1. Introduction
[1.1] When season 1 of the critically acclaimed Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire (2022–) was about to make its shift from AMC to Netflix in the summer of 2024, fans of the TV show worried about its reception and the fan discourses that might follow. The title of the Gothic horror/romance show is arguably a misnomer, as it makes several changes to Anne Rice's 1976 novel, Interview with the Vampire. The show follows Louis de Pointe du Lac—here a queer Black man in 1910s New Orleans who runs a brothel instead of an eighteenth-century white man who owns a slave plantation outside New Orleans—as he tries to support his family amidst a cruel, racist, and gossiping society, and struggles with his sexuality, especially when a mind-reading French vampire from the 1760s arrives in town and turns him into a vampire as well. He and his maker-companion, Lestat de Lioncourt, begin a romantic and sexual relationship. The latter is another departure from the novel, in which vampires do not have sex but rather exchange blood as an intimate act. Torn between his new monstrous form and his human connections, between loving and hating Lestat, and haunted by self-hatred, Louis recounts these years in the present day to journalist Daniel Molloy, who himself struggles with family, illness, and identity. Fans of the TV show worried on multiple accounts, not the least because Anne Rice herself despised fan fiction for a significant part of her career and found it upsetting when people wrote about her own characters, whom she saw as "always as alive as any other person" (Jackson 2021). We do not know what Rice would have thought of the choices the show makes, for she died in 2021, before the show aired. Fans of the show worried: How would the adaptation be received, especially by book fans, with such significant changes? How would new show-watchers react—and with what biases—to both Louis and Claudia, his adoptive vampire daughter, being Black and the new racial dynamics present among characters therefore? To Louis and Lestat having a more overtly sexual relationship? Would some book fans be naysayers about it, especially given Rice's sentiments about changing her characters? How would this spill into conversations about shipping and fan work?
[1.2] Sure enough, these discourses did happen. On October 8, 2024, Twitter user skorpiomag wrote, "iwtv fans are so fascinating I've never seen a fanbase with so many ppl who are like 'fuck what anne rice said' until it's to disprove some pairing they don't like and then they'll start digging up her deranged facebook posts to thump at people like Baptist pastors with a bible" (https://x.com/skorpiomag/status/1843540704213004372). As comedic as this analogy—fans to pastors—might be, it does get at the core problem of hermeneutics. According to skorpiomag, purist fans see the author's words as the first and final authority of a text, a mixture of formalism taken to the extreme (what Rice says is gospel) and not the death of the author but the ever-presentness of the author. The author, in these purist readings, is never dead. Beyond hermeneutics, this kind of purist reading practice, as skorpiomag suggests, may also lead to a problem of fandom culture, where fans argue with one another—sometimes to the point of bullying and harassment—over these interpretive differences. Some purist fans might invoke quotes from the author or the source text to justify their stance when engaging or arguing with other fans online. Purist fans of this sort tend to read media as moral screed; demonstrate a desire to protect the perceived sanctity of the original text as the word of the author, upholding the original text as the canon; and fear that other fans who take more liberties with the text either do not respect the canon or might apply the same liberties to real people as they do fictional characters.
[1.3] As a scholar of the anglophone eighteenth century, I found these purist reading practices both troubling and familiar. In the context of the anglophone eighteenth century, as novel reading became more common, a moral panic rose around women's readership: What if women couldn't tell fact from fiction? Scholar Ana Vogrinčič connects this eighteenth-century fear (mostly in the British context) to the contemporary sociological concept of "moral panic" around media consumption (2008): If one reads something or sees something in media, the fear is that they will mimic what they have observed or take it as fact. The Bon Ton Magazine in 1792 warned that "women of little experience are apt to mistake the urgency of bodily wants with the violence of a delicate passion" and were therefore in danger of "mistak[ing] male lust for the emotion they read about in novels" (quoted in Stone 1977, 284). Reading in this impassioned way—a gendered way, to the eighteenth-century mind—or, as we might put today, reading like a fan—carried with it the danger of reading real people as fictional characters, or else treating real people as characters found in media. This hermeneutic jump continues to be rather common; we see this in the fearmongering over the dangers of playing video games and how doing so can cause game players to be violent in real life—a fear-driven connection that appeared recently in NBC's coverage of Luigi Mangione's history of playing Among Us in college (Lozano 2024). We also see this hermeneutic leap in the fear that watching a drag show will somehow corrupt the innocence of young folks in the audience and make them gay—a fear directed at the speculative consequences of drag shows rather than, for example, the violence drag queens have faced themselves (Wholey 2023). In both examples, though disparate on the surface, the fear is directed toward a specific piece of art or media and the slippery-slope speculative reception thereof, rather than at wider systems of oppression. And in both examples, what the art has to offer as art is also completely glossed over.
