“Manor” (1885)

If it’s a little surprising to find this gay vampire love story by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs from as long ago as 1885, it’s a little less surprising to find how hard it is to see online in English (get your auf Deutsch right here). It was not translated into English until 1991, per the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), where it is Ulrichs’s only listed story. It has not been much anthologized either—in a way it still exists as underground artifact. Ulrichs was primarily a lawyer and pioneering gay rights activist in 19th-century Germany. He pressed his cases in the courts and published a lot of essays. Vampire stories were and maybe still are apt refuge for highly marginalized LGBTQ+ folks, already too often necessarily operating behind masks. Sheridan Le Fanu’s amazing 1872 novella “Carmilla” is testimony to that. Ulrichs picked up on the vibe in this tale, which is altogether more romance than shocker (knowing perhaps that the spectacle of man-love would be shocking enough to conventions). Its strength is its commercial weakness, which is that it’s just so plain what is going on here. The boy is 15. Manor, the young sailor, is 19. It’s hearts on eyeballs love at first sight, after a rescue scene. They live on an island system in the Norwegian Sea—way north (where Ingmar Bergman lived too). There is no overt sex but the chemistry and the contentment of sleeping together are palpable. They spend a lot of time in the woods, which I think might be intended as our big clue. Manor is an orphan and sailor by trade. He goes to sea and when he returns he is part of a terrible wreck, which he does not survive and is buried with the rest. But wait. At night, he comes scratching at the boy’s window. His love has transcended death but also he needs blood from the boy to keep this good thing going. You can guess. Soon the boy’s pallor is terrible. The sad moral: “They thrive on the blood of the living and, like a beloved, long for their embrace. But their yearning causes everyone nothing but grief.” The townspeople figure out what’s going on and they’re not having any of it and, well, we know how these things go. It’s worth asking what the townspeople are objecting to, the desecrated grave or the gay. It seems to be more about the grave which Manor keeps climbing out of and leaving a big mess behind. I have to say I can understand the problem. There’s no good end to this, yet however strange it is still a touching love story.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Story not available online.