We’re here to answer Interview With The Vampire’s ultimate question: “What the heck do we know about Cincinnati?”

Image courtesy of AMC

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE SEASONS ONE AND TWO ON AMC.

WWhen Cincinnati is mentioned in the media, proud Queen City residents can’t help but be proud of our city and the recognition we receive. 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 that 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 excellent in a way that television rarely is. It’s beautiful, it’s captivating, it’s sexy, it’s queer, and it strikes a perfect balance between gothic darkness and sarcastic 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 settle in post-World War II Paris after killing their creator/Louis’ ex-husband, Lestat de Lioncourt, in New Orleans and fleeing to Europe. In France, they encounter the local coven, the Théâtre des Vampires, and realize that the group was co-founded by Lestat. In order to prevent the coven from discovering that they murdered their beloved founder, Louis and Claudia attempt to concoct a fake backstory involving a different creator and cities far removed from New Orleans.

Claudia: “You can find me in Springfield, selling chestnuts outside the train station. He commits suicide in Cincinnati.”

Louis: “What do we really know about Cincinnati?”

Claudia: “What are you doing? she do you know about Cincinnati?”

Well, Louis de Pointe du Lac, here’s what you (and possibly the coven) knew about Cincinnati at the time.

---

Image courtesy of AMC

Before you ask, no, the infamous Gem City Vampires are not from Cincinnati, they are from Dayton. That’s a whole hour away! While we may not have the largest coven outside of Louis and Claudia’s hometown of New Orleans, we did have a brief but notable vampire craze.

According to local historian Greg Hand, drinking blood was the city’s most popular diet fad in the late 19th century. Cincinnati Medical Advances was the first to sound the alarm in 1875 about the dozens of people who gathered at slaughterhouses to take a sip of fresh blood. Thirsty customers stood in line, glass in hand, and filled themselves with fresh blood from the veins of the slaughter.

Illustration from Cincinnati Weekly Times, 1885, image taken from microfilm by Greg Hand

Lafcadio Hearn, a legendary writer who specialized in the strange, noted that our large Jewish community and kosher slaughter scene are due to the highest quality blood. “Many who can drink the blood of animals slaughtered in the Hebrew fashion cannot endure that of oxen felled with the axe,” Hearn wrote. “The blood of the latter is black and thick and lifeless; that of the former is clear, red and bright as new wine.” Blood is also not kosher, so the wannabe vamps got their supply for free.

You could argue that Hearn himself became a vampire through the experience. The poetic way he writes about drinking blood rivals the prose of Anne Rice herself. “Imagine the richest cream, warm, with a sour sweetness, and the wholesome power of pure wine ‘that gladdens the heart of man!’ It was a simply delicious drink, sweeter than any concoction of the chemist, the confectioner, the winemaker—it was the elixir of life itself.”

---

The gay scene

Image courtesy of AMC

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Interview with the vampire is the portrayal of a protagonist who is unashamedly homosexual. His (non)life and struggles in early 20th century New Orleans are shaped as much by his race and sexual identity as by his vampirism. If he had 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 Cincinnati in the 1910s-1940s, it was extremely segregated. Many of the city’s large gay bars barely allowed non-white patrons until the 1970s. Part of this was because these establishments were run by the mafia, and part was the city’s long history of segregationist policies.

Photo from John Harshaw’s “Cincinnati’s West End” courtesy of Jacob Hogue

If Louis was going to go anywhere, he would probably have ended up in the West End, which was considered a prime destination for both jazz and black queer life. The biggest draw to the West End was the Cotton Club, the city’s only integrated nightclub. It also regularly provided a platform for black queer talent.

“The Cotton Club is where it seems like a predominantly straight audience went to see queer entertainment,” Hogue says. “There were female impersonators all the time… Dixie Lee was the most popular female impersonator at the Cotton Club. She was also a great dancer and she danced alongside some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. There was also a dancer named Fajor who historians describe as ‘effeminate.’ I think that’s great.”

Press of Atlantic City. August 31, 1946, page 12, courtesy of Jacob Hogue

Another West End venue Louis frequented was the Cordelia Hotel. Men often went to the Cordelia looking for other queer men and sometimes trans women to date. It was described as a “whorehouse,” much like the Azalea Club Louis ran in New Orleans. If he had run the Cordelia instead, he might have avoided police raids, as Hogue said officers were less likely to police black queer spaces than white ones.

If you’re interested in learning more about Cincinnati’s queer history, follow Hogue’s Instagram and keep an eye out for his upcoming book, Cincinnati Before Stonewall: The Queen City’s Untold Queer History.

---

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 and Claudia’s heyday. According to The Cincinnati EnquirerBetween 1910 and 1930, the city’s black population doubled to nearly 50,000 through The Great Migration. A majority of these people settled in the West End, making it the center of black culture in Cincinnati.

As the West End’s population exploded and a thriving jazz scene developed, segregationists feared the city’s growing diversity. Redlining and housing segregation were officially implemented in the 1920s by the Cincinnati Real Estate Board as a means of controlling racist movements.

Meanwhile, Walnut Hills became the local destination for civil rights. The Frederick Douglass School offered education, social services, and mutual aid. Both children and adults were educated at Douglass, which would have been perfect for a child/adult in a child’s body like Claudia.

Also during Louis and Claudia’s time, the Cincinnati chapter of the NAACP was founded in 1915, with activist, author, musician, and editor Wendell P. Dabney as its first president. Louis had published his articles in The Union newspaper.

---

Connections to New Orleans

Embed from Getty Images
Louis and Claudia were proud Creole New Orleanians (with a strong southern accent), so no matter how much they knew about Cincinnati, the truth about their real hometown would have come out anyway. That said, there are some 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 drank blood? After living and writing in Cincinnati from 1869 to 1877, he decided to move to New Orleans. Some of his most prominent works were written in NOLA, including The Creole kitchen And Chita: Memories of the Last Island. He also wrote extensively about voodoo, including obituaries for community leaders Marie Laveau and Doctor John Montanet.

Just as the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi, a man walked across the water from Cincinnati to New Orleans in 1907. According to the Waterways MagazineInventor Charles Oldrieve was challenged to walk down the river in special water shoes he had invented for $1,500. If he could travel from Cincinnati to New Orleans in 40 days, he would receive the equivalent of $53,000 in today’s dollars. He succeeded just in time, leaving Cincinnati on January 1 and arriving in NOLA on February 9.

The most obvious Louisiana connection that Cincinnatians will be familiar with comes through the Cincinnati Bengals. The unstoppable duo of quarterback Joe Burrow and wide receiver Ja’Marr Chase were equally powerful during their time at Louisiana State, where they won the 2019 NCAA College Football Championship. Burrow and Chase remain equally beloved both here and in Louisiana, Chase in particular, as 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 south, he can jump on the big NOLA Bengals bandwagon.

---

To give Interview with the vampire watch on AMC, AMC+ or Netflix. You won’t regret it!