[1.4] This fearmongering over media consumption is nothing new and has often been perpetuated in fandoms by people termed "antis," commonly defined as someone "who hates something so much their fandom activity revolves around exclusively fighting it or mocking it"; from "idol group[s]" to "movies, or a pairing," the "focus of the anti's fannish energy is about tearing down a thing" (Stitch, quoted in TWC Editor 2022). The term has been used in a slippery way, however, and has also come to be used against people who are "criticizing fandom or the source media," primarily marginalized fans, including Black fans, fans of color, and disabled fans (Stitch, quoted in TWC Editor 2022). Because they are critical of the media that they may also be fans of, they are deemed antis for speaking up. Given this rather dizzying history of the term, which remains in flux, I will be using the term "purist reading practice" to describe the hermeneutics (and the rhetorics that stem from that hermeneutics) of a fear that readers, often (and often erroneously) presumed to be women, will distort the original media object and not be able to tell fact from fiction. In some cases, this fear is also that these readers, presumed to be women, will misapply what they learn from fiction to reality.
[1.5] I theorize purist reading practices as a hermeneutics and rhetoric. I argue how this purist reading practice, which dictates that adaptation and—sometimes more saliently—fan work should adhere to the sanctity of the original text, and which equates fannish response to fans' real-world desires and morality, bears similarities to the eighteenth-century fears around authorship and reader response. As a strategy in response to purist reading, and drawing from Sara Ahmed's theory of queer phenomenology, I propose a queering of reading practices in fandom, both toward the media object in question as well as toward other fans. This, in essence, is a proposed attention away from rigidity and fixity and toward the nonbinaristic, the fleeting, the in-between, the unknowable, and the opaque.
[1.6] In the last two sections, I demonstrate this proposed queering of reading practices by turning my attention to AMC's Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire as a case study of queer camp narrative structures. In the last section, I explore ways in which this TV adaptation uses narrative opacity as a queer technique as well. Finally, I argue how fan creation, particularly fan video edits, and fan explication might work as an interpretive strategy, and how affective repetition as creative work can highlight opacity and resist the prescriptiveness of purist reading.
2. The transhistoricity and hermeneutics of purist reading
[2.1] In chronicling the history of eighteenth-century novel-reading panic, Vogrinčič writes, "Broadly, one could divide the reproaches into those ascribing to novels the dangerous psychological affects, triggering imitation and inoculating wrong ideas of love and life; and into those referring to the mere habit of novel-reading as a physically harmful waste of time, damaging not only the mind and the morale of readers, but also their eyesight and posture" (2008, 109). We can see this in the discussion especially of Gothic literature and satirized in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote and famously in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, wherein the naïve protagonist Catherine Morland, fan girl of Gothic romance, assumes everyone around her to be living out some Gothic plot. Lennox and Austen satirize the problematic but also defend, I believe, the female protagonists, with their fannish reading practices made fun of but ultimately presented as a legitimate epistemology. In many cases, Catherine Morland is correct in her hunches about the characters around her; even if the two men she finds suspicious are not murderers or kidnappers, they are despotic, rude, and misogynistic. The central fear that these women authors are responding to is that fans of romance and Gothic literature—usually conceptualized as or presumed to be women—will not be able to tell fact from fiction. Instead of outright rejecting this fear, Lennox and Austen play with it and turn it on its head, even arguing that, to an extent, fannish reading can be a tool used by women to navigate the patriarchal terrain around them.
