Queering the Queer: Vampirism and Conservatism in The Lost Boys
Spoilers for The Lost Boys (1987) and The Lost Boys: A New Musical
The Lost Boys: A New Musical opens in 1987 with a cop walking into the abandoned Coronado Steelworks in Santa Carla, California. On an old box TV, then-President Ronald Reagan delivers a speech extolling the virtues of traditional family values. Suddenly, the TV cuts out, and vampires sweep out of the darkness, sucking the life out of the officer. These vampires are revealed to be the “Lost Boys,” led by the leather-wearing, piercing-studded David. The central story begins with Michael and Sam Emerson moving to Santa Carla with their mother, Lucy, to escape their abusive father and husband, respectively. Struggling with the move, Michael is drawn into the Lost Boys’ orbit through Star, a beautiful half-vampire he becomes infatuated with, leading David to turn him. Simultaneously, Lucy becomes romantically entangled with Max, owner of the local video store (VideoMax), while Sam befriends the Frog brothers, Edgar and Alan, who turn out to be vampire hunters. As the musical evolves, Michael must choose between his families: human or vampire.
At first glance, the Lost Boys are explicitly countercultural. In contrast to Michael, a “normal” t-shirt-and-jeans-wearing high schooler, the Lost Boys have pierced ears and dress exclusively in leather. In the film, they live in an abandoned hotel; in the musical, an abandoned mill. Either way, they live on both the cultural and physical fringes of society. Even the first scene of the musical shows the subversive’s domination: the vampire triumphs over the mainstream, defined by Reagan’s “traditional family values.”
This interpretation aligns with mainstream views of vampires: sexy, dangerous, and a little bit queer. In “Critically Queer,” Judith Butler defines “queer” as a “site of collective contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings,” framing queerness as a subversion of a mainstream, cisheterosexist past and future (19). From explicitly queer vampires, such as Carmilla or Louis and Lestat in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (since adapted into an extremely popular AMC show), to Twilight’s quasi-incestuous, yet alluring, Cullens, vampires in popular media can be read through this definition because of the threat they pose to traditional relationships, reproduction, and the “natural” course of human life.
Furthermore, an implicit connection exists between the vampire spreading its condition through blood and the enduring negative connection drawn between queerness and blood. This includes the false assertion that queerness is a “spreadable disease,” the enduring association between queerness and STDs, particularly HIV/AIDS, and, of course, the only recently repealed restriction on queer men donating blood. Reading vampirism as queer exists in media as old as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, considered one of the defining works of the vampire genre, or The Vampire (1913), the first film featuring a vampire. However, both of these pieces of media reveal that often, society associates vampirism with queerness not as a celebration of the subversive, but as a criticism. In both, an alluring vampire nearly seduces an innocent human (a woman in Dracula, a man in The Vampire) before the heroes, upstanding members of mainstream society, stop them, allowing the human to return to a life of patriarchal, heterosexual bliss.
As common as it is for vampires to be queer, though, it is just as common for that queerness to be punished or eliminated. Most vampire media, after all, ends with the vampire getting staked. Even in cases when the vampires do not explicitly die, most media still portrays them as predatory and amoral. Now, this is where The Lost Boys comes back in. What sets this silly little horror comedy spectacle apart is how effortlessly it queers the queer vampire.
Remember Ronald Reagan? The epitome of mainstream conservative “family values,” Reagan was infamous for his hostility towards the LGBTQ+ community and his refusal to take action against HIV/AIDS, resulting in thousands of deaths. His spectre haunts The Lost Boys, from his appearance in the show’s first moments to Alan Frog arguing that Reagan is secretly the “head vampire” because of his status as a “charismatic leader.” Furthermore, Max is established as a stalwart conservative, at one point calling Barry Goldwater one of the best products of Arizona, adding additional context to his apparent protection of the Emersons from the Lost Boys at the beginning of the show. The Lost Boys so clearly follows the path laid out by vampire media from years past: vampire (queer) bad, human (normal) good.
That’s what makes the plot twist so shocking. And so delicious.
At the very end of Act II, the Emersons and their allies have killed David, supposedly freeing Star and Michael from their half-vampirehood. And yet, they remain cursed. Out of nowhere, Max appears with Lucy and reveals both his position as the head vampire and his plot to turn the Emersons into vampires. “It was all going to be so perfect,” he snaps. “My boys needed a mother, yours needed a father.” With that one line, he suddenly subverts the message the show seemed to be delivering just moments earlier.
The Lost Boys tells us that conservatives fighting to constrain society within a certain narrow standard of “acceptability,” who are willing to kill to fulfil their aims, are the real vampires, the real parasites, and the real amoral “shit-suckers” (as Sam Emerson would call them). There is a reason, after all, that Max sings “boys need chains”. Max is the villain because he tries to force the Emersons into a traditional family structure and mould the Lost Boys and the Emerson boys into perfect all-American men. To do so, he coerces the counterculture, the marginalised, and the queer – the Lost Boys – into doing his dirty work. Max never feeds on a human. Max has no homoerotic tension with another male character. Max keeps his hands clean and his chin up, controlling the Lost Boys even as he shuns them. For The Lost Boys, conservatism, repression, and marginalisation hiding behind a veneer of respectability represent the true danger.
Perhaps the best indication of The Lost Boys’ genre subversion is its queering of the non-vampire characters even while presenting them as unambiguously good. The musical queers Lucy, a single mother, through her rejection of the nuclear family and marriage, most notably when she stakes Max while yelling “I can raise my kids on my own, asshole!” in a clear rejection of Max’s conservative values. It likewise queers Sam when he decides to fight the vampires in “Superpower” while still celebrating his queer identity — the choreography accompanying the song involves superheroes dancing in rainbow order under rainbow stage lights. Ultimately, portraying the Emersons as queered vampire hunters best illustrates The Lost Boys’ break from the vampire tradition of overcoming the queer with the normal. Instead, the show creates a world where Sam can proudly declare: “But maybe I could be a hero here / And make it cool to be queer.”
Valli Pendyala is a Senior in the SFS majoring in Regional and Comparative Studies: SWANA & South Asia. In their free time, Valli enjoys engaging with increasingly niche vampire media, making ridiculous Spotify playlists, and watching niche YouTube essays.
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