A fellow S’cubie, Kerrie, recently brought up Spike siring males, commenting how homoerotic that seems. It’s pretty much beyond disputation that sex is an underlying emotional dynamic to vampire biter/human bite-ee, from Dracula onward. But vampire/vampire biting/siring might have different implications…nope. That started me thinking.

Although the siring of our principal vamps SEEMS nicely "daisy chain," with Darla siring Angelus, Angelus siring Drusilla, and Spike sired by Dru, there's still the lingering oddity because Spike originally--in "School Hard"--claimed Angelus as his sire. Joss Whedon has tried to explain that away, stating that any elder vampire of the same bloodline is one's sire, but I think that's "skate fast" talking. Canon is canon. When Spike was gonna be a one or two time repeat character, like Tector Gorch, it didn't matter who sired him--and that's how he was originally intended. Only when Spike became one of the principals did the question of whether he was directly sired by Angelus or by Dru become worth worrying about or trying to explain (away).

I think that at the point Spike was to become a regular, Joss saw exactly the same homoerotic implications that Kerrie did and didn't want to raise them explicitly in the series in regard to a character who was ultimately to become the female protagonist's paramour. That's a bit strong for network prime-time TV.

But the implication is there. And I believe that's it's true.

Some fan writers (specifically, "peasant" and "coquette") have made what is to me is a persuasive case about how vampires experience and use sex. It's about power first, pleasure second, love rarely, and progeny not at all. If that were to be drawn on a pie chart or given in percentages, it would be something like power 70%, pleasure 25%, love 5%, and that's all she wrote.

Vampires are a predatory society of what are effectively all adults. Even their "childer" are adults, physically. (Those turned as children don’t tend to survive long—their incomplete physical and mental development means they have to be continually protected, and vampires tend to be neglectful caretakers because of their innate selfishness.) Every other vampire is a competitor and is of approximately equal physical power (compared to the vast discrepancy in size and strength between an adult human and a five-year-old human, for instance). In a society of peers in competition for prey, with no helpless young to protect or nurture, dominance is crucial. There are hunting territories to be claimed and defended, fellow predators eager to eliminate the competition, and the ever-present threat of the human prey hunting them down and staking them. And for the most singularly unlucky of vampires, there’s the Slayer—as certain and inexorable a killer as the sun.

The price of immortality is never-ending peril, uncertainty, and violence. Life is nasty and brutish, and for each individual fledgling vampire, commonly short.

The only way to increase the chance of individual survival, individual power, is to form self-seeking alliances with other vampires; and the only analogy to the lifelong (potential) stability of the human family is among the members of a bloodline clan—a sire and his/her childer who, immature as vampires, can be utterly dominated for a time before they come into their own in confidence, ability, knowledge, experience, and control of their heightened vampire senses and strengths. Pack hunting, including childer and minions (subordinate vampires not of the same bloodline), increases the success rate of each of the individual vampires comprising the pack and gives it leverage in the competition over hunting territories and therefore more security and, ultimately, longevity. A lone vamp can be staked more easily than an experienced, coordinated pack; a clan can stand against (or escape) an enraged mob with fewer casualties than can a surprised nest of unrelated, non-cooperating individuals.

But the fact of vampires’ long, long lives (if they survive their fledglinghood, as few do) means even that domination and ghost of social cohesion eventually fails. The glue cannot hold forever. Dependence ends, and natural competition of self-centered peers within the group brings self-assertion and rebellion. Sometimes that means the childer rise up against the Master vampire (one capable of siring and then maintaining/dominating childer), and either sire or childe is slaughtered; sometimes it means that the childe strikes out on his/her own and may attempt to become a Master in turn. Either way, the center cannot hold. Mature vampire "families" shatter and regroup, then scatter again over time.

We see this in Spike’s quick disposal of the child-sized Anointed One upon his first arrival in Sunnydale, with Dru, and in his brief and mostly feckless assumption of the role of Master of the vampires of Sunnydale, a role he’s unfit for psychologically or emotionally. On the one hand, he’s too impatient; on the other, he’s not consistently brutal enough toward subordinates to keep them in submission. On the third hand, he evidently feels no sense of responsibility toward anyone other than Dru. Spike is just not Master vamp material. We also see it in how Angel, Darla, Spike, and Dru are forever finding one another after long absence, uneasily reconnecting, interacting for awhile, then rebounding away in all directions, usually muttering and in a really rotten mood.

Domination over humans means food: blood. And vampires, like humans, are naturally gender-indiscriminate in their feeding: very few people care to make any distinction whether the chicken or fish that’s for dinner was male or female. Domination over other vampires within the hunting pack, the bloodline clan, means survival—as long as that domination can be maintained. And that’s a continual battle.

