Vampires have taken over YA lit and pop culture because straight teenage girls use them as a proxy for the gay men they would ideally prefer as boyfriends over the smelly, unkempt, mumbling boys they grew up with. … … … … Huh… … … … Makes sense. I’d totally take a vampire over my 17 year old self. I guess this is why it was so hard for me to get laid as a kid. That or the D&D. But both do involve the undead. I better roll a saving throw here just in case. Nhoy!

Forget everything you’ve read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn’t about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There’s a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men. Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi novelist and geek grandmaster, found out just how many during the shitstorm of pique that covered him from head to toe this past summer after he suggested in an interview that the vampire craze had run its course and should disappear for another twenty to twenty-five years. (Twilight fans took to Twitter in protest.) A foolish hope. The craving for vampire fiction is not a matter of taste but of urges; one does not read or watch it so much as inject it through the eyes, and like any epidemic, it’s symptomatic of something much larger: a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life.