[2.2] While fandom is usually seen as an escape from reality, the history of eighteenth-century reading and readers' response hopefully shows how politicized and policed reading and fandom cultures can be. Indeed, fandom rhetorics, anxieties, and discourses often reflect what is going on in the wider world. Anne Jamison observed similarly: "These debates [about fandom behavior] are more likely to take me back to the 1790s than the 1990s…There's recurring concern about the harm literary texts can do. These debates ebb and flow, coming to a head in say, England in the eighteenth century (novels are dangerous for women and girls) or nineteenth century (poison books help create homosexuality)" (Jamison, quoted in TWC Editor 2022). Though these purist reading practices and fearmongering rhetorics are not new in fandom, they seem to have raised in pitch in the last few years, rising in tandem, perhaps, with conservatism in the west. A YouTube video essay by E, with almost half a million views and over 39,000 likes, argues as much about fandom culture at large: "There has been this growing sentiment within this fandom space online between the people who are self-proclaimed morally correct and the people they deem morally incorrect based on the type of fiction that they consume" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFVRjNG1sSk). The video essay compiles in its opening montage several screenshots of fans who report having experienced death threats for consuming various pieces of media, lost friends over fannish opinions, and been stalked in real life because of a ship. Degrading comments about intelligence and ability abound. Some writers have attributed this general decline in social etiquette to the COVID-19 pandemic—more specifically, to the normalization of eugenicist rhetoric—tracing the historical correlation among pandemics, eugenics, and fascist ideologies (Galofré-Vilà et al. 2022; Fowler and Ryan 2024; Luse et al. 2025). Separately but perhaps relatedly, TikTokers have traced the influx of bullies in fandom to the COVID-19 lockdown, when folks who would not typically deem themselves fans or engage in fandom had little else to do but join online fandom communities (https://www.tiktok.com/@koollbeanz/video/7355327427758820650?_r=1&_t=ZT-8tl48Em8wTz). Whatever the cause, it is clear that these debates and discourses online echo the times in which they are produced. Fandom is not an escape from reality but a reflection of it, manifest in the debates, discourses, and ideologies that make possible and undergird these imaginaries.
[2.3] Purist reading practices reflect a larger cultural anxiety about interpretation, reception, and fan creation, and seem to swirl around the questions of what canon is and what we may do with so-called canon. A simple search of "top bottom discourse" on Twitter/X will produce hundreds of results within BL (boys' love) and m/m slash fandoms pertaining but not limited to Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, myriad arguments about who in the main couple is the top and who is the bottom, and whether they can or should switch sexual positions in fan work or even headcanons. As one X user posts of their exhaustion toward these incessant debates, "In iwtvtwt [Interview with the Vampire Twitter] you can't do anything but top and bottom discourse for one hundred years and then you die" (https://x.com/girl_lestat/status/1944763101230047474). Among the search results are claims that Lestat, Louis's love interest, is definitively a bottom, definitively a switch, or definitively a top, with posts variously citing the show, the movie, and the novel series.
