It’s About Sex

“Andrew, we’re complex. We contain both the evil of men and the evil of teen girls.”

“Evil?”

“Collin, he’s simple. A man among men, only wanting uncomplicated gay love, which he believes will save him. We know—nothing will save us. ‘Man delights not me … nor woman neither.’”

Reading author, children’s librarian, and one of my literary heroes Hal Schrieve’s 2022-2023 comic Vivian’s Ghost, I felt seen—no, exposed. Here, finally, was a transexual storyteller not writing redemptive or merely “real” or “messy” trans narratives, but hauntingly honest ones. Across Hal’s many books, I find the worst of myself in hir characters, people struggling to accept the fact that transness alone does not liberate us from evil, or worse—as if we need another risk, that in raising our “true” and “beautiful” selves to the surface, we must face our inner ugliness, too.

“I am squealing! Like I can’t even believe ze read my work,” I replied when smoke and mold editors shared that my story “Show Me Your Fangs” for their Trans Eco Horror issue would be illustrated by Hal. After learning that we were paired because Hal was soon publishing a queer YA vampire novel—yes, I leaped into hir DMs to gush. Both psychologically complex and a pulpy page-turner, after reading Fawn’s Blood I had to interview hir about desire, sex work, and our preoccupation with evil.

This interview was conducted over email in July 2026. It has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

---

Crystal Odelle (CO): “It’s about sex,” you said, when asked about your projects in progress in a 2024 interview on Gender Reveal with Tuck Woodstock, two years prior to the release of Fawn’s Blood—your very queer, very wondrous YA vampire novel. In a country both hypersexualized and puritanical, where sexual autonomy is still framed as wicked, let alone queer sex or kink—how sticky was the work of writing a YA novel about sex?

Hal Schrieve (HS): I think a lot of YA novels are about sexuality. Very 1970s-era YA novels like The Perilous Gard—which, like Sarah J Maas’s books today, is a Tam Lin retelling and is shockingly kinky along hypnosis/kidnapping lines—were fundamentally embarking on trying to prepare young people for navigating their power/pleasure and danger/coercion as they moved between childhood and adulthood. Adolescence is always going to involve interfacing with sexuality, even if a given teen is asexual, because you have to learn to express boundaries. Reading about sexual desire—whether that involves vampires/blood or not—helps teens know what they want and don’t want and see examples of what they might do or feel in different situations.

I think we’ve moved backwards in terms of talking about consent and assessing safety. Sexuality has become more taboo. I think my book is not the sexiest vampire book you could read in terms of traditional sex scenes—there are basically just two scenes involving human sex, both of which are between Rachel and Brid and both of which fade to black. (If a teen were looking for actual vampire sex, they could try Poppy Z. Brite…) I was trying to thread the needle on making sure it could be reasonably included in library collections for upper middle and high schoolers. But because I think it’s really important to describe the sensations of desire, revulsion, discomfort, curiosity and evaluation that go into sex, I focus a lot on how it feels to suck blood/get one’s blood sucked, and I think those scenes might reasonably be described as obscene. 

CO: In pop culture, vampirism often serves as a metaphor for abhorrent behavior—homosexuality in Interview With the Vampire, colonization in Sinners—generally “sin.” Fawn’s Blood reads as both too clever to use vampirism as a one-to-one metaphor to explore social deviance and alienation at-large, yet still circles a familiar existential turmoil of vampire narrators: Is the inner conflict people feel about non-normative desires a matter of internalized phobia and shame, or a crucial grappling with immorality, maybe evil? What has writing the novel and/or life experience taught you about that conflict?

HS: Vampires are a mixed signifier, as you say—sometimes they’re oppressed people (the diseased, the immigrant, the gay person, the Jew) and sometimes they’re a colonizer, a lord, an abuser. They’re always hungry. Sometimes their hunger is the hunger of the poor and sometimes it’s the hunger of the capitalist and sometimes it’s the hunger of the abused and sometimes it’s the hunger of the abuser. In real life, real people might move from one position to another multiple times based on their context; humans, too, are always hungry.

