Barry Lowe sinks his teeth into the world of gay vampires and discovers a queer aftertaste.

What is it with gay guys and vampires?

Perhaps it’s the party-all-night-sleep-all-day routine of your average living dead – but what about your tan line?  And don’t the fangs get in the way when you’re sucking cock?

Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee never got my veins throbbing, and even Frank Langella, the supposedly sexy Dracula, left me limp. And as for hunky Gary Oldman’s demented piss-elegant blood sucker …

There’s a wealth of gay erotica on the subject: Brothers of the Night: Gay Vampire Stories, edited by Michael Rowe & Thomas S Roche; Desmond: A Novel About Love and the Modern Vampire by Ulysses G Dietz; Vampire Transgression by Michael Schiefelbein; Blood Lust: Erotic Vampire Tales by M Christian and Todd Gregory; and Bound in Blood: The Erotic Journey of a Vampire by David Thomas Lord, are just a few of the dozens of titles available.

There’s also a long tradition of gay vampire porn movies – most of it bad! Gayracula (1983) has Tim Kramer as Gaylord Young stalking the streets of LA sucking more than necks. His arch nemesis in this ‘classic’ is the Marquis de Suede.

That’s about the cleverest thing in this dud. The tag line for the film, naturally enough, is “He’ll suck you dry!”

Much cleverer in the title department, albeit just as feeble as a porn movie, was the trany blood sucker, Dragula, Queen of Darkness, which featured that famous porn superstar Bram Stroker.

This is not to be confused with gay director Andy Milligan’s short 1973 film Dragula, in which a New York hairdresser’s bite turns his victims into drag queens.

Sons of Satan (Tom deSimone, 1973), The Night Boys (Gino Colbert, 1991), Vampire Boys (Mark Reilly, 1999), Bite This! (Jan Osten, 1996), and The Bite (Chi Chi LaRue, 1998) are okay as porn if not kosher on their vampire history, ,while The Vampire of Budapest (Kristen Bjorn, 1995) may be superior in its production values and couplings but is even less faithful to folklore than many of its predecessors.

Most of them share that hoary old gay conceit that the love of a pretty boy can save anyone.

Now the creators of Dante’s Cove, that truly awful gay teleseries, have come up with the ultimate vampire wet dream, The Lair, the first season of which is available on DVD. Full of impossibly handsome men with impossibly hard bodies, it is set around the private gay club of the title run by, what else? Vampires.

The premises are used to lure hunky men as dinner. When their bodies turn up with suspicious bite marks on their necks, an inquisitive journalist sets out to investigate, thus putting not only himself but his boyfriend in danger. The journo, it seems, is the dead spit for the head vampire honcho’s deceased lover.

Originally screened on Here TV in the US in six half-hour episodes, there’s enough hunky vampire bloodletting and sucking (be warned though, this is homoerotic not porn – there are no dick shots) to allow even the most discerning viewer to overlook the inadequacies of some of the performances.

www.heretv.com/the_lair