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SPOILERS AHEAD FOR INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE SEASONS ONE AND TWO ON AMC.
When any piece of media mentions Cincinnati, proud Queen City denizens can’t help but take pride in our city and its recognition. When the best show on television mentions Cincinnati, the ultimate Flying Pig Signal is activated. I’m here to answer the call. Now that the first season of said show has hit Netflix and is reaching a larger audience, we thought it would be a good time to address the name drop.
Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire on AMC/AMC+ is outstanding in a way television rarely is anymore. It’s gorgeous, engrossing, sexy, queer, and strikes a perfect balance between Gothic darkness and snarky humor. If you’re looking for your next vampire fix, look no further.
Cincinnati enters the picture in season two, episode three, “No Pain.” Our main vamps Louis and Claudia are settling in post–World War II Paris after murdering their maker/Louis’s ex-husband, Lestat de Lioncourt, in New Orleans and fleeing to Europe. In France they meet the local coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, and realize the group was co-created by Lestat. To keep the coven from finding out they murdered their beloved founder, Louis and Claudia try to make up a fake backstory with a different maker and cities far away from New Orleans.
Claudia: “You find me in Springfield selling chestnuts outside the train station. He kills himself in Cincinnati.”
Louis: “What the hell do we know about Cincinnati?”
Claudia: “What do they know about Cincinnati?”
Well, Louis de Pointe du Lac, here is what you (and potentially the coven) would have known about Cincinnati at that time.
Cincinnati Vampires
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Before you ask, no, the notorious Gem City Vampires are not from Cincinnati, they’re from Dayton. That’s a full hour’s drive away! While we made not have the biggest coven outside Louis and Claudia’s hometown of New Orleans, we did have a brief but notable vampiric craze.
According to local historian Greg Hand, blood drinking was the hottest dietary fad of the city in the late 1800s. The Cincinnati Medical Advance was the first to ring alarm bells in 1875 about the dozens of people who would gather at abattoirs to get a swig of fresh blood. Thirsty customers would line up, glass in hand, and fill up fresh from the veins of the slaughter.
Illustration from Cincinnati Weekly Times, 1885, image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Lafcadio Hearn, legendary writer who specialized in the strange, noted that our large Jewish community and Kosher butchery scene were to thank for the highest quality blood. “Many who can drink the blood of animals slaughtered according to the Hebrew fashion, can not stomach that of bullocks felled with the ax,” Hearn wrote. “The blood of the latter is black and thick and lifeless; that of the former bright, ruddy, and clear as new wine.” Also, blood isn’t Kosher so the wannabe vamps got their supply for free.
One could argue Hearn became a vampire himself from the experience. The poetic manner in which he writes about drinking blood rivals the prose of Anne Rice herself. “Fancy the richest cream, warm, with a tart sweetness, and the healthy strength of the pure wine ‘that gladdeneth the heart of man!’ It was a draught simply delicious, sweeter than any concoction of the chemist, the confectioner, the winemaker—it was the very elixir of life itself.”
The Gay Scene
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One of the most revolutionary aspects of Interview With the Vampire is the portrayal of a main character who is unabashedly gay. His (un)life and struggles in early 20th century New Orleans are shaped by his race and sexual identity just as much as his vampirism. If he lived here instead, what would his experience as a gay Black man have been?
According to Cincinnati LGBTQ+ historian Jacob Houge, it would have been a mixed bag. While there was an underground gay scene in 1910s–40s Cincinnati, it was extremely segregated. Many major gay bars in town hardly let any non-white customers in until the 1970s. Part of this was due to these establishments being mafia-run and part of it is the long history of segregationist policies in town.
Photograph from John Harshaw's "Cincinnati's West End" courtesy of Jacob Hogue
If Louis were going out somewhere, he likely would have ended up in the West End, which was considered a prime destination for both jazz and Black queer life. The West End’s biggest draw was the Cotton Club, the only integrated nightclub in the city. It also frequently platformed Black queer talent.
“The Cotton Club is the place where it seems like a predominantly straight crowd went to watch queer entertainment,” says Hogue. “It had female impersonators there all the time…Dixie Lee was the most popular female impersonator at the Cotton Club. She was also a great dancer, and she was dancing side by side with some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. There was also this dancer named Fajor who is described by historians as ‘sissified.’ I love that.”
Press of Atlantic City. August 31, 1946, Page 12, courtesy of Jacob Hogue
Another West End spot Louis may have frequented was the Cordelia Hotel. Men often went to the Cordelia seeking out other queer men and sometimes trans women to hook up with. It was described as a “whorehouse” much like the Azalea Club that Louis ran in New Orleans. If he had run the Cordelia instead, perhaps he would have avoided police raids, as according to Hogue, cops surveilled Black queer spaces less than White ones.
If you want to learn more about Cincinnati’s queer history, you should follow Hogue’s Instagram, and look out for his upcoming book, Cincinnati Before Stonewall: The Untold Queer History of the Queen City.
The Black Community
Image extracted from microfilm by Greg Hand
Speaking of the West End, this is where a large portion of the Black community lived in Louis’s and Claudia’s heyday. According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, between 1910 and 1930 the city’s Black population more than doubled to nearly 50,000 due to The Great Migration. A majority of these people settled in the West End, making it the hub of Black culture in Cincinnati.
While the West End’s population boomed and formed a flourishing jazz scene, segregationists feared the city’s increasing diversity. Redlining and housing segregation were officially instilled by the Cincinnati Real Estate Board in the 1920s as a means of racist movement control.
Meanwhile, Walnut Hills was becoming the local civil rights destination. The Frederick Douglass School provided education, social services, and mutual aid resources. Both children and adults were taught at Douglass, which would have been perfect for a child/adult in a child’s body like Claudia.
Also in Louis and Claudia’s time, the Cincinnati branch of the NAACP formed in 1915 with activist, author, musician, and editor Wendell P. Dabney serving as its first president. Louis could have read his articles in The Union newspaper.
New Orleans Connections
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Louis and Claudia were proud Creole New Orleanians (with strong southern accents) so no matter how much they knew about Cincinnati, the truth about their real hometown would’ve come out. That being said, there are interesting connections between the Queen City and the Big Easy that I think Louis and Claudia would find…fascinating (heh).
Remember Lafcadio Hearn, the writer who partook in blood drinking? After living and writing in Cincinnati from 1869 to 1877, he decided to move down to New Orleans. Some of his most prominent work was written in NOLA including La Cuisine Créole and Chita: A Memory of Last Island. He extensively covered voodoo as well, having written the obituaries for community leaders Marie Laveau and Doctor John Montanet.
Just as the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi, a man in 1907 walked on water all the way from Cincinnati to New Orleans. According to the Waterways Journal, inventor Charles Oldrieve was challenged to walk down the river in special water shoes he invented for $1,500. If he could get from Cincinnati to New Orleans in 40 days, he would receive the equivalent of $53,000 in today’s dollars. He succeeded just under the wire, leaving Cincinnati on January 1 and arriving in NOLA on February 9.
The most obvious Louisiana connection that Cincinnatians know comes from the Cincinnati Bengals. The unstoppable duo of quarterback Joe Burrow and wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase were equally powerful in their days at Louisiana State, where they won the 2019 NCAA College Football Championship. Burrow and Chase are still equally beloved both here and in Louisiana—Chase especially, since he was born and raised in Baton Rouge.
Image courtesy of AMC
Too bad Louis is a Saints fan. If (and probably when) their season goes sideways, he’s welcome to hop on the large NOLA Bengals bandwagon.
Give Interview With the Vampire a watch on AMC, AMC+, or Netflix. You won’t regret it!
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