[2.4] Fans who switch up the sexual dynamics of the main couple are frequently termed "pro switch," and the oft-cited fear of purist readers in response to these switched dynamics is that (1) they go against what is seen as the holy word of the author (to borrow from fannish representations of this discourse) or that (2) they are presumably (straight) women fetishizing gay men. The first fear has long been perpetuated in fandom and can be tied to the role of property and capital in the circulation and reception of media objects. Roland Barthes, for example, famously claims that "the author is a modern character"—he argues that "capitalist ideology" has "granted the greatest importance to the author's 'person'" (1986, 49–50). The author-as-character becomes inextricably tied to the work; the work is discussed only in terms of the author's biography and intentions, whether stated outright or speculated. In this framework, Barthes writes, "Explanation of the work is still sought in the person of its producer, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always, ultimately, the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his 'confidences'" (1986, 50). Elizabeth F. Judge makes the connection between modern-day fandom and eighteenth-century fan works "to highlight similar instabilities in copyright as are invoked by fan fiction practices today (particularly with respect to internet archives of fan fiction)" (2009, 8). Copyright law—debates around who owned the rights to a book—is constantly in flux, and its development underpins this connection between the eighteenth century and our discourses today. The 1710 Statute of Anne, for example, gave copyright to a book as a whole, but not to individual ideas within a book (Judge 2009). This legal slipperiness, especially in a literary market and literary form (the novel) that was just coming into being, led to discussions, debates, and fears over ownership: Were parodies and adaptations allowed? What was categorized as a parody, what as an adaptation, and what was considered a part of a novel? It is these same debates about ownership that also underpinned author Anne Rice's opinions on fan fiction of her original book series, which shifted over the years. In the 1990s and early 2000s, she is quoted as completely disallowing fan fiction: "The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters" (https://annerice.com/ReaderInteraction-MessagesToFans.html). In the 2010s, she is quoted having a more nuanced position regarding fan fiction, stating that she never reads it and that if it helps writers on their way to creating their own original work and honing their craft, then "live and let live" (Metrowebukmetro 2012). Fears within fandom (and even from the author) about misrepresenting the author or going against their word echo these anxieties about capital, ownership, property law, and the moral valences thereof.
[2.5] As to the fear that fans are fetishizing gay couples, especially in discussions surrounding m/m slash, this fear is underpinned by the stereotype that fandom is composed primarily of young, allosexual women (Gerrard 2022). However, this assumption is limiting and inaccurate, discounting the gender and sexual diversity among fans. The assumption also warps fandom culture and has a negative effect on fans who do not fall into these categories: Fans of BL and slash, presumed to be cishetero allosexual women, are written off as fetishizers of gay men. In a thesis on BL fandoms, Hailey Rose Coleman reports, "Queer fans resented the fetishizer stigma and felt its presence discredited the media and the people who enjoy consuming it" (2021, 55). Presumptions about identity of fans and rigid notions about who is allowed to enjoy a piece of media tend to erase the diversity within fandom. The notion that only so-called fetishizers of gay men enjoy BL overlooks the possibility (and reality) of gay men within fandom. In addition, lesbian and ace fans of BL and m/m slash challenge this tendency to equate fannish feeling about a media object with sexual desire toward characters in the media object. To read fannish feeling only as sexual desire is to repeat the all-too-common misrepresentations of fandom as overrun by id-driven, unthinking collectives, typically presumed to be women, who cannot tell fact from fiction. In other words, to read fans—even fellow fans—this way is to repeat sexist eighteenth-century anxieties (note 1).
[2.6] What's interesting about this discourse is that purist readers in fandom around queer media may or may not be queer themselves; and so, in a departure from eighteenth-century discourses, this is an intracommunity discussion, rather than one that comes from the top down (authors to readers), laterally at the top (authors to authors), or from the outside (nonfans to fans). The purist readers are fans debating with other fans. I am less interested in the sexual orientations and gender identities of these readers, however, than I am about reading practice and hermeneutics—the fixity of purist reading practices and how we might work against or around them. This fixity with which purist fans read media could benefit, I argue, from a queering of hermeneutics. A queer phenomenology toward fannish objects and reading other fans asks us to "rethink the work of the straight line," as Sara Ahmed writes (2006, 556). This queer orientation toward objects is less about sexual identity—in fact, "orientations are straightening devices" in some cases, lines we follow again and again into a rigid pattern (563)—and more about reframing and reinterpreting. "It shows us the relation between two lines, the vertical and horizontal lines of conventional genealogy" (556). While Ahmed is talking about family trees and lineage in a literal sense, she is also talking about rigidity and fixity of the lines we follow—of thought, of interpretation. "A queer phenomenology would function as a disorientation device […] Queer would become a matter of how one approaches the object that slips away, a way to inhabit the world at the point at which things fleet" (566). In other words, a queer hermeneutics toward these queer media objects means attending to the weird, the slippery, the unknowable, the sticky, the opaque, the withheld, the fleeting, the just-out-of-reach, the nonbinaristic, the nonfixed and nonteleological, the unknown and unknowable. It might mean attending to the queer forms of these queer media objects—formal choices that invite such fannish passion—and, as fans, following the lead of these formal quirks and, possibly, extending this capacious, queer reading practice to the reading of fellow fans.
