This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.

(Stoker 1997, p. 327)

This boy, known as Quincey, may well some day know how brave is his mother, Mina Harker, but there may forever be some doubt as to who is, or how many are, his actual father. Though his mother’s spouse is one Jonathan Harker, his blood has flowed through the veins of not only Mr Harker, but of four other men: Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood. These five men together are the “Crew of Light”, as Craft (1997, p. 445) has dubbed them, who bonded together in order to hunt down and destroy another through whose veins this lad’s life source has passed, and from whose breast his mother has suckled – the ‘Lord of Blood’, Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula. Though there may be no greyness as to the heterosexual union between Mr and Mrs Harker, a veil of homoerotic allusion, a veil as black as the garb of the ‘Prince of Darkness’, shrouds Stoker’s text, hiding a secret desire, a latent sexuality, which men who are ‘real men’ might refer to as ‘male bonding’. This band of heroic gentlemen, the ‘Crew of Light’, a ‘Mardi Gras of Salvation’, who would later be bound together forever, or another generation at least through their namesake, young Quincey, weave that veil with the dubious threads of machismo, their needles piercing through the fine fabric of Victorian heterosexual monogamy using the very foundation of that hegemony as their palette – the unwed, yet betrothed, presumably virginal women, in this scenario, Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. Stoker positions these women, indeed, offers their bared necks and flailed, limp and inviting limbs, as mediums through which those paragons of masculine virtue, those phallic paraders, are able to establish and maintain a link, not only of homoerotic desire, but of an everlasting paternal bond.

Hensley (2000) claims Bram Stoker’s Dracula is “a tale of dark love, forbidden pleasures, and erotic yet macabre passion”, and the fulfilment of homoerotic desire was certainly a “forbidden pleasure” when Stoker wrote his tale of terror, originally published in 1897, just two years after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for homosexual activity or “acts of gross indecency” (Auerbach & Skal 1997, p. xi). Auerbach and Skal (1997, p. xi) suggest that Wilde’s judicial and consequent penal experience had been the impetus for Stoker’s creation of the Count. Various critics, including Botting (1996), Mulvey-Roberts (1998), Senf (1997) and Craft (1997), have commented on the sexual threat posed by Stoker’s denizen of the dark. Craft (1997) and Schaffer (1997) have elaborated on this threat arguing, as Halberstam (1993) does that Dracula “knows the other side”, and that side is ‘dark’ and the ‘other’, for this is a tale of homosexuality and homoeroticism - pleasures indeed forbidden in those times. Schafferth (2002) proposes it was that Wildean-inspired “crisis of the closet” which makes Dracula a novel of horror, a horror not of the ‘Undead’ feeding on the blood of life, but rather of the “conflict between homosexuality and heterosexuality”. Halberstam (1993) goes further to argue that “the vampire represents the productions of sexuality itself”. Fry and Edwards (2005), McMillan (2002) and Stevenson (1988) all suggest that this tale of the living against him who is ‘not so living’ is more than a contest between good and evil. It is also a competition of sperm, the sperm of those brave Englishmen versus the reproductive fluid, or blood, of that foreigner, the ‘other’, or as Van Helsing calls him, “this monster” who would, were he to win the battle, be “the father or furtherer of a new order of beings” (Stoker 1997, p. 263). Howes (cited in Signorotti 1996) points out that the receptacles of all this reproductive fluid, the mediums of these transgressions, the women, are also a “safe outlet” for men’s emotions; a suggestion which supports the claim by Boone (1993) that throughout this tale, where the evil vampire feeds on the blood of Lucy, and the good brave men replace it via transfusion after transfusion, “whether putting blood in or taking it out, the male character views the woman as a system”, a system that connects them all, good or evil, living or ‘Undead’, native or alien, in a macabre orgy where these men are able to penetrate each other through the flesh of a woman.

Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra exist almost solely for the men in their lives. Mina’s ambition, as she tells Lucy, is “to be useful to Jonathan” (Stoker 1997, p. 55). Lucy tells Mina “I am so happy that I don’t know what to do with myself” (Stoker 1997, p. 57), having received three proposals of marriage in one day. As Lucy (Stoker 1997, p. 57) admits, “it never rains but it pours” and as the receptacle of such amorous attention, she is a tank that is overflowing. Perhaps her seeming ability to attract the attention of not one but three men is what draws Dracula as the first penetrant of her flesh. The sexuality of either Mina or Lucy is of little consequence until they have been bitten by the Count, although Lucy does express that desire to be amorous and indeed married to all of her suitors, those being Dr Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood. But these same three do get to join in a matrimony of sorts, along with the ‘celebrant’, Van Helsing, as they attempt to rescue Lucy from the clutches of the Count through a succession of blood transfusions, beginning, in a seemingly respectful, gentlemanly order, with the blood of her chosen one, Arthur. As Lucy becomes more and more ‘voluptuous’, a consequence of the Count’s repeated penetrations, these men are literally pushing each other aside as they pull up their sleeves to bear their throbbing veins for her salvation, their passion so fervent, one could easily evoke a Freudian discourse proposing their shirt sleeves to be a metaphor for their penile foreskins. This series of transfusions, four in all, are an act, Signorotti (1996) asserts, conjures up “images of gang rape” as the men deposit their essence into her veins. At the same time, their unity as the ‘Crew of Light’, as a gang, becomes more cemented. But Lucy succumbs to the passions of the ‘anti-Christ’ and joins the ranks of the ‘Undead’. Van Helsing leads Dr Seward, under the cover of the darkness of night, to Lucy’s tomb:

Holding his candle so that he could read the coffin plates, and so holding it that the sperm dropped in white patches which congealed as they touched the metal.

(Stoker 1997, p. 175)

Though ‘sperm’ in this context most apparently refers to the wax from a candle made from the oil of sperm whales, it would not be a stretch to imagine Dr Seward witnessing Van Helsing, holding himself, his candle, masturbating over the coffin. Later, Van Helsing and Seward invite Arthur and Quincey, their comrades in the fine art of sharing bodily fluids, to join them in another ritualistic rape of Lucy, this event culminating in the decapitation and ‘staking’ of not the ‘Undead’, but of the ‘Un-Lucy’, as for once their deed is done:

There, in the coffin lay no longer the foul Thing that we had so dreaded and grown to hate that the work of her destruction was yielded as a privilege to the one best entitled to it, but Lucy as we had seen her in her life, with her face of unequalled sweetness and purity.

(Stoker 1997, p. 192)

Again, out of a perverse respect, the actual plunging of the stake into Lucy’s heart, the “privilege”, is a task given to her betrothed, Arthur, like an act of nuptial consummation performed within the circle of the ‘Crew of Light’ in a scene Senf (1997, p. 429) considers the “group rape and murder of an unconscious woman”. Senf (1997, p. 430) argues that the actions of these supposed heroes, these saviours of society, mask their own “violence and…sexuality”, the outcome being young Quincey, “the result of their social union rather than the product of a sexual union between one man and one woman”. Craft (1997, p. 459) is more adventurous perhaps, claiming young Quincey is actually conceived within Lucy by the blood transfusions. That impregnated blood is then taken, sucked in by Dracula, who passes it on to Mina, who then gives birth to the “son of an illicit and nearly invisible homosexual union” (Craft 1997, p. 459). Having used and dispensed with Lucy, the gang continue their hunt for the Count, the medium now being Mina. As she had suckled from the Count’s breast, Mina can now operate as a conduit via hypnotism - a “defenceless body”, as Signorotti (1996) suggests, “for the men to probe freely”, sleeves pulled back, in their quest to tighten their grip on that elusive candle of the night. This mardi gras of salvation culminates in a flashing of pistols and knives as the men encircle the wagon of gypsies who would return the Count to his castylic abode. Jonathan’s knife slashes through the Count’s throat as Quincey’s knife plunges into the Count’s heart of darkness. The Count’s body crumbles into dust and so too does the evidence that these men were united in an unholy mission, as Jonathan’s concluding memorandum reveals:

We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept…so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it up as he said, with our boy on his knee:- ‘We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!’

(Stoker 1997, p. 327)

Though Stoker has undoubtedly produced a tale of unbelievable terror, he has also produced a tale, as Botting (1996, p. 150) argues, of a “perverse sexuality, unnatural in the way it exceeds fixed gender roles and heterosexual distinctions”. Perhaps that is the true source of the terror. Stoker has pushed aside the ‘normal’, or expected and accepted, presentations of feminine sexuality and heterosexual relationships, replacing these hegemonic ideals with “a masculine perspective in which women serve as objects of exchange and competition between men” (Botting 1996, p. 145-146). At a time when homosexuality could lead to imprisonment, Stoker provides men with women as mediums through which they may hold each other’s candles as the flames hidden behind a veil of masculine heroics. As Van Helsing (Stoker 1997, p. 113) says to Arthur, slapping him on the shoulder as he invites him, nay, implores him, to be the first to bear his veins for the transfusion of blood to Lucy: “You are a man, and it is a man we want”.

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