Entertainment

FLESH & ‘BLOOD’

‘TRUE Blood’s” second- season timing couldn’t be better — it’s taking off just as gay marriage is grabbing headlines again.

For many fans of the blood-drunk HBO series, the fictional vampires’ quest for the same rights and social acceptance enjoyed by “breathers” (what the vampires call humans on the show) has become synonymous with the very real fight for gay rights.

This season, the storyline so far has focused on the Fellowship of the Sun, a conservative religious group whose goal is “protecting humanity from the iniquity of vampires.”

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Author Charlaine Harris — who wrote the best-selling Sookie Stackhouse mystery novels that the TV show is based on — hoped fans would pick up on the link between vampire rights and gay rights when she published the first book in 2001.

“When I began framing how I was going to represent the vampires, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be interesting if they were a minority that was trying to get equal rights,” Harris says.

“It just seemed to fit with what was happening in the world right then.”

But, the creator of the TV series, Alan Ball, doesn’t see it the same way. “To look at these vampires on the show as metaphors for gays and lesbians is so simple and so easy, that it’s kind of lazy,” Ball told a group of reporters in early June.

“If you get really serious about it, well, then the show could be seen to be very homophobic because vampires are dangerous: They kill, they’re amoral.”

In fact, that’s one aspect of “True Blood” that has begun to worry gay and lesbian scholars.

“The ‘good vampires’ are those that are able to contain their appetite for blood and sex and the ‘bad vampires’ are those who kill people, drink their blood and are hyper-sexual,” says Lauren Gutterman, coordinator of OutHistory.org, a project of CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies.

“There is a long history of association between vampires and sexual deviance and gays and lesbians as being parasitic in a similar way that vampires are. So I wonder to what extent the show is trying to challenge that association or if it’s perpetuating it.”

One way or the other, the show is making viewers think of gay rights, Gutterman says.

“If they watch the show and they identify with the romance between Bill [Stephen Moyer] and Sookie [Anna Paquin] and then empathize with his oppression and the way other people treat him, that could be productive,” she says.

Ultimately, Ball says, “I just hope people can remember that, because it’s a show about vampires, it’s not meant to be taken that seriously. It’s supposed to be fun.”