We think the ghosts will come to us as we sit in Kaitlyn’s car, once our car, on top of the man-made hill that houses the only mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery. Small blue orbs dot the landscape. Ghost hunting shows often cite orbs as a sign of a haunting. But these are just battery-operated lamps that families have left next to their dead’s gravestones.

We figure this spot under the tree is a good place to hide from the few cars that might drive by in the night, going from Urbana to Champaign or vice versa. I turn the ignition off.

“Now what?” Kaitlyn sighs. Our ghost hunting inexperience is evident.

Three months ago, I had stood in our kitchen, now my kitchen, and said: I’m gay. At first, I had said I would find a new place because she had loved the garden in the backyard. But she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be in a house haunted by our former togetherness.

Over the remains of our marriage, we both wanted to create a celebration for our new friendship and a new tradition—one last ours. Inspired by the then-new show “Ghost Hunters,” we’d search out ghosts on Halloween, our shared favorite holiday. We decided to call it Wake the Dead.

Fog from the cold creeps up the windows. Silhouettes of the tree’s branches knock against the back window.

“What was that?” Kaitlyn whispers

“What was what?” I look around, afraid. The idea of seeing a ghost seemed fun, the increasing possibility as we sit in the dark cemetery, not so much.

“Thought I saw something moving across that way.” She points towards a row of graves.

I don’t see anything. Still, as the cold bleeds in through the vents, making everything feel even creepier, a thought whispers to me that we shouldn’t be there.

“Want to go?”

She nods. I drive as fast as I can on the twisty cemetery road in the dark. We go back to my apartment to eat pizza and watch a comedy. We laugh hard at anything slightly funny.

The author’s ceramic figurine in Chicago’s AIDS Garden—a place he believes is crowded with gay ghosts or ‘lavender apparitions.’ Courtesy of author.

Maybe we didn’t see anything because ghosts don’t hang out in cemeteries. According to Shane McClelland, co-founder of the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters, they tend to return to places they associate with happiness or a place where they experienced trauma.

McClelland’s group hosts a YouTube show called “Queer Ghost Hunters.” In contrast to regular ghost hunting shows, all the investigators on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are queer, and the subjects of their investigations are queer ghosts.

I started watching Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters in April 2022, while researching my memoir about my relationship to ghosts. Like my queerness, ghosts have always been with me, even when I didn’t want to acknowledge them. I started to notice my father’s ghost standing behind me three years ago when I remembered that he had molested me. Those memories brought on PTSD, major depression, and generalized anxiety disorder. I stopped showering. I slept with the lights on. No matter where I went or what I did, he was there, his hand hovering above my left shoulder.

But just as ghosts can haunt places of pleasure or trauma, that “you are not alone” feeling can be scary or be a comfort. Like I once accepted being queer, I eventually accepted being haunted. My once-casual interest in ghosts has become a full-fledged fascination. Now, instead of fearing being haunted, I devote much of my free time to seeking queer ghosts and writing haunted memoir, a term I coined, about the lived experience of being haunted. Ghosts have led me to a community of others also welcoming ghosts into their lives.

I’ve found that queerness and ghosts go together in fundamental ways. For one, our lack of queer history is a haunting. Rather than camera-ready scares, the hunts on “Queer Ghost Hunters” are a vehicle for finding and sharing queer history. By seeking out our ghosts and telling their stories, we defy erasure.

But in “Queer Ghost Hunters”, the Stonewall Columbus Ghost Hunters focus their searches on places of trauma, like prisons and abandoned asylums. They don’t go anywhere the queer ghosts might have had fun. If we are to memorialize places of queer trauma—and I believe we should—we also need to memorialize places of queer joy. For me, the power of queer ghost hunting lies in the way that it offers a means to acknowledge the co-existence of loss and celebration in queer, haunted spaces.

AIDS Garden Chicago balances this coexistence. Built on the ruins of what used to be a cruising and queer gathering spot known as Belmont Rocks in one of the city’s gay-friendly northern neighborhoods, the garden’s site memorializes a joyful part of Chicago’s queer history. Chicago Reader described Belmont Rocks as “the rare spot where the queer community could mix and mingle in broad daylight all summer long” and “nothing short of a gay paradise.”

