Sadly, later in life, Bram Stoker became an advocate for censorship. His articles “The Censorship of Fiction” (1908) and “The Censorship of Stage Plays” (1909) target gay themes with coded language like “decadence” and “morbid psychology,” referring to “vices so flagitious, so opposed to even the decencies of nature in its crudest and lowest forms, that the poignancy of moral disgust is lost in horror.” We cannot know how Stoker, who once called gay poet Walt Whitman “a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to [my] soul,” reached this point, but his disgust and horror at Wilde’s plight was certainly an influence. Does such an extreme response indicate gay leanings on Stoker’s part? Again, we cannot know, but enough evidence exists to have kept queer scholars discussing the possibility for a century.
In The Route of Ice and Salt, José Luis Zárate gives us a queer Dracula-related novella taking place aboard the Demeter, the ill-fated schooner that brought the Count to England, whose captain was found lashed to the wheel dead with a rosary in his hands. The captain’s log traces the crew’s disappearance at the hands of some unknown assailant, and the citizens of Whitby treat this captain as a hero, holding a boat parade for his funeral and giving him a Christian burial in the churchyard of the town’s famous abbey. In Dracula, the log comprises our entire knowledge of this nameless captain. In Zárate’s novella, we read the captain’s private diary, which begins as an obsessive and fiercely erotic inventory of his homosexual fantasies about his men. As the crew’s numbers diminish, he comes to realize that, while he wishes to sexually “consume” the men, something aboard is literally consuming them and turning them into vampires. Determined to save their souls, the captain dives overboard and — in a scene containing the gruesome image of the undead crewmen clinging to the underside of the Demeter like suckerfish — lures them away from the ship’s protection with his own blood, then hauls himself back aboard the schooner to thwart Dracula by dying at the wheel.
The captain is willing to die for his men in part because he believes that his first lover, Mikhail, died for him. Upon learning of the affair, the captain’s fellow Russian villagers killed Mikhail in the manner of a vampire, severing his head, filling his mouth with garlic, and burying him at a crossroads with a stake through his body, while the captain escaped. Since this time, the captain has buried his own sexuality, never letting it emerge except in the feverish diary. He is not certain that his death aboard the Demeter can redeem him, but he does come to the understanding that homosexuality is not vampirism: “Hunger is not a sin, nor is Necessity or Appetite. What matters, I repeat, is what we are willing to do to satisfy them. My ephemeral pleasures are not a stain; the fact that he sacrifices others, anyone and everyone else, just to satisfy his Thirst … most certainly is.”
To appreciate the logic of Zárate’s novella, it is important to understand that Dracula was itself a very sexual book for its day. In his study of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, Stephen King characterizes it as “a frankly palpitating melodrama,” pointing out that Jonathan Harker nearly experiences oral rape at the hands (and mouths) of the three “weird sisters” who share Dracula’s castle. They spare him only at Dracula’s command, in obedience to Dracula’s claim, “This man belongs to me.”
While Dracula never attacks Harker himself, he violates Harker’s marriage bed, exchanging blood with Mina while Harker lies in a swoon beside them. Stoker, who was an inveterate self-promoter, sent a signed copy of Dracula to British Prime Minister William Gladstone with a note asserting, “The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to ‘cleanse the mind by pity & terror.’ At any rate there is nothing base in the book.” Speculation as to whether Stoker truly believed this or was trying to convince himself along with others is beyond the scope of this afterword. Zárate’s captain is far franker about his own desires, but those desires are not out of proportion with those experienced by the characters in Dracula; Zárate is simply free to describe them with greater frankness.
In “A Wilde Desire Took Me,” Talia Schaffer asserts that “at the heart of [Dracula], Stoker gingerly shows that the ‘normal’ man and the ‘depraved’ man are one.” At the heart of The Route of Ice and Salt, then, does not Zárate show that sometimes the “depraved” man must hold himself to a higher standard than the “normal” man simply to stay alive? This idea
resonates at least as strongly in today’s political climate as it did when Zárate’s novella first appeared in 1998. Since that date, same-sex marriage has become legal in the U.S., the U.K. (including Stoker’s native Ireland), and Zárate’s home country of Mexico, but there are those who would destroy that right and many more. To ensure that doesn’t happen, it is vital for marginalized people to see themselves as important citizens of the world, and that includes making them visible in literature and other media, as they are here. Bravo to Innsmouth Free Press for making such a book available, and bravo to you for reading it.
— Poppy Z. Brite,
October 2020, New Orleans, LA
José Luis Zárate is a key figure of the Mexican fantastic literature of the 1980s. Together with Gerardo Porcayo, he created the first online Mexican science fiction magazine, La Langosta se ha Posado, in 1992. He is a winner of the Premio Internacional de Novela de Ciencia Ficción y Fantasía MECyF and Premio Kalpa. Zárate is best-known for a trilogy of short novels centred around key popular culture figures – Dracula, Superman and El Santo. He studied Linguistics and Literature and now teaches a course on fantastic literature in his native city of Puebla.
David Bowles is a Mexican-American author and translator from south Texas, where he teaches at the University of Texas Río Grande Valley. He has written several books, most notably They Call Me Güero: A Border Kid’s Poems (Tomás Rivera Mexican American Children’s Book Award, Claudia Lewis Award for Excellence in Poetry, Pura Belpré Honor Book, Walter Dean Myers Honor Book). In 2017, Bowles was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Poppy Z. Brite is the pen name of author Billy Martin, who lives in New Orleans with his husband. His novels include Lost Souls, Exquisite Corpse, and Liquor. He is currently working on a nonfiction book about religion and spirituality in the work of Stephen King.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Mexican Gothic and other novels. She runs Innsmouth Free Press and together with Paula R. Stiles won a World Fantasy Award for the anthology She Walks in Shadows (a.k.a. Cthulhu’s Daughters).
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