Interview With "The Lair"'s Lead Vamp, Peter Stickles

AE: How's it been straddling gay film and horror, two genres that rarely intersect?
PS: Well, I'm a genuine fan of horror since I was little. I used to hide Fangorias under my bed like Playboys. I've always been drawn to them for whatever reason, so when I moved to New York to become an actor, that was a genre I really wanted to focus on.

But … when Shortbus came out, I'd always wanted to do a movie involving sexual situations and graphic sex and using sex as a language. I'd always wanted to do a sex movie, as well. Because it sort of stems from my — not horror, but from a "scary place." What sex can kind of be, especially when you're young.

As far as trying to straddle both worlds, I'm generally interested in both, and it hasn't been difficult, because I've been able to kind of merge the two. They seem to be blending into each other, in a way.

AE: I've interviewed a lot of gay horror filmmakers, and many say it's harder to come out as a horror fan than a gay person.
PS: I remember my father screaming at me when I was little, saying, "I don't want you wasting your money on that!" And then just a few years ago bringing a Fangoria to him because I was actually in it, saying, "Here, Dad, it was worth it!" Of course he didn't remember saying it to me.

AE: With Dante's Cove and now The Lair, there seems to be a response from gay viewers to erotic horror.
PS: The gay community really responds to this genre, you know — Supernatural, Buffy, vampires, sex. In a way, it's sort of like drag queens and a lot of gay clowns and fetishes, black parties and white parties, this dressing up and pretending you're someone else.

There's this fantasy world that people really respond to, and then add sex to it and naked men, and it can sort of become hilarious. The gay community has an amazing sense of humor, and they can find the humor in all kinds of things, especially when you're dressing up and pretending to be other people.

It would be one thing to kind of do a regular soap opera with chiseled hunks making out and having sex, which is great. But when you turn it and make them vampires and throw makeup on them and crazy outfits, of course the gay community will respond to that because it's hilarious and it's campy and it's fun.

AE: So the campiness of the show is self-aware?
PS: Oh, yeah. And again