Opened this year, the AIDS Garden’s centerpiece is a 30-foot, green Keith Haring sculpture titled Self-Portrait. Its defiant, joyful figure has its left leg and arm raised, as if photographed mid step. The park that circles the sculpture has concrete walking paths, benches, and pink and orange flowers. Through QR codes, visitors can scan to hear a still-growing collection of stories from those who lived through the crisis years in Chicago, as well as stories about those who didn’t make it. Because not a lot of storytelling exists about the Midwest during the height of the AIDS epidemic, the park is vital in making space to witness queer history and lives.

The author’s ceramic ghost stands in front of a 30-foot Keith Haring sculpture at AIDS Garden Chicago. Coutesy of author.

On the day I visit, the garden is busy: Cinnamon fills the air from the churros being made by the nearby food stand; closer to the lake, the air smells of sweat and sunscreen. People picnic under the shade of the trees surrounding the garden, while others hurry by to get a spot on the grass close to the lake. Some sunbathe on the concrete lip between the garden and the lakefront walkways just like in the historical pictures of Belmont Rocks. All of it feels like a way of honoring the space—laughing, taking in the sun, being with friends by the lake, just like the ghosts who haunt this space did when they were alive. It is a communal space for the living and the dead where the feeling that you are not alone is a comfort.

I’ve brought my own ghost to the garden, a ceramic figurine. I lie on my stomach on the crisp summer grass right in front of the sculpture to get a picture of the two together. The garden, I imagine, must be crowded with gay ghosts—or “lavender apparitions,” this more delightful descriptor courtesy of the podcast History Is Gay’s Halloween episode featuring the Queer Ghost Hunters. Just as ghosts are evidence of history, lavender apparitions prove queer people have always existed—even when we didn’t have language for queerness, even when some try to make us vanish.

Wake the Dead was a one-time event. Kaitlyn started her own tradition the next year: a Halloween costume party. Eventually, we phased out of each other’s lives, and I moved out of central Illinois to find my new home in Chicago, a city that provides space for queer history, celebration. Here, through searching out queer ghosts, I’ve reclaimed the ghost for myself just as I have the feeling of being haunted—two things the frightened version of me hiding from ghosts in that car in Urbana-Champaign would not have thought possible.

My new home is also walking distance to a local gay beach on Lake Michigan. I walk along the sand-covered concrete ridge that separates the beach from the preserved prairie dunes, the tall yellow-green marram grass stretching out towards the dark gray-blue water, towards the lighthouse with the rainbow base, on one of the first warm days. The dunes are themselves an unofficial cemetery of those lost to settler genocide. As I sit on the beach, the Chicago wind picks up, and sand swirls in the wind as if it’s dancing. I try to record it on my phone, to document what feels magical. I know I won’t capture it, but that’s OK. I let myself enjoy this lavender apparition, enjoying movement after being frozen for the winter. A gay ghost, as in a happy one.

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In the first episode of AMC’s superb television adaptation, the white, aristocratic Lestat propositions Louis, in this iteration a Black Creole business owner, to “be my companion … be all the beautiful things that you are and be them without apology for all eternity.”

This Black queer reimagining—still set in New Orleans, but in the Jim Crow rather than the antebellum era—isn’t some anomaly in vampire fiction, but rather follows the larger cultural transformation that the bloodsuckers have undergone over the last two centuries.

After all, vampires never really die (Rice, for one, wrote 13 Lestat novels), but each generation continues to reincarnate them based on the fixations of the present.

British writer and physician John William Polidori is often credited with kicking off the gothic subgenre in 1819 when he published the short story “The Vampyre; A Tale.” But it’s less remembered that the same year Polidori’s narrative debuted (famously modeling the titular vampire after his demanding hypochondriac patient, Lord Byron), an American author knocked off the concept, immediately linking vampirism with race.

Set just before the Haitian Revolution, the novella, “The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo,” begins after a slave owner attempts to kill a boy who cannot be killed. At first, the vampire seeks revenge, but after marrying and turning the slave owner’s wife, the two not only form a family unit but eventually take a cure that enables them to return to their human forms and to Christianity. But their happiness can only go far in a world defined by skin color; the ending reveals that their mixed-race descendant, now a resident of Essex County, New Jersey, finds himself also experiencing “the thirst of a vampire.” As Katie Bray argues in her dissertation “Haunted Hemisphere,” the plot takes a wide view of race in America, questioning “not only putatively pure racial lines but also uncomplicated U.S. national narratives.”

