Bonus! Plumbing Dracula's Gay Depths (aka Did Bram Stoker have a Crush on Walt Whitman?)
A quick note about accessing this week's video: Oops, I accidentally set this post to be public! Sorry if you got an unexpected alert about that. I'm going to leave it accessible for all free and paid members for the this week, so if you got a notification, you'll still be able to view it. Then on Friday, I'll switch it to normal bonus-video access, for Patrons at $2/month and up.
Was Bram Stoker horny for Walt Whitman? It certainly seems like that may have been the case. Bram did send a very flirtatious letter to Walt, years before Bram wrote Dracula. And Dracula may itself be based on Walt Whitman's book erotic gay poetry. So we're going to be looking into that in this week's bonus video!
Also, in week's bonus video I mentioned how Fox attempted to turn Black Swan into a campy midnight movie by advertising free screenings hosted by drag queens around the country. There was some interest in that weird effort, so I dug around and unearthed some promo materials and also my photos from a screening in San Francisco! Here's a photo gallery, and this does not begin to capture how COMPLETELY aware everyone was that the movie studio was trying to make fetch happen but at least some drag queens got paid.
Backup link to the bonus video: https://youtu.be/3IPtvG4w75A
Comments (10)
Hey, I went and looked up Bram Stoker images and found this page: http://ricorso.net/tx/Courses/UFRN_BR/LEM2055/Albbbums/B-Stoker/index.htm . I think you can see the sensitive nostrils and thick lips a bit more clearly in the middle image than in the one you've got, plus the one on the right seems to be a slightly different version of the one you've got where the bump over his eye shows up more clearly. Also! If you're doing a video about vampires and queerness, here are a couple of things that may (or may not) be useful: there's a lot of argument about Achilles and Patrocles in the Iliad, whether they're being deliberately written as in love with each other or not, but after Patrocles dies, Achilles lies on the ground next to him for several days, crying and holding on to him. Achilles's mum, a sea-nymph, has to go up to Olympus to beg Zeus to keep Patrocles' body from rotting, so that her son at least won't be lying on the ground crying and holding on to a decaying body. Also, in the Epic of Gilgamesh, after Gilgamesh's, ahem, "friend" Enkidu dies, Gilgamesh is so horrified by this that he tries to find a way to make sure that he himself will never die, ever; and he actually comes pretty close to succeeding. So the two earliest surviving narratives we have that may possibly kinda sorta imply a gay relationship also have themes of a) living forever, and b) a body being preserved unchanged after death. Which are both kind of vampire-ish things.
You can see the bump over Bram’s right eyebrow, Matt. No idea about the sensitive nostrils though! 😁
"Fish eye? No fish eye." - Harvey Fierstein, Kull the Conquerer (1997)
Same thing. Shoulder view only. How does one watch something in Patreon?
I just switched it with an updated version, should be working corectly now!
Fish eye lease close up on the shoulder video? Edit: seem to just be when I watch on YouTube, looks fine on Patreon 🤷♂️
Oh that's incredibly weird, for some reason Premiere exported this as VR video?!?! I just re-uploaded, it should be displaying correctly now.
Watching your shoulder tell me about Bram Stoker... :)
What's with the weird framing? Did you shoot this on a 360 degree camera? Something's not right.
It should be working now -- I recorded it with an ooooold camera using OBS so I have no idea why it suddenly decided to switch into VR mode!