Vampires are a mixed signifier, as you say—sometimes they’re oppressed people (the diseased, the immigrant, the gay person, the Jew) and sometimes they’re a colonizer, a lord, an abuser. They’re always hungry. Sometimes their hunger is the hunger of the poor and sometimes it’s the hunger of the capitalist and sometimes it’s the hunger of the abused and sometimes it’s the hunger of the abuser.

I think that the question about the morality of taboo desire is genuinely an interesting and unresolved one. To take the classic butch border wars talking point: is the desire to be a man evil because men have access to structural power within patriarchy? And my answer is, of course, that’s not an evil desire, but you do meet trans guys who are enjoying the patriarchy and seem unconcerned with the crisis of violence facing their sisters, and you’re like ‘hm, this guy does seem to be evil…’ His pleasure, like other men’s, is so often centered on the world needing to bend to him and being furious when it does not. USAmerican/European rich gay people today have the option of partying on a cruise around the Mediterranean or Caribbean, even as other people (gay and otherwise) crowd onto boats in the same seas trying to reach refuge. That doesn’t mean having a gay party is evil—but I would say being an imperialist is.

CO: Back in your 2024 Gender Reveal interview, you cheekily describe yourself as “pro-chaser.” The sentiment that diverse attraction is a net positive resonated with me, as well as that being a good chaser means being honest about one’s desires. Early on in the novel, Fawn is chastised for having a perverse fascination with vampires akin to chasers’ fixation with trans people. Because Fawn flirts with the idea of becoming a vampire, the novel raises an age-old question—maybe not, “Is my chaser really trans?” so much as the broader (gayer?) question, “Do I want to fuck you or be you?” Does the difference matter? Why or why not?

HS: I am pro-chaser because I am a chaser. I would never insult the people I desire by denying I want them because of how they are. I also like being desired because of my deal rather than by someone who can’t see it. People who don’t like chasers generally feel that way because they don’t want to be reduced to being fat or trans or “daddy” or (insert adjective)—and also because sometimes people desire you while still half-hating you. What I insist on is that there’s just as many trans people who do this to other trans people—using their peers as a stepladder to their own expression without really seeing the person—as there are cis people doing it to us, so I don’t see any reason to mark cis chasers as especially evil for it.

I think a lot of chaser-y desires IRL are about running from and running to—e.g., a chaser of trans people might be trying to find a new place inside gender relations for themselves, a chaser of older partners might be looking for a parent, a chaser of fat people might be trying to resist negative lessons they’d learned about their own body, a chaser of vampires might be trying to be close to magic… or to find someone to whom they will be quantitatively necessary. Maybe that’s healthy; I think it depends. Chasing is about movement; it’s about getting somewhere. Sometimes it’s fun to be the place someone is trying to get to. I think some chaser hunger is too big to be met by an actual person—it’s something primordial that needs to consume a lot, like No-Face from Spirited Away, because there’s this hole that isn’t filled; they are still looking for something kind of metaphysical—a kind of feeling of purpose or belonging or love—and when they can’t find it they get mad or miserable. Sometimes it is hard to be a landing place for someone’s expectations like that, but sometimes people can find a mirror in another person’s vivid desire, at least for a while, and it can be wonderful.

Chasing is about movement; it’s about getting somewhere. Sometimes it’s fun to be the place someone is trying to get to.

CO: As a former sex worker, I appreciated the representation you evoke through “sellers,” humans who sell blood to vampires illegally. Several of Fawn’s interior reflections put words to my unvoiced feelings as someone drawn to the work for financial reasons and to scratch an erotic itch. During Fawn’s first encounter with a client, she thinks, “I realized if she wanted to take without paying, she could. I could probably push her off. Desire or paralysis or curiosity would stop me. This was going to be a problem if I was going to be doing this for a living.” Framing sex work and gender transition as life-affirming choices seem requisite to combat conservative narratives mobilized to legislate us out of existence. Personally, like Fawn, I can’t pretend that I’m not sometimes guided by a fascination with danger, if not death. Are the kids OK, and what do we need to know most about desire and mortality?