Homosexuality, too, was present in early gothic vampire literature. J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, serialized from 1871-2, became the prototype for the lesbian vampire novel, told through the perspective of a young girl named Laura who catches the attention of a mysterious stranger who comes to stay with her family following a graphic carriage incident. LGBTQ scholar Ardel Haefele-Thomas’ analysis of Carmilla and 1897’s The Blood of the Vampire, Florence Marryat’s story about a mixed-race psychic vampire named Harriet, suggests that both plots vacillate between “demonizing and showing empathy” toward their undead characters. This ambiguity—epitomized by Laura’s torn recollection of her vampire companion Carmilla, remembering her as “sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend”—underscores how these stories were not intended to be read as clear-cut morality tales. But if Carmilla and Harriet aren’t wholly demonized, their vampirism still makes them, ultimately, a stand-in for society’s fears, rather than fully realized characters with whom the reader can sympathize and identify with.

As it so happened, the same year readers discovered The Blood of the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s immortalized the vampire trope as we know it today with Dracula. To the Victorians, the bloodsucker was still, above all, a gothic monster.

It would take another half century before the vampire could begin to be re-imagined as a romantic lead, and daytime television is partly to thank for our change in appetites.

Dark Shadows, the ABC daytime soap opera that ran from 1966 to 1971, acquired a cult following thanks in part to Jonathan Frid’s magnetic portrayal of the immortal Barnabas Collins, a vampire disgusted by his own habits. Then, five years after it off the air, came Interview with the Vampire, the debut novel of a 34-year-old graduate student in New Orleans. The novels in Anne Rice’s gothic horror series The Vampire Chronicles weren’t romances, but they humanized vampires, depicting them as three-dimensional characters.

Notably, Rice, who died in 2021, was a vocal champion of gay rights, and by treating her characters with care and giving them a clear homoerotic undertext, she invented a modern vampire. Joseph Crawford, a scholar who’s extensively researched the origins and evolution of the paranormal romance genre, argues that Rice helped to shift public mores, priming readers to be ready to accept this reimagining.

“The figure of the vampire has historically been used as a representation of marginalized and vilified social groups,” he writes in his definitive book The Twilight of the Gothic? and led by Rice, the “revisionist vampire fiction of the 1970s was, to some extent, a symptom of changing social attitudes towards such groups.”

Steamy vampire stories that were more sympathetic toward the undead skyrocketed in popularity, first in the U.S. and then abroad. Nearly a century after Stoker’s Dracula, even the Count was ready to be given a love interest by the 1990s with Francis Ford Coppola’s reimagining (a genre-shifting, queer-coded blockbuster that Coppola made at the same time he was working on a project on the AIDS epidemic).

Vampire romances have continued to be in hot demand in the 21st century with the rise of properties like The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and True Blood. Over this period, the vampire may have picked up some new attributes (like being sparkly or “vegetarian”), but its basic DNA hasn’t changed; what’s changed is our perspective of the vampire’s condition. More and more, the public is considering what it means to date the other instead of demonizing it.

“Every age embraces the vampire it needs,” notes Nina Auerbach, a scholar of late 19th-century English literature.

Maybe there’s something especially hopeful, then, in the way AMC’s Interview with the Vampire continues to build on this context, bridging race, sexuality, and romance, with all their inherent nuance and complications.

Watching the show is a reminder that though the undead may be timeless, us mortals caught in their thrall are constantly changing. In this way, we, too, crave new blood.

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Around this time, a militia group called the Nusra Front, with ties to al-Qaida, had formed near Nahas’s town. He had heard rumors that they’d kidnapped and killed several gay men.

Nahas, who had near perfect grades in his third year of college, stopped going to school, fearful that his soft voice and gentle gestures might reveal what he’d kept secret his whole life. Since the war’s beginning earlier that year, friends he’d known since grade school were beginning to affiliate with extremist groups. He spent most days and nights in his bedroom—never expecting violence at the hands of his own family. But his father, an affluent contractor with close ties to the Assad government, saw his son’s effeminacy as an affront to their family’s honor.

