedition-in-disguise): a postmodern/postcolonial (and postmortem) tradition drawing from Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), specifically her making Bertha/Antoinette Causeway from Jane Eyre (1847) the central protagonist, Rakich also race-swapping their protagonist to shift focus onto race/a racial allegory arguably there the whole time (the 2018 adaptation of Ann Rice's story making Louis black, below). Such things are fine provided it's to raise awareness, not cash in on cunning recognition's bad-faith representation of racial minorities alongside other oppressed groups (those preyed on by state-corporate machinery and actors; e.g., so-called "Black Snape" in the billionaire-backed HBO re-adaptation of the Harry Potter franchise; re: "Dead on Arrival"). The devil's in the details, the data "in the blood" however "corrupt" it appears (the abject/cryptonymic but also cryptomimetic presence of conflicting reports, fascism capital-in-decay but also Socialism and Marx's infamous spectres pushing imperfectly towards Communism; re: he loved vampire metaphors, but was also a giant homophobe/debatable antisemitic person).

C'est la vie. Rebellion, for all the poo-pooing Marxist-Leninists (of a reactionary sort) whine about, is performative (and often in ways that include/warp gender performance; e.g., crossdress, drag shows, and trans folk, drag-me-to-Hell; re: me vis-à-vis Butler's and Greene et al's famous works; see: "Inside the Man Box," 2025). Development is both social and material, Marx' Base and the Superstructure something to camp in dialectical-material duality (re: "On Twin Trees," 2023). Immortality is, from Matteson to us, the drinking of the blood (or eating of green eggs and ham) to "live forever." This roots in consciousness as intersectional; i.e., through holistic study reversing abjection in different anisotropic ways, but also by allowing different forms of excluded labor into the fold—racial minorities, yes, but also, as I argue, sex workers. This categorically means unpaid labor as also including care work aka "reproductive labor," but me taking it one step further than many (older) feminists can't be arsed: to lionize the chief scapegoat of capital/state, which the whore very much is. Whores are clowns, then, but also jesters and class warriors swimming in vitality as "blood," in so many words; i.e., ass war is class war (with modular elements race and culture selectively thrown in, per case)! It's a cloak, but a vampire's—with black and red striking at reality and Realism as two different things (and allowing for shared struggle and disagreements sharing virtues [and vices] concerning sex work under Socialist Realism, below).

(source thumbnail [feat. Lady Izdihar, right]: "Intersecting Discourse: Inviting Two Different Muslims to Discuss Trans/Indigenous Rights," 2026; see, also: "Critiquing Soviet Aesthetics during Socialist Realism" from "Raising Awareness")

Such is cryptonymy as a complicit or revolutionary device, defeating or upholding state predation accordingly (chasing the Communist Numinous [and its Dark/Archaic Mother] either way; re: "The Quest for Power," 2023)! But what of the whores, themselves. They're been here the whole time. So let's pull back the curtain, shall we?

There's Some Whores in This House; re: Sex Workers Ahead!

"Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it [...] Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts" (source).

—Robert Asprey's War in the Shadows (1975).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: vampires aren't my favorite monster—a truth "universally acknowledged" that I never bothered to question until now. Why was I sinking my teeth into them, time-and-time again (to "spread it, mount it, pin it," as the lepidopterists put it)?

(artist: Axel Ross; cited: "Modularity and Class")

Sadly the truth on the other side isn't always sexy (above). Turns out, they're not only the perfect metaphor to critique and skewer capital with, but also the state and Marxist-to-Marxist-Leninism's shortcomings; i.e., whores = vampires as performative critical devices/actors (the model and the master). As I told Atun-Shei in my video to him (timestamp: 13:43), "There be sex workers." Whether or not they accept my offer, this series—despite being SFW—still covers sex workers, queer folk and other unpaid labor divorced from privilege by the universal class subject (as white, straight, paid and male under a Protestant ethic; re: me vis-à-vis John the Duncan; re: "State Vampirism," footnote 1; timestamp: 1:39:55). To that, what do you think vampires are? Bastards, destroyers, homewreckers, impostors, pirates, criminals, terrorists, witches, and yes, whores but also gay icons dishing counterterror out; e.g., Gary Oldman or Christopher Lee, etc, as theatre nerds who, despite being straight, still speak to queerness, prurience, live burial, hypnosis, feeding and "boners" (all the usual puns, oxymorons, what-have-you) the way we queers psychosexually do: bad to the bone, "al dente," and so on (the Gothic's usual hyphenation of sex and death, bodies and castles, sickness and food, mouths and teeth, etc).

(artist: Alliesha Bay; source: "The Price of Rice in China")

But it's not just "one of us"; we are Legion, a congress of bloodsuckers (sucking this or that):

(artists, top-left to bottom-right [SFW version; ibid.]: Hallie Cross, Darling, Puppy Bat, Puppy Tyko, Jael, Ryder K., Clockwork Rhxbynn, Lilith Mae, Fishnet Housepet, Pupstar Darina, and Cosmo Wanderlust)

So, parody and pastiche, I'll refer conversationally to my sex worker companions (the creatures of the night, what sweet music we make); e.g., their interviews and times to shine, on my book covers, making my work all the better in the bargain:

(model and artist: Maddie Minx and Persephone van der Waard)

We'll also probably cite my book series a little (and its abject contents, below), though I will try to keep that to a minimum:

(artist: Missuscrim; cited: "'Men of Reason Suck'; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise," 2024).