The primary method of domination is crude physical power: the many against the one, the larger against the smaller, the more experienced against the less experienced, those with momentarily more allies in the ever-shifting dance of allegiances against those with less. And swift vampire healing from any injury not outright fatal insures that the beatings and tortures involved in these assertions of physical power are really horrendous. Hence Angelus’ study of torture as an art form. Hence Spike’s (and every other vampire who’s been "raised" in a pack/clan situation) ready aggression and almost reflexive rejection of authority. It’s a given that vampires brutally beat and torture one another: the only question is who’s on which side of the bullwhip, and Spike doesn’t want to be on the receiving end ever again.

The other means of domination is sex.

Like all other primates but unlike all other predators (with the possible exception of werewolves like Oz), vampires don’t go into season: sex is a possibility every hour of every day. And as with adult humans, it’s therefore simmering in the back of their thoughts and their awareness every waking hour and almost certainly in their dreams, as well.

As with feeding, vampires are indiscriminate about sex. Since large males (like Angelus) are stronger, in general, not only than females but also than smaller males (like Spike), sex-as-domination (read: forced sex=rape) tends not to be gender-specific. A Master must subdue his/her childer, whichever gender they be, and keep them that way for the pack to endure. In fact, because the most likely source of both effective support and of rebellion will tend to be male/male, so is a considerable part, or even most, of the power-sex.

Sex can punish and dominate. It can also reward—because vampires do (or can) enjoy sex. And it’s an equal-opportunity form of domination: the women can wield sexual power at least as well, and possibly better, than the males can wield the fact or the threat of bodily abuse. It has the advantage that there’s less wear and tear on the childer—they’re not helpless and healing for long days, having to have their food supplied, unavailable for clan defense, incapable of quick escape. It’s safer because it doesn’t bear within it the possibility of losing, being deposed. It does not/cannot lead to a pregnancy in which a female, and ultimately an infant, has to be protected and function as less than an equal hunting member of the pack at full strength. To get sex with a preferred partner or offer sex in return for alliance, individuals will make accommodation, back off from fullscale confrontation, subordinate themselves to another’s will. To avoid the most brutal kind of unwanted forced sex, they’ll do the same. So when sex will serve, sex is preferred to beating one’s childe to a bloody pulp. It is therefore the main dynamic that holds a clan together. Everybody concerned is continually angling for advantage in it. And with no law or morality to restrain the individuals and even a counter-urge toward the deliberately perverse (these are vampires, after all), everybody has sex with everybody.

It’s the universal coinage of vampire relationships. Given or withheld, shared or forced, it punishes or reconciles after punishment. It’s what you do when you’re bored. Or exuberant. Or sad. It’s conversation. It’s gift and apology and acceptance and consolation and humiliation, appeasement, and submission. There’s pity sex and spite sex. Sex is not only everything it is for other primates (except reproduction): it’s what vampires have as the replacement for, and the powerful equivalent of, the bond between a child and its parents, its siblings, and its eventual progeny. It’s the answer to everything when the answer isn’t blood.

It’s all about the power. As has been said about diplomacy, sex for vampires is warfare under another name—and felt, and known, to be so.

I therefore accept as a given that Angelus, the Master vampire, and Spike, Angelus’ childe (directly or indirectly), have been sexual partners innumerable times—whether, initially, Spike was willing or not. Given the times and what we know of his character, most likely not. And because Spike is very plainly an individual who tends to form lasting emotional bonds (case in point: over a century protecting, cosseting, and tolerating whimsical, insane, visionary Dru), any long-term sexual relationship is going to produce in him a lasting emotional attachment…even if that attachment is more than half hatred. It follows then that both Angelus and Spike are profoundly bisexual, almost indiscriminately so.

Spike is innately far less brutal and focused on domination than Angelus. He’s avoided developing that side of himself. Although Spike has sired other vampires (Holden Webster, of "Conversations with Dead People," for one), he’s never taken up residence with any of them, so he’s never had to exercise the unrelenting dominance required of a Master over his childer; evidently, he’s never wished to, except during his brief and almost accidental tenure as the Master vampire of Sunnydale, after cranking the Anointed One into the annihilating sunlight, when he inherited all the minions but sired no childer we can be certain of—certainly none who survived. He demonstrates less than no enthusiasm at the prospect of siring ailing Ford, in Second Season’s "Lie to Me": creating childer for support and to support doesn’t seem high on his list of priorities (assuming he has one, which is doubtful). In more lasting stable relationships, he sets up housekeeping with Dru and then with Harmony, neither his childe. Quite plainly, he prefers to form sexual partnerships with women—not (I conjecture) so much because they’re women, but because they’re easier to get along with than men. Spike likes comparative peace in his domestic arrangements, and with women, he doesn’t have to be continually beating them down, or being beaten down by them, as the price of the relationship. Not continually, but surely occasionally. It’s understood and expected. Otherwise, his women are apt to stray (and sometimes do anyway: Dru and the Fungus demon; Dru and the Chaos demon; Dru and Angelus). Besides, Dru likes (and perhaps requires) it: to wit, Spike’s cheerful intention of countering her desertion by becoming the vampire she fell in love with, namely by tracking her down and torturing her until she loves him again ("Lovers Walk"). Who knows? Sounds like a plan to me, given the participants. Violence is a given in vampire relationships. Pain inflicted or suffered is an intrinsic part of sex. Sado-masochism as a way of life (or in this case, unlife).

