It’s time to bare my fangs and reveal a major pet peeve of mine: bisexual vampires.

They used to be all the rage in movies such as Vampire Lovers, The Forsaken, The Brotherhood, Blacula, Interview with the Vampire, Fright Night, The Lair of the White Worm, The Hunger, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Lost Boys (arguably), and countless Hammer horror films in the 1970s.

It’s kind of impressive when you think about all the major leading men who were willing to play at least strongly implied bisexuality – Tom Cruise (1994), Brad Pitt (1994), David Bowie (1983), Kiefer Sutherland (1987) – just as long as their characters were vampires when they did it.

Hell, it’s arguable that, with 1960’s Blood and Roses, we had bisexual (or lesbian) vampires in movies even before we had actual on-screen lesbians, in The Children’s Hour, which came out a year later.

Blood and Roses (1960)

On TV, we’ve had just as many bisexual vampires, on shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and Xena: Warrior Princess (in “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” Xena and Gabrielle finally start to get it on – but only because Gabrielle’s been turned into a decadent member of the undead who will clearly sleep with anything and anyone!).

Do I like a lot of these movies and TV shows? Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that, for all the talk about the vampire genre being “subversive,” the bisexual vampire trope subtly communicated to viewers the most conventional message possible: namely, that gay – and especially bisexual – people are amoral hedonists who hide in shadows attempting to prey on unsuspecting victims, who they will destroy in the end if they are not first mercilessly defeated. Either that or we’re weary moral relativists, the ultimate elitists, scorning the petty concerns of the common man, and hell-bent on destroying the pillars of “normal” society.

No, seriously.

Let's face it. Bisexuality – usually a kiss between two women – has long been used to communicate to an audience the idea that someone or some group is completely free from any morals whatsoever: that the brakes are off and animal lust has been allowed to run completely wild. This is how Supernatural, Xena, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Caprica have all indicated that their main characters have crossed over into some truly anarchical, hedonistic realm. (Why is it usually a kiss between women? Men kissing is apparently too decadent even for hedonists. They have to have some standards, after all.)

Anyway, vampires are just one manifestation of this old, depressing trend. But this idea that vampires wantonly seduce innocents, desiring new victims every night? It’s just about the most pernicious stereotype about bisexual people there is.

Despite all the current talk about bisexual invisibility, bisexuals haven’t really been all that invisible in movies and on TV – they’ve just usually been portrayed as vampires!

Why more people haven’t been more upset by this, I do not know. But I’ll run down the arguments that I heard from people whenever I’d go off about yet another bisexual vampire:

(1) Sure, they’re bisexual vampires, but hey, visibility is visibility! Besides, if we want to be truly equal, we can’t always be the hero.

To which I say: we were never the hero. Seriously, can you think of one mainstream vampire project ever where there’s an outright, non-morally-ambiguous gay or bisexual hero? They all have them, they're just never gay.

And when you’ve got an entire genre when virtually the only time gay or bisexual characters appear is as hedonistic villains or at least morally ambiguous figures of weary elitism – characters with qualities that just happen to reinforce big stereotypes about our community – that’s pretty much the opposite of visibility.

Next Page! The two other "pro-bisexual vampire" arguments!

(2) Oh, vampires aren’t real villains! Vampires are complicated.

To which I say: they eat people. Besides, all good villains are complicated. Just because Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve look incredibly sexy together, that doesn’t mean Deneuve isn’t a villain in The Hunger.

(3) Vampires aren’t gay or straight. They suck blood! It’s not about sex. It just makes sense that male vampires would suck male blood, and females would suck female blood.

I find this one so dumb that part of me doesn’t even want to dignify it with a response. But let me just say: vampires are all about sensuality, which is all about sex. Why else do you think vampires are so eternally popular? Because people have a fascination with the human circulatory system?

But it’s this last point that pretty much proves definitively that bisexual vampires weren’t ever about GLBT visibility or anything innate about the “vampire” experience. They weren’t ever about anything except reinforcing existing stereotypes about gay and bisexual people.

How do I know this to be true?

As the years have rolled on by, the vampire genre has changed in an important way: vampires, which used to be much more morally ambiguous, are now much more likely to be figures of romance and heroism. Anne Rice first popularized this trend, and Buffy and Angel took it a big step forward, but I’m mostly thinking of the Twilight franchise (and its infinite number of imitators) and shows like The Vampire Diaries and Being Human.

What of True Blood? Clearly, they straddle the "good"/"bad" vampire divide, and given its queer pedigree, there are those who say it's subverting the obvious bisexual vampire cliches. That may or may not be giving the show too much credit, but I do think a big part of the reason why the show has found such mainstream acceptance despite its explicit "gay" content is because it trades in such familiar stereotypes.

But the point is, the basic workings of individual vampires has stayed the same: they hate sunlight, suck blood, have to be invited into your house, and all the rest.

The only thing that’s changed is the morality of the vampires in question: they’re no longer always secretive amoral subversives preying on the blood of helpless victims. Sometimes some of them are now outright heroes and figures of open romance.

And what do you know? Suddenly vampires have stopped being bisexual. The more “good” they are, the less morally dubious, the straighter they’ve become. It’s an almost perfect correlation!

In other words, we had to endure decades of bisexual vampires as amoral villains, and all this talk about how obviously bisexual vampires didn’t have anything to do with defaming actual bisexuals – how it just made sense that male vampires would suck the blood of other males.

But now that vampires have turned heroic, we’re still waiting for one mainstream gay or bisexual vampire who isn’t morally dubious (and no, one cheeky, throw-away reference by Spike, who was totally morally dubious, about a possible romp with Angel doesn't count).

As for the morally "complicated" vampires on True Blood, most of whom have exhibited some degree of bisexuality, it seems that the more thoroughly "evil" a vampire is, the more likely we are to have actually seen a same-sex relationship.

Anyway, it turns out the “bisexual” part of vampirism wasn’t innate after all. And just as it's now possible to portray vampires as morally strong – stronger than humans, in many cases – it turns out there are also plenty of ways to portrays vampires as being thoroughly, 100% heterosexual. Who knew?

Like actual vampires, I’m sure the bisexual vampire trope will never truly die – it will keep returning from the grave as long as bad writers rely on hackneyed stereotypes (even as they also express deep-rooted societal prejudice).

But if Hollywood insists on grinding out vampire after vampire, after literally hundreds of amoral bisexual vampires, it’s about time Hollywood gave us a few thoroughly heroic bisexual ones, don’t you think?