3. Campy vamps: Puncturing purist reading
[3.1] I now attempt to demonstrate this kind of queer attention by illuminating the queer camp in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. A hermeneutic answer to the hermeneutic problematic of purist reading, even if not a solution writ large, may be within the media object itself, as Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is rife with narrative play and queer camp. In many ways, this recent TV version could be considered an eighteenth-century media object, not only because the main love interest is an eighteenth-century man but also because of how it plays with fictionality and linear time.
[3.2] The title of the show itself plays with the question of adaptation by tacking on the author's name and introduces the theme of multimedia storytelling. Plot A is the interview between Daniel Molloy and Louis in 2020, but Daniel goes on to write a book titled Interview with the Vampire. Is the physical book we hold in our hands identical to the physical book that his fictional readers in the novel hold? Translated to a different medium, how do we reconcile the various media at play: voice recordings on tape; the texts within the text; memories glitching as they fold in on themselves; music, both diegetic (Lestat is a composer) and extradiegetic (the orchestral music written by Daniel Hart)?
[3.3] The mixed media is precisely the point. In playing with and at times blurring its fictionality, the show emphasizes again and again its own fictionality. This is part of the show's camp. In "Notes on Camp," Susan Sontag draws the origins of it to the eighteenth century (1966). It is here that this sensibility, style, and "way of seeing the world" burgeoned (299). In Nick Stang's account, "Camp is about artifice. Camp insists on, dramatizes even, its own unreality, its difference from 'the real thing'" (Quiñones et al. 2019). Revising Sontag's piece for its dehistoricization, Ula Lukszo Klein and Emily M. N. Kugler place camp in conversation with LGBTQ+ history and eighteenth-century aesthetics: "Today it is often signified by elements of eighteenth-century Europe, with its elaborate hairstyles, exaggerated silhouettes, affected courtiers, and a rise in the consumption of exotic goods, candelabras, masks, and other markers of elite excess. Camp's relation to queer modes of performance and its prioritization of style over (or in conjunction with) substance offers a queer aesthetic lens with which to re-evaluate the eighteenth century as well as the current moment" (2019, 1). Similarly and importantly, Carl Schottmiller points out the queer histories of camp: "Historically, LGBTQ people use camp's irony, theatricality, parody, humor, and aestheticism to help relieve the social stigmas associated with our identities" (Quiñones et al. 2019).
[3.4] Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire is interested in its own mediated-ness. The opening sequence of the first season is titled "Act One," and the opening theme song is titled "Overture," even mimicking the tuning of an orchestra until it crescendos into an ominous chord, adding both the theatrical apparatus and horror elements. I mentioned that the score is extradiegetic, and in the overture it is, but there are scenes in which it is an interesting blend between extradiegetic and diegetic. "I tried to write music that was not omnipotent, but from the characters' point of view," says composer Daniel Hart (Dreldon 2024). As Twitter/X user and fan Diana writes in relation to in-scene use of music, "Something I've loved about the music in iwtv is how unironic it is. It's wholehearted and romantic and never campy, even when some scenes veer towards camp" (https://x.com/diana_liwen/status/1803926323045503054?s=46&t=poTmtmGvj4Tu9XslJgVmqQ). Diana suggests something interesting: The score adds a grounded layer of diegetic character emotion that works in tandem (or, rather, in contradiction) with the other storytelling elements, and it is this tension or gap that creates the genre blend among Gothic, romance, and horror. As Diana and other fans have picked up on, the music is one more voice in the plurivocal storytelling of the show, saving us from a too-prescriptive reading.