HS: I don’t know what we need to know about desire and morality, but I think we usually confront ambiguity when we’re thinking about it. I think it can be harder than most people admit to figure out when we’re being hurt vs. having fun, especially when we don’t have much experience and haven’t chosen all parts of our situation. I think it’s made more complicated when there’s a lot of messages saying that we shouldn’t exist/desire the way we do, such that other people get the message it is okay to hurt us (worse than we want).

I also did sporadic SW in my early adulthood, partly because it was a feasible way to make rent and partly because I was curious about and scared of men’s sexual desire for me and kind of wanted to put it in a container. It turned out that the most upsetting thing was the vulnerability and shame around their desire (for me) that clients had, rather than any violence—I mean, that’s luck/privilege talking, but I think the emotional work and boundaries around what I was being asked for was much harder than anything physical. Originally I had a whole arc around a client of Fawn’s named Seth, an older trans man vampire, a kind of counter-Cain/Cain’s Louis, who was trying to just live off of bagged blood but who kept buckling and hiring sellers, who he then would profusely apologize to. I was going to have him have this redemptive arc where he comes around to being part of vampire community and discovers his powers, but then I decided that Silver could do the same things in the story and that Seth was just a guy from my past I wanted to save.

CO: Throughout the novel, Fawn learns to navigate consent as a seller among vampires. At a shelter in Seattle, for example, she flees Jay after an encounter that bystander vampires characterize as attempted rape. Jay fails to defend himself, saying, “Thought you wanted it. Your necklace, you know.” He refers to the bat wing necklace that Fawn wears, a symbol of the “Free Blood” humans vowed to give blood freely to vampires. I was reminded of the kink equivalent of the “free use” symbol to connote consensual non-consent and other emblems that shorthand non-normative desires within BDSM spaces. In approaching an ethics of vampirism, Fawn’s Blood seems to draw from various community discourses around consent. What’s important for communities to remember when having sticky and yet crucial conversations?

HS: I wanted to show some vampires who were trying really hard to manage it ethically and were a little haunted by it, and some vampires who had thrown that concern out the window. Jay is a new vampire with really strong urges, and all of the non-vampire world says to indulge any of that is wrong, so the vampires who are trying to set up rules are (in his view) oppressing him, and the ones telling him to go for it are righteous. And the thing is, he is playing by a certain set of rules—assuming that a cultural signifier means a particular thing about the person’s desire. The problem is that not everyone understands the signals they’re putting off and not everyone can read signals. And that makes Jay—who ultimately avoids physically hurting Fawn—both kind of dangerous and ripe for being hurt himself by other vampires protecting their community or by slayers. There’s a bad end where it could make him bitter and unrepentantly malicious; hopefully he just figures out how to read the room better.

There has never been an era when everyone practiced perfect consent within BDSM or queer spaces; I want to put the torch to the idea that there is an Ur-Queer habitus of upright conduct that has only been abandoned by degenerates. It is in fact just all people more or less figuring it out, and that’s what I want to show in stories I write. Elders are winging it. There are debates IRL about sadism and kink. Right-wingers participate in kink while trying to kill us for it. Cultures of shame broadly are not good for safety, but I think there’s a lot of room to ask about where play-pretend meets the real—even if everyone knows something is a game, a line can still be crossed and real harm done. And also, some kinks have to do with real-world violence and you can’t just pretend that the ghosts of that violence don’t follow you into the room and refuse to process it with partners.

There has never been an era when everyone practiced perfect consent within BDSM or queer spaces; I want to put the torch to the idea that there is an Ur-Queer habitus of upright conduct that has only been abandoned by degenerates. It is in fact just all people more or less figuring it out, and that’s what I want to show in stories I write.

