Vampires

[...] The sexualised vampire is thus read alternatively as the embodiment of authorial neuroses and as the coded expression of more general cultural fears of which the author is, consciously or incosnciously, an observer. Vampirism is a practice that lends itself to such readings. Described frecuentñy as a kiss but carrying with it pain and blood analogous to those of defloration or violent intercoourse, the vampire's bite is at once oral and yet penetrative. As such, it blurs the boundaries between foreplay and coitus, between the violent and the erotic, between the prelude and the cosummation [...] In its sexualised quest for blood, therefore, the vampire is capable of disrupting what have been culturally percieved as discrete patterns of sexual behaviour, and of evading the taboos that polarise heterosexuality and homosexuality. The vampire represents, in this sense, the liberation of those sexual activities or desires that have been alledegly proscribed or censored in society or repressed within the self. [...]

Punter, David: "A Companion to the Gothic".