[3.5] The script, too, dodges simple hermeneutics. In the 1920s, Louis and Lestat break a vampire rule and save a young Black girl, Claudia, from a fire by turning her into a vampire. Part of the storytelling is volumes of her diaries being read aloud by a present-day Molloy, horrified by the idea of a woman aging mentally and emotionally while stuck in a child's body. Pages, he finds, have been ripped out over the years, sometimes looking as though they were cut out methodically with a knife. Louis is not the reliable narrator we wish him to be. In fact, one of his main character arcs throughout the first two seasons is admitting that he was and still is in love with Lestat, even though he would rather deny this for an entire season in favor of a progress narrative. Memory folds in on itself as Molloy catches plot holes in Louis's account. As an investigative journalist with many accolades, Molloy doesn't hold back in questioning Louis—interrupting his narrative, playing back the tapes, checking them against Claudia's diaries, checking those against his own notes. Mixing media forms sets up expectations only to dash them. The timeline is collapsed—or, rather, layered—over itself. It is meant to be hard to pin down.
[3.6] The show's commitment to multilayered structure is mirrored in the diegesis of the show. An important glitch in Louis's memory is the making of Claudia, who becomes his and Lestat's adopted daughter and eventually a sister-like figure to him as they grow older. In Louis's mind, he saves her from a fire that he indirectly caused by provoking the white racists in town. He sees his redemption in her: If he can save her, maybe he isn't so bad after all. She is a fourteen-year-old girl when he brings her to Lestat, begging him to turn her. In his first recounting of this memory, Lestat stoically holds back before obliging—it is against vampiric law to turn a child, who will forever be imprisoned in their body as they mentally age forever. The scene is tableaued with the figure of a burnt Claudia in a four-poster bed. In a second flashback to the same scene in season two, Louis horrifically drags Claudia's body across the floor (a detail he omitted or forgot the first time) and pleads with a morally disgusted Lestat to turn her: He promises he will stay with Lestat if he does him this one favor. Claudia represents a kind of salvation for the depressed Louis, who hates his vampiric self. Reminiscent of Toni Morrison's statement that "memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation" (1984), and that "rememory," a particularly Black American theory, is a "recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past" (Morrison 2019), the present-day Louis strives to understand and memorialize his connection to Claudia, who has long since been killed, leaving only a dress and her diaries with him. These moments where the show rewrites memory—as experienced by Louis, and as experienced by the audience—do away with linear time, positing that narrative and memory-making are always in process, and reminding us constantly of the storytelling-ness, the constructed-ness of the story. It is a narrative that is at once revealing and withholding, toying with the idea of canon itself.
[3.7] As much as the show dwells in tragedy, it also delights in play. As in Austen's Northanger Abbey, the narrative teeters between satire of the diegetic world and satire of the character, between Gothic horror/romance and satire thereof. What in the first and second seasons is at times a dark romance between Louis and Lestat becomes, in the lead-up to the third season, a campy romp. For decades, while Louis and Lestat are broken up, Lestat canonically becomes a rock star. While seasons one and two are flashbacks of Louis's memories, season three (not yet aired at the time of writing this) is expected to delve into what's been happening to Lestat during the second half of the twentieth century. Season three's promotional video premiered at San Diego Comic Con 2024 and starts with a shot of a man resembling rock star Lestat: shoulder-length blond hair, a leather jacket over a gray shirt, and tight pants, a smug look on his face. A still camera is on him to set up the shot; we hear the chatter of the producers behind the camera, see the bustle of sound people fixing his mic. He is going to be interviewed. Is this Lestat, indeed? What are we looking at? Is that Daniel we hear from beyond the camera? Is he going to interview Lestat now to get the other perspective?
