Chapter Text
The Queen of the Damned is an AIDS crisis book. That was understood and commonly discussed in the late 80's and early 90's and it astonished me to find that it's apparently been lost to our abused and fractured fandom.
The idea that Rice is not aware that she structured this gothic horror novel as an AIDS crisis allegory is not credible to me. If one wants to be thorough about this 30 year old interpretation it looks like this:
- Akasha is the monstrous embodiment of 80's american society's reaction to AIDS. She evokes both terror of ugly death that seemed to come out of nowhere and the horror of religious and political response that people 'deserved to die', 'society would be better without them'.
- In this book (only) the vampires occupy the symbolic space of people with full blown AIDS; they are doomed to die if they can't find a solution to the crisis.
- In this book the mortal characters are representative of the people at risk of AIDS, Baby Jenks the injection heroin using sex worker, Daniel the bisexual man, and Jesse vulnerable because of her heritage (she serves as a hemophiliac metaphor and a reminder of the Holocaust on that score), and when she is injured and Mael gives her Blood in a hospital she also becomes the representative of the people exposed to AIDS via blood transfusion.
- The concept of 'being HIV positive' simply did not exist in 1985, when TQOTD is set. No test to screen individuals for HIV antibodies was available before spring 1985, and it was still uncertain at that time if HIV always developed into AIDS. In practice, you were either sick with AIDS, a swift death sentence because there was no treatment, or helplessly lived in fear you'd been exposed and might become sick. That context, and the context of just how terrible dread of the horrifically stigmatized epidemic was and how pervasive the effects were on 80's society, is now largely lost on younger readers.
- In the book, the only one of the three that symbolically develops full blown AIDS is Baby Jenks; she dies. Daniel and Jesse, in becoming immortal, are symbols of hope: TQOTD has a happy ending, with a very realistic razor blade in it: only the privileged, lucky, and loved Daniel and Jesse, not the impoverished, thrown away Baby Jenks could survive long enough for a solution to the crisis to be found.
- In this book Lestat represents americans for whom the system works; he's a beneficiary of the 20th century cultural revolution, a successful rockstar. But he's been blindsided and had his own life upended by the crisis: friends die and he himself is in danger.
- Akasha is a good parable for the harm maximisIng actions of the politically and religiously powerful during the crisis. From the needless deaths they caused right down to their crude, punitive bronze age religious philosophies and fascist 'justifications' that the world could be forced into a 'better' place by removing 'the wrong people' from it. Just like Akasha, what they did they did with malice aforethought, actions springing from arrogance and hate in their hearts.
- Akasha tries to seduce Lestat into believing that those who are suffering are 'less than', 'sinners' and that the death toll can be part of an agenda that advantages him. Lestat redeems himself in the end by choosing solidarity and compassion for the 'little people' she heartlessly destroys.
- The fact that Akasha terrorizes mortals of color in developing countries was not thoughtless: that is precisely where the most extreme burden of AIDS was projected to, and has indeed, hit.
I don't quite know how to engage with the idea I've seen proposed, that Anne was exploitative in writing a book about gay blood drinkers in the 80's and not giving people living with AIDS representation because again: the. whole. damn. book. is. about. AIDS. But a 2019 revisionist view of the book would still not read Daniel nor Jesse as actually sick with AIDS.
And then there is the 'Daniel dying of AIDS' headcanon that emerged during the Trump era: The text says dying due to alcoholism, the subtext reads drank himself to death in response to AIDS terror, and I can personally assure anyone that in those terrifying and hopeless times some symptomless people who thought they were likely exposed did indeed self destruct.
I've tried not to hate Trump era 'Daniel dying of AIDS' against-text headcanon. My family lost two people to AIDS in the mid 90's. One of them was a VC fan, and I can't think of a more wonderful, embraceable use for Daniel than to remember him. If compassion were the goal. If that were sincere. And the thing is, I think the woman I lost to AIDS deserves remembering in Jesse too.
But I'll be frank: if done, it needs doing with care: the cruelty of breaking canon that when changed into a vampire the Blood does not remove physical deformities or aging markers (please see Magnus, who still apears very elderly in TVL, and Heskith who still had the twisted back and malformed limbs she lived with in PL) but always *completely heals any damage from illness or disease, restoring the appearance of perfect health and transforming the person into an idealized portrait of their natural selves, including body weight* (please see Gabrielle, who is completely restored from a skeletal years of tuberculosis ravaged wraith into a voluptuous middle aged woman in TVL, and Mona who is restored from a skeletal years of chronic illness ravaged wraith into a voluptuous young woman in BCant) for the sole purpose of presenting sickness and recognizable, still stigmatizing, AIDS wasting syndrome in Daniel's immortal body, as I've seen done in some fanworks, is the subtextual equivalent of presented him with a big red stigmatizing 'A' for eternity and strongly implies this against-text, headcanoned death from 'sinner's disease' sets Daniel apart as the sole character unworthy of Riceian vampiric perfection and therefore punished. It reads as hate.
And yes, I am aware hate was not the original intent. The original intent was not cruelty, nor fetishization, nor homophobia. And yes, the density of the that irony does floor me.