Instead, "Interview" explores primarily my older works from 2014-2022, conversationally interjecting my historical readings of said pieces with bits of color (as most of this will be on YouTube, reading from said essays as I go). May its eating turn your lips (and other things) red! To turn the faint-of-heart bold! What the fluid, paint your own canvases and weave your own spells; re: Blake's "Heaven in a Wildflower" (as I discuss its monstrous-feminine potential, 2024) describing fire flowers, sideways smiles, what-have you, endlessly into the retro-future of a brave new world:

(artist: Lilith Mae; source: "The Price of Rice in China")

On the Strength We Draw from Our Fellows; or, the Book Volume This Series Shall Inevitably Become

"I feel like a young strapping lad, beating his meat vigorously for the first time!" (source).

—Lord Slug, TFS's "Dragon Ball Z Abridged MOVIE: Lord Slug" (2011; timestamp: 13:31) 

Speaking of whores and houses, this whorehouse is composite; i.e., Gothic Communism a non-profit project that, unpaid and unemployed though I am, consists of a patchwork bride of different wicked ladies' "Gorgon Voltron." I don't tend to make much money from this project, because I put everything I make back into it. But it gives me (and others) strength; i.e., in ways that routinely draw strength from while playing with dead things: whatever we leave behind, for others to find!

Keep that in mind, as we proceed; you're walk the footsteps of divine beings! In turn, everything dies; so find joy in it, her-tits-were-there—meaning a hauntology to plant new flags and flowers! Grow whatever you like, as long as it builds collectively towards intersectional consciousness/solidarity and universal liberation! No Omelas whores!

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard; source: "My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!" 2023)

Also, with "the Sphinx's Riddle" (the name for my next planned book promotion in said series; i.e., Volume 5: Holistic Study), I want release a book volume; i.e., one that catalogues, but also engages with, my older work from 2014-2022; re: in future YouTube essays, recorded and released over the following months: to discuss things from the written to the oral, there-and-back-again. It includes the written stuff, but also spoken accounts of me at the present space and time that are more conversational and reflective, years afterward. "Interview with the Vampire," then, marries the oral to the written—all to catalogue and explore the "guts" of what Gothic Communism ultimately became! "I was, I am, I shall be!" and like Rosa Luxemburg shall not plead meekly with my conquerors, but rather become the apple (and the tree bearing it) to dodge the rapist/face the axe they hold (the tree remembers); re: the paradox of exposure that liberation demands—not just struggle, as Fredrick Douglass explains, but naked struggle cryptonymy-and-abjection (see: "Prey as Liberators," 2024). To it, Medusa never dies; she only returns to haunt Europe (and elsewhere) in ways Marx could scare imagine! They kettle us, gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss; we clap back, using what we have "on the Aegis"! Our bodies, our labor and our art to shout, loudly and proudly from the rooftops: "Land back, labor back, sex back!" (re: "It Began with a Whisper").

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Or, as other 'spectres" impart along the same refrain (above):

Land back. Free Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Turtle Island, Lebanon, and all occupied, oppressed, embargoed land. Give to mutual aid. Learn about the indigenous nation whose land you are on. Lead with kindness but don't shy away from conflict. Always ask yourself who is being left out and why (it is almost always going to be disabled people, indigenous people, trans people, children). Start a garden. Make some art. Stay curious. Don't obey rules that don't make sense. Be loud about injustice. Abolish ICE. Abolish the police. Abolish the government. All power to the people. And wear a mask and test for Covid! (source: "Hailing Hellions*: An Interview with Delilah Gallo," 2025)

We live in Gothic times. So go wild, babes! You have only to lose your chains (and avoid a slow agonizing death from state shift aka climate change, but eye on the prize). Take these books (and their prior synthesis) and synthesize, post hoc, your own pandemonium. Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven, Medusa (and her ilk) the queens of Communism!

*A series catalogued in my latest live volume, Volume Four aka the Praxis Volume or "Pussy on the Chainwax" (2026).

This Series (as It Unfolds)

Dee Reynolds: What is "Night Crawlers"?
Dennis Reynolds: It's a game where they crawl around in the night like worms.
Charlie Kelly: I never said that.
Frank Reynolds: Yeah, well that's what it is (source).

—the Gang, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2005)

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This book series is a shelf of brains in glass jars, concentrically arranged but also interconnected through a variety of endless "Abbie Normal" pathways (surgical, but "madly" so: a Hamlet-level method to said madness): to embrace decay "among the midden," but also like Shelley's undervalued Last Man (1826) consider the beautiful side of such things (enhanced while the world decays; e.g., this dog who loves trains riding a train). Moreover, this series is largely set, as I'm working with a pre-made body of work (even then fixated ritualistically on the monstrous-feminine damsel as "forte/fatale"; e.g., Amazons-and-Gorgons pareidolia, above). But I can/shall choose from it as I wish. As I do, and as I record a given section for YouTube, I will share it here and update this section:

[to be added/expanded on; stay tuned]

• "My [Older] Body of Work" and "YouTube Videos (Symposiums)": Our treasure map, if you will, helping us explore the vampire's castle.
• "Sex, Metal and Videogames" (January 30th, 2021): A good outline of what we'll be going over. As I write in "My Older Body of Work, "I study horror, but have chosen, over the years, to focus on these three topics; they were a large part of my interests growing up, and continue to guide my research going forward. This post explores my introduction to them, and why I continue to devote my time and energy in exploring their Gothic potential."
• Alien: Isolation sequel [name unknown]: When we look at my work on "Alien: Ore" and Alien: Isolation, we'll also consider this upcoming sequel to Creative Assembly's 2014 classic (source: Abyan Khan's "Alien: Isolation Sequel Teaser Trailer Reveals First Look at the Game," 2026).