One has to confront Spike’s self-chosen image, particularly in his "Fool for Love" 70’s subway incarnation: there is the eye-liner. There are the earrings and the black nailpolish. There are the meticulously arranged punk chic hairdo and the wildly excessive jewelry. In this one instance, Spike adopts and projects a blatantly androgynous image, and it’s unforgettable: retroactively coloring everything else we’ve seen of him before and everything that comes after. This is quintessential Spike. There is one significant fact, however, that indicates Spike is not at all as comfortable with his bisexual history as this image from "Fool for Love" would otherwise suggest: his incessantly referring to Angel as a "poof": a homosexual. "Poof," "poofter," "nancy boy," "Peaches," are all his preferred way of avoiding speaking Angel’s name. When it comes to "protesting too much," Spike could serve as a textbook example. Spike makes it extremely, glaringly, and unnecessarily clear how much he hates homosexuals. He jokes (in "School Hard") that wielding a weapon "makes him feel all manly"—whereupon he discards the weapon and fights the Slayer hand-to-hand, body to body. Being "manly" is less important than the chance to get as close to the Slayer as possible—even in their first (but far from last) all-out battle. It could be that in his unrelenting and unvarying homosexual slurs, Spike is expressing contempt for broody (souled) Angel in contrast to fierce, brutal, (unsouled) Angelus: Hyde to Angel’s Dr. Jeckyll. I recall no instance in which Spike refers, specifically, to Angelus as a "poofter." However, in his wheelchair phase, when Angel has reverted to Angelus, Spike has few opportunities to discuss his freshly-unsouled sire with any non-vampire, so the matter remains moot. (In the single instance where he discusses Angelus with Buffy, in proposing an alliance of convenience in "Becoming Part II," Spike calls him only "Angel," making no distinction between Jeckyll and Hyde.) Yet one must give weight to how conspicuously and consistently Spike tries to distance himself from, and states his contempt for, homosexuals. If he ever has idle imaginings of a coupling between himself and Xander (for instance), he never says so; but Xander certainly seems subconsciously aware of an unspoken subtext. When confronting Buffy about the sighting of Spike having sex with the Buffybot ("Intervention") Xander says, "No one is judging you. It's understandable. Spike is strong and mysterious and sort of compact but well-muscled—" and Buffy responds, "I am not having sex with Spike, but I'm starting to think you are." Which of these two is imagining things: Xander? Buffy? Both? Spike never indicates or acknowledges such possibilities. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t there. However, for Spike, then and always/afterward, it’s all about Buffy. For Spike, there no longer are any other possibilities.

It follows from this that in the sixth-season mutual punch-outs, Buffy had entered into what Spike would perceive as a normal, if volatile and unstable, vampire courtship and sexual relationship. Below the level of consciousness, he would have felt he knew the rules, the patterns. It would have felt familiar, natural, and "right" despite the healing time required. That’s probably why he put up with Buffy’s abuse with such relative equanimity and lack of resentment for so long. But Buffy knew none of these patterns. To her, sex/love implied more gentleness than outright, undisguised brutality. And finding the brutality as the most effective and common coin of exchange between them, recognizing it as foreplay, dismayed her deeply: raised within human norms, human expectations—and from before puberty, by a single (and generally not sexually active) mother. For Buffy, the super-strong and quick-healing Slayer, what she felt and what she was doing in this bloody-knuckled, rib-cracking, satisfying relationship was horrific, unnatural, terrifying. She felt it as alien and fundamentally "wrong." And therein lies their tragedy culminating in the almost-rape, which horrified even Spike: not because of what he’d almost done but because he perceived it to be an issue at all. It was a clash of expectations deeper than thought, agonizingly emotional to them both. He had to learn to feel on Buffy’s terms or give up the relationship altogether because a vampire courtship was one that eventually Buffy could not accept or sustain and one that at last even he found unsatisfying. Because Buffy was who he wanted; because he loved her. And because Spike is the most human of vampires. Even the Judge could tell.