In the hospital, Nahas made a decision that would change the course of his life: Despite huge risks, he would flee to Lebanon, nearly 15 hours away by road. Scraping together bills and coins, he bribed a taxi driver to take him to the border and pretend that his passenger was mute. At each checkpoint, Nahas sat paralyzed in silence, fearing guards would see through the ruse, interrogate him, and return him to Idlib. Or worse.

His plan worked. He made it to Beirut, then Turkey, where he applied for refugee status with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Nearly two and a half years later, he boarded a plane to San Francisco to begin a new life.

Between World War II and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States resettled more refugees than any other country in the world. In 2013, for the first time, the U.S. began concerted efforts to resettle people persecuted due to sexual orientation and gender identity. Hillary Clinton’s State Department, via the Department of Health and Human Services, issued its first major grant to help resettle queer refugees to an agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jewish Family and Community Services—East Bay.

I met Nahas at JFCS, where I was volunteering while producing a documentary about dislocated queer immigrants. As horrific as his account sounded, I quickly learned that nearly all queer refugees experience trauma, if not torture. As LGBTQ civil rights and marriage equality were accelerating quickly in many western countries, being gay or transgender in many parts of the world had become a hostile proposition. Anti-queer violence and state-sanctioned homophobia was on the rise, especially in countries in Africa and the Middle East. To this day, it’s illegal in 70 countries to be gay or lesbian; seven of these punish homosexuality with the death penalty.

In the early days of my research, I couldn’t have told you the difference between a refugee and asylum seeker, or how refugee resettlement works. Refugees get their asylum or “refugee status” conferred outside of the United States through the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Once approved and vetted by Homeland Security, they are assigned to cities with refugee resettlement agencies who receive federal money to help them integrate into American society. Part of this support includes small living stipends, food stamps, and basic medical insurance. Asylum seekers, on the other hand, are people who have already made their way into the United States, often on student or tourist visas, and then must present their case before immigration courts; they receive no benefits while they wait for a ruling.

From 2013 to 2016, as LGBTQ people fleeing persecution began to find refuge in the United States, the effort to integrate them was made more complicated by the fact that refugee resettlement is traditionally predicated on families: A family flees a war-torn region of the world and is resettled in an American locale connected to a community of its diaspora. An Iraqi family resettling in the Bay Area might be introduced to local mosques, grocery stores, or community centers of other Iraqis and Iraqi Americans.

Most LGBTQ refugees are not fleeing with families; they’re often fleeing from families. So a gay or trans Iraqi arriving in San Francisco might prefer to see anybody but other Iraqis. This conundrum leaves LGBTQ refugees isolated and at much higher risk, according to researchers, for post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and what is called “internal displacement.”

“Internal displacement”: I learned this phrase while working closely with Junior Mayema, another client at the agency where I volunteered. A gay man from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Mayema had fled repeated harassment in Kinshasa, then faced anti-gay police brutality in Cape Town, South Africa, before receiving refugee papers to resettle in San Francisco. He, too, had dreamed of America’s queer sanctuary, hoping for community, stability, and perhaps even a new love in his life. But in the first year I knew him, over many hours of filming, I witnessed Mayema experience anything but stability: moving more than 10 times in as many months, couch-surfing his way through the San Francisco Bay Area, and relying on strangers, sometimes older benefactors, for support.

It might have seemed noble to help LGBTQ refugees resettle in San Francisco, with its immigrant-friendly policies and a culture steeped in queer liberation. But the Obama administration forgot one basic reality: Try living on a monthly refugee benefit of $350 in one of the world’s most expensive cities. For someone whose life was fraught with trauma and the precariousness of major migration, repeated displacements within San Francisco meant repetition of that trauma.

There were other hurdles. Mayema, for example, is a dark-skinned, gender-nonconforming person with HIV, whose thick Congolese-French accent made his English difficult to understand. One host enthusiastically invited Mayema into her home to provide a diverse “cultural experience” for her inquisitive high school daughter—until they discovered that he drank and was often depressed. He was quickly made to pack his bags again.

