Dracula Dreamin' 🧛🏻‍♂️🖤

Jonathan Harker meets the hunk of his nightmares

Hope you like this cute lil ship of Jonathan Harker and Count Drac. Love those spooky boys for each other! Happy Pride month to them! Black goth rainbows and creepy, toothy kisses and such.

When I read those first few chapters of Dracula for the first time, the thing that stuck out to me was how obsessed Jonathan Harker is with Dracula’s body. He mentions it a lot… like… a lot. He keeps talking about how he’s having a bad time in this gloomy, spooky old castle, but then he’ll spend a whole paragraph about how Dracula is like, kind of a beefcake for being so old—how his arms are so strong, his gaze so fiery and intense. He’s got it for Dracula. Hard.

The first time he meets Dracula, the Count is helping Jonathan out of a carriage (though Jonathan doesn’t know it’s Dracula at the time). He just notices that the guy helping him dismount does so “with a hand which caught my arm in a grip of steel; his strength must have been prodigious.”

Then, the first time he actually gets a good look at the Count, he says, “His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead… the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.”

SO VERY STRONG.

Later on, Jonathan gets visited by three hot vampire ladies in the night, and he absolutely wants to be eaten by them. In like a sexy way. But he’s also kind of distracted by the Count, who walks in on these ladies before they can dig in and drain him of his blood.

He describes the encounter like this: “I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing.”

Like, there’s no way Jonathan Harker is fully straight. He’s very much into this whole gothic daddy kink scene at Dracula’s castle, whether he admits it to himself or not. It’s just one big, homoerotic adventure for Jonathan Harker.

Of course, Dracula and so many other monster tales are so easily read as queer metaphors. Queerness is both delicious and horrifying—our love, our gender, our sexual identities have the potential to ostracize us and make us whole. Our queerness is what makes us dangerous, what makes us a threat to society. It has the potential to disrupt and equalize everything, so it’s monstrous.

We’re here, we’re queer—we might as well be the bloodsucking un-dead.

Some day it might not feel so dangerous or scary to be queer. I hope so. These days it feels dangerous to be human at all.

Here’s the part where I talk about abortion rights, because it feels too weird not to say anything. Things hurt right now. This is not the first time that something dehumanizing and wickedly unjust has happened in my lifetime, or even in the past six months, so it feels extra heavy and cruel.

Most folks understand that not all pregnancies can or should end in childbirth. That’s why we upheld Roe v. Wade for so long, and why healers and midwives and intuitive folks have aborted unwanted pregnancies for centuries. That’s why Jesus and Muhammad and the Buddha never condemned abortion themselves—even though abortions existed then, just as they always have.

That’s also why abortion rights have the most widespread support ever—74% of people in my country think abortion should be legal for almost any reason. There’s some despair in that number—clearly our leaders don’t represent us honestly. But there’s comfort in it, too. We don’t have to change people’s minds. That work has been done. There’s no need to hold debates with our neighbors or family members or strangers on the Internet.

But, seeing how it’s played out, it’s clear that this is a wound that didn’t heal properly the first time. There’s misogyny in it, and classism, racism, misinformation, religion, wealth, greed, and desperation. There are so many reasons this is happening now, and so many ways it could end. I keep hoping for happier endings, and less monstrous beginnings. I’m doing what I can to keep my heart tender and open, should something happen quickly. I hope it does—in the right ways, the best ways.

I’ve also been thinking a lot of this quote by one of my favorite writers, Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s about capitalism, but it’s also about so much else.

“We live in capitalism,” she says. “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

Human oppression can feel so monstrous. I won’t say I’m not monstrous at times. I am. I try my best to see those parts of myself and love on them, so that my own self-loathing doesn’t close me off to all that suffering out there. I don’t know if it helps, but I believe it does.

Hang in there, my friends. I hope this comic made you laugh. I’ll be here in the cheap seats for as long as it takes.

Yours monstrously,

🧛🏻Becca Lee, the Haunted Librarian🧛🏻