Forget everything you've read about vampires so far. The current bloodsucking trend, achieving maximum ferocity in November with the release of the sequel to Twilight, isn't about outsiders or immigrants or religion or even AIDS, as critics and bloggers have argued ad nauseam these past few months. There's a much better, simpler, more obvious explanation: Vampires have overwhelmed pop culture because young straight women want to have sex with gay men. Not all young straight women, of course, but many, if not most, of them. Neil Gaiman, sci-fi novelist and geek grandmaster, found out just how many during the shitstorm of pique that covered him from head to toe this past summer after he suggested in an interview that the vampire craze had run its course and should disappear for another twenty to twenty-five years. (Twilight fans took to Twitter in protest.) A foolish hope. The craving for vampire fiction is not a matter of taste but of urges; one does not read or watch it so much as inject it through the eyes, and like any epidemic, it's symptomatic of something much larger: a quiet but profound sexual revolution and a new acceptance of freakiness in mainstream American life.

Vampires have always stalked the cultural landscape at moments of carnal crisis. The seminal short story "The Vampyre," written in 1819 by John Polidori, was based on his fascination with Lord Byron, the icon of Romantic sexual liberation and danger. The frisson of deviance was there right from the start: Nobody really knows what happened between Byron and Polidori, but both of their memoirs were destroyed for the sake of propriety. (Byron, a few whispered, had even slept with his sister.) Bram Stoker's masterpiece, Dracula, appeared right in the middle of what historians call the Great Binge, a period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when cocaine and heroin use ran rampant, and the poster for the novel's first-ever movie adaptation promised "the strangest passion the world has ever known!" More recently, a small boom in vampire movies (The Hunger, The Lost Boys) coincided exactly with the rise of AIDS, their vampires intelligent and glamorous and doomed.

All these earlier iterations of the theme are not at all like vampire fiction today. Our vampires are normal. They're not Goth, they're not scary, they're not even that weird. This fall's big vampire show is on the CW, the Gossip Girl network, and its producer also brought the world Dawson's Creek.

In the best-selling Undead series of MaryJanice Davidson, the Queen of the Vampires is a suburbanite named Betsy Taylor. Edward, the romantic hero of the Twilight series, is a sweet, screwed-up high school kid, and at the beginning of his relationship with Bella, she is attracted to him because he is strange, beautiful, and seemingly repulsed by her. This exact scenario happened several times in my high school between straight girls and gay guys who either hadn't figured out they were gay or were still in the closet. Twilight's fantasy is that the gorgeous gay guy can be your boyfriend, and for the slightly awkward teenage girls who consume the books and movies, that's the clincher. Vampire fiction for young women is the equivalent of lesbian porn for men: Both create an atmosphere of sexual abandon that is nonthreatening. That's what everybody wants, isn't it? Sex that's dangerous and safe at the same time, risky but comfortable, gooey and violent but also traditional and loving. In the bedroom, we want to have one foot in the twenty-first century and another in the nineteenth.

True Blood also casts its shadow on the romance between a young woman and a vampire, but unlike Twilight, which is all subtext and love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name, HBO's cult series connects vampirism to homosexuality explicitly. In the opening credits - best opening credits ever? - a passing road sign reads GOD HATES FANGS. The vampires call the humans "breathers" instead of "breeders," and the series opens with a talk-show interview about vampires "mainstreaming," or "coming out of the coffin." True Blood contrasts its vampires' desires for normalcy with humans who are extreme drug users, shape-shifters, and orgiastic maenads, and it's a perfect encapsulation of the American bedroom at this moment: Everyone is a freak, even the people who claim to rail against freakiness.

The first question that comes to mind when you see a family-values orator today is, "I wonder if he's into meth-fueled orgies with male hookers?" And the segment of the religious Right that is not hypocritical has more or less joined the party: An evangelical preacher whose mission in life is to make Christians freakier is telling his flock to try anal play. For most Americans, there is no longer any such thing as a shameful sexual act between consenting adults. Having a bland sex life? Now, that's shameful. No one would dare admit to that.

And so vampires have appeared to help America process its newfound acceptance of what so many once thought strange or abnormal. Adam and Steve who live on your corner with their adorable little son and run a bakery? The transgendered man who gave birth to a healthy baby? The teenage girl who wishes that all boys could be vampires? All part of the luscious and terrifying magic of today's sexual revolution. The political consequences are sweeping - Iowa's Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage is further proof of an old wise man's dictum that the United States invariably does the right thing, after first exhausting all the other alternatives - and the cultural impact is just beginning to be felt. Stephenie Meyer's fourth book in her vampire series, Breaking Dawn, will - one rumor has it - be broken into as many as three different films, which means that husbands, fathers, and boyfriends could find themselves dragged to Twilight movies over the next decade. Neil Gaiman should take some comfort, though: Vampires will eventually go away. They always do. But only when they've sucked our fear and our longing dry.