CO: As a slayer turned into a vampire against her will, Rachel starts out morally repulsed by her thirst for human blood. From her famed slayer mother to anti-vamp public policy, she’s internalized that to pursue and penetrate and feed from humans is a sick, monstrous act. Throughout the novel, she struggles with this anxiety over sadism—like, how can anyone enjoy harm? Ultimately, she can’t ignore how good her body feels, for example during the penultimate battle in which Jay gets wings by drinking from someone: “I decided not to look—to turn into a monster, he had to hurt her—but then I did anyway.” When personally conflicted by the ethical implications of masochism and sadism, I’ve found refuge in Avgi Saketopoulou’s concepts of traumatophilia and exigent sadism as forces of psycho-social liberation. Similarly, I was moved by the symbiotic need and care and respect that Fawn develops for Rachel: “Her fangs over her bottom lip were beautiful to me, and I thought about her bat-face when she drank from my neck. She hated it. I wanted her to love it. I wondered if, when we were both less made of electric wire, she would try again. I wouldn’t ask her now.” Whose work do you turn to in making sense of seeming contradictions between ethics and practice?

HS: I love Leo Fox, who is also working on a book about vampires and who loves to write about the miserable yet fulfilling, carved-out feeling of overpowering desire and hate, and who created the character Jounce, The Spirit Of Perversion, that I hope will endure as a meme. I think Davey Davis’s writing about masochism and sadism is very interesting and often very thorough, though I don’t always relate to or understand their experiences. Kate Bornstein has a wonderfully chaos magicky guide for young people called 101 Alternatives To Suicide where she provides harm-reduction tools and ideas for living that is committed both to keeping all options on the table and assessing harm. I think reading Patrick Califia’s work like Public Sex is also illuminating re: this, especially the places where he had to walk back earlier positions and change with time and apologize (there are some things he has never apologized for; this is also instructive). In terms of more ethic-ethics, I think I’ve learned a lot from Kai Cheng Thom’s work on love and solidarity, and from Leslie Feinberg. Though ze didn’t necessarily prioritize pleasure, hir work is all about overcoming fear and loneliness in order to do right by others and how that feels good, better than retreating. 

CO: Both your graphic novel Vivian’s Ghost and Fawn’s Blood (geeked by the parallel in these titles, is this the start of a trilogy??) follow trans protagonists in search of lost loved ones in an attempt at reconciliation with the past. Along the way, each hero resolves some shame or grief related to their own transition to more optimistically face the future. What’s the most important lesson a ghost has taught you about living?

HS: I’m going to be very earnest here: “never kill yourself.” Don’t die, because that’s the end of where you control your own story. I mean this very seriously. Look at what people do to dead trans people’s memories. They eat them up and make tchotchkes out of them. They—we—the living—make trans death into endless memorial speeches and art about ourselves and stories that blur the outlines of the people we remember into narratives beyond who they actually were. My dead friends have absolutely no ability to correct the record on what I misremember about them or how I understand their experiences. I do hope our ancestors watch us and are somehow in contact with us; I do find it immensely meaningful to be in the presence of memorials to our dead, which are a sign of the living persisting. But better more alive trans people arguing with each other than a thousand gorgeous altars.

I do find it immensely meaningful to be in the presence of memorials to our dead, which are a sign of the living persisting. But better more alive trans people arguing with each other than a thousand gorgeous altars.

I do think that both of these books are, among other things, about processing the same moment in my life—e.g., the loss of a close, complicated friend to suicide when I was eighteen. In real life, he is gone, and I have been unable to reach him. In Fawn’s Blood, Silver’s alive after all and Fawn can address his flaws/their different trajectories to his face; in Vivian’s Ghost, Vivian can be put to rest inside his friends when they start trying to actually live without him. So they are twin books, kind of.