For such reasons, many LGBTQ refugees find themselves isolated with few options for housing and livelihood. I met Cheyenne and Mari—a charming mid-20s couple whom I was introduced to through Melanie Nathan, director of the African Human Rights Coalition, a small organization based in San Anselmo, California. They had been successful musicians and popsicle entrepreneurs in Luanda, the capital of Angola. But neighbors had cut their electricity and water, killed their dog, and harangued them incessantly every time they left the house. Nathan recalls: “One man would come and masturbate outside their window threatening: ‘We’re coming in to rape you, to kill you… and we’re going to burn your house down.’”

Desperate to find safety, Mari convinced her mother to let the couple stay temporarily at her home. But instead of offering them refuge, Mari’s mother prepared a dinner that made them violently ill.

Unable to get to a United Nations office to apply for refugee status, Cheyenne and Mari applied for student visas and registered for a two-week English course at a language academy in San Francisco. Such visas are extremely difficult to secure for short courses, yet they’d managed to get them and book plane tickets out of Angola.

As difficult as life is for refugees, it’s doubly hard for asylum seekers. In addition to that monthly stipend of $350 for eight months, refugees receive a one-time payment of $1,100 upon arrival, medical insurance, and food stamps. Asylum seekers receive nothing. And, once in the U.S., the onus falls on asylum seekers to find an attorney and navigate a legal process that takes years. They are also unable to receive a work authorization permit until six months after filing their petition. This cruel regulation puts them in a double bind: To survive as they navigate the bureaucratic quagmire and heal from intense trauma, they either have to work under the table, legally jeopardizing their asylum case, or rely on the generosity of others.

For some LGBTQ refugees in San Francisco, it was the kindness of strangers that filled the gap. By late 2015, many individuals, often older LGBTQ retirees and members of faith communities, had begun offering housing, jobs, donations, and other assistance. Among my fellow volunteers, I found unexpected alliances forming between many older white gay Americans who had faced McCarthy-era persecution in the 1950s and present-day LGBTQ refugees. Over the course of making our film Unsettled, the numbers of queer refugees and asylum claims rose. A new and robust infrastructure to support dislocated LGBTQ people took root in San Francisco, and cities such as New York and Chicago as well.

Then, everything changed.

A year after the 2016 presidential election, I called Amy Weiss, then-director of refugee services at JFCS. While donations were at an all-time high, and strategies for more effectively resettling and integrating queer refugees had greatly matured, the number of refugees allowed into the United States had fallen to a trickle under Donald Trump’s new immigration policies. Currently, the number of refugees allowed into the U.S. is at an all-time low and 80 percent less than in 2016. This closing of America has come when the world has more refugees and migrants than at any time since World War II.

Over the past few years, speaking at film festivals and events to draw attention to the plight of LGBTQ refugees, I’m often asked whether I think America’s turn toward tribalism and xenophobia will continue to pervade national discourse. It’s a fair question: Anti-immigrant rhetoric that energized Trump’s campaign has translated consistently into policies maligning and restricting immigrants of every stripe. The new migration protocols on the U.S.-Mexico border are more draconian than at any other time in recent history. Under the “remain in Mexico” policy, most Central American asylum seekers are now being denied their right to have their day in asylum court.

However, I try to remain cautiously optimistic: Back before the Trump administration, during one of our film shoots, I attended the San Francisco Pride Parade, an increasingly corporatized event to which many activists have become inured. But this time, I saw something new: Nahas, Mayema, Cheyenne, and Mari, and a dozen LGBTQ refugees were all marching together in a small contingent. Their simple handmade signs stood out among the fancy rainbow logos of corporate behemoths like Facebook and Google, even Walmart.

Not long after, Nahas was made Grand Marshal of the New York City Pride celebration and was invited by then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to testify before the Security Council: the first time that august body heard live testimony from an openly gay person.

During that trip, Nahas and I visited the Stonewall Inn, site of the 1969 unrest that helped catalyze a national gay rights movement. We hopped on the Staten Island Ferry to catch a better glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t help but wonder at his journey: This self-professed shy man, whose sole strategy to survive growing up in Syria was to remain silent, was now speaking on an international stage and carrying a new banner for queer liberation.

Looking at the statue and at the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at its base, I began to wonder, given the Trump policies: How many fewer people from the masses of tired, poor and queer we will ever get to know? And how quiet will this land be without their voices?

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