[3.8] Quickly, these notions are dashed. The real Lestat, played by Sam Reid, walks up from behind the first Lestat (who we realize is a double to set up the scene), and we think—of course. How could we have even thought this was a new Lestat? This Lestat is so much more decadent: Instead of a gray shirt, he's wearing a lime green blazer, asymmetrically feathered sleeves, tight leather pants, and a choker that makes his neck look sliced. One eyebrow is arched in annoyed amusement and perhaps suspicion, and his mouth is downturned in half-boredom at the humans around him. He does not want to be here, but he knows he is a wonderful spectacle to look at. This is rock star, in its cynicism, in its rebellion, and in its concurrent desire for attention. This is also, as actors Jacob Anderson and Sam Reid have said themselves in interviews, camp (https://apnews.com/video/anne-rice-new-york-35cf19c16f624573a55252ef2314b793).
[3.9] In camp's excess, subversion, contradiction, and insistence on its own fictionality, it resists being pinned down. So too does Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, in this campy spirit, set up expectations only to dash them; to establish a point of view only to later challenge it; to make audiences think they know and can access the characters, only to find them distant. Lestat telekinetically pulls the camera in during the promo video to the alarmed remarks of the human camera crew, only for the video to cut to black and for his music video to begin. What is at first a suggestion of perspectival immersion (we are almost-victim to his vampire compulsion) becomes a clearly fictional piece of media-as-mediated.
4. Opacity as queer technique, explication as creative fan work
[4.1] In this last section, I examine narrative opacity within the media object itself and fan explication in response to that opacity as queer techniques. In Anne Rice's vampire lore, vampires can hear human thoughts, but once a vampire makes another vampire, they lose that psychic connection to their fledgling's mind. In episode 1.02 "…After the Phantoms of Your Former Self" of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, Lestat tells the newborn vampire Louis, "A sacrifice is made when the dark gift is shared," explaining why Lestat no longer has access to Louis's mind that he was once able to read. This opacity becomes a major worldbuilding rule in the diegesis of the show, as well as a parallel to the narrative techniques the show writers establish of characters' distance and opacity to the audience. This narrative refusal to divulge everything is the show claiming a right to opacity for its characters, retaining in some way Claudia's dignity but also her tragedy, and challenging prescriptive, morally black-and-white readings of the story. Here, I borrow from Edouard Glissant's idea of the "right to opacity" (1997, 189–94) as an ethical mode of relating to the Other, or those who are deemed Other. Such an opacity may also be queer in form. If liberalism and capitalism demand visibility and confession in order for the subject to be seen and understood, then opacity is a narrative strategy that resists these demands. In "Afterthoughts on Queer Opacity," Nicholas de Villiers (2022) posits this strategy as a "form of resistance to a now ubiquitous regime of facial recognition" and state surveillance, summoning Deleuze and Foucault's tactics of resistance.
[4.2] A famous and fan-favorite scene of opacity occurs in the second season. Decades after Claudia is killed, Louis returns to New Orleans. Lestat, long estranged from him, expects another argument but, mourning the loss of their daughter, the two comfort each other in an embrace. The windows of the New Orleans home tremble behind them from an oncoming hurricane, but Louis and Lestat stay embracing, the camera pulling slowly away from them in a wide shot. They hold each other, their lips move, and we cannot hear what they say.
[4.3] Importantly, we will never hear what they say. Actor Sam Reid has stated as much in interviews, that whatever he and Jacob Anderson as Lestat and Louis, respectively, whispered to each other will never be known to viewers. Fans have tried zooming in and slowing down the footage to lip-read, to no avail. The opacity achieves something on two levels: Diegetically, the characters must communicate with each other without the help of supernatural powers—this reconciliation is raw and ever more intimate because they are, here, two people vulnerable and sobbing after many years apart; extradiegetically, the actors' refusal to divulge what is said between the characters creates a playful intimacy between the actors, an in-group of which we are on the outside and, importantly, a playful distance between the actors and the fans. A sacrifice is made when the dark gift is shared. In the encounter between audiences and the media object of which they are fans, there is intimacy just as much as there is distance and refusal. It is a mediated relation, the show emphasizes and insists, as it plays with its own fictionality.
[4.4] In response to the opacity of this scene, fans have engaged in what I call fan explication, a hermeneutics and analytical mode that serves as an alternative to the fixity of purist reading. They have done so through both video editing and analysis thereof. In a January 2025 tweet about this very scene, featuring a zoomed-in GIF of Loustat (the ship name, a portmanteau of Louis and Lestat) Louis kissing Lestat's cheek as they embrace, willow writes, "80 years apart and loustat are finally safe, back in each others [sic] arms, they refuse to break contact for a second, need to be as close as they can to eachother [sic]" (https://x.com/yur1stat/status/1883286294215971172). While some fans guess at and try to lip-read the conversation between the characters, most responses are like this one, displaying a fannish hermeneutics that is happy to linger in the discomfort of unknowing, and are more akin to explication and more invested in the recursion—reliving the moment—than in speculation or purist, definitive readings. "They refuse to break contact for a second" is both a description of what's happening in the clip and an affectively infused narration of the reunion, a creative adaptation of the scene itself. In this tweet, willow demonstrates what Louisa Stein and Charlene Fu have termed "affective modularity" or "affective repetition," applied originally to BL fan videos that I argue are doing the same as these Loustat clips (2024, 343). According to Stein and Fu, these fan videos are "a creative form with multiple modes of creative logic: sometimes with intent to recreate or expand narrative, other times to analyze character or theme, still other times to evoke mood, emotion, and feeling in their viewers, or sometimes all of the above" (346). While these Loustat reunion videos are edited to varying degrees—sometimes with music and effects, sometimes just an extreme zoom-in like this one—they are creative modes of engagement with the source material that celebrate the things we do know (Loustat embraces, Louis kisses Lestat, they are crying) and do not know about Loustat (what they say to each other) in this moment. Fans relive the moment again and again, and in the explication, communicate the feelings again and again portrayed by the actors onscreen: It is a big moment, and the fans want you and themselves to feel, once more, just how big of a moment it is.
[4.5] Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, by engaging in queer narrative techniques like camp and opacity, staunchly resists attempts to pin it firmly down or prescribe dogmatic morality to its characters. The characters are neither fully at fault nor fully absolved; both are grieving their shortcomings and wrongdoings, and mourning the one who was most affected by these. No character is on a perfect pedestal or gets to be the moral compass or arbiter over another.
[4.6] Following the lead of the show's queer forms, fans have produced videos and explications that engage with affective repetition around these moments of opacity, playing with the source material on its own terms and re-queering a fannish hermeneutics that resists prescriptive, purist reading. What these fans do to suspend themselves in a state of unknowing, to relish in the unknowable, is rich in its creative potential.
[4.7] These fans know, in other words, that a maker, vampire or otherwise, loses power over what he's made. The answer is not, as Lestat learns, to chase down the power you've lost to the ends of the earth. It is to let them go free and, if they wish to, speak with them in hushed tones no audience may ever hear.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] I have attempted to theorize and contextualize purist reading practices in m/m slash fandoms, particularly the Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire fandom as one case study, by connecting the hermeneutics to a history of moral panic over women's reading in the anglophone eighteenth century. As a response to prescriptivist readings that might criticize adaptation or fan work because they change the author's intended narrative or fiction characters' original dynamics, I propose a queering of hermeneutics about queer media. A queer hermeneutics may turn prescriptivist discussions about the morality of a fictional character or the true nature of a relationship's sexual dynamic to, instead, questions such as: How does this fan work's affective repetition highlight certain parts of the media object? How does the media object play with form and structure, or employ camp to dodge a fixed reading? What knowledges or interpretations are produced when we look at the multiple layers of narrative and storytelling modes present in a show like Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire? Fan work that takes on a queer approach to the media object in this way—by acknowledging the campy, the multilayered, and the opaque—may challenge prescriptivist and purist readings and rhetorics.
[5.2] In other words, when we attend to the oblique, the campy, the unknowable, when we approach the very queer (oblique, campy, not-straight, not-straightforward) media object queerly, we might begin to embrace the story on its own—and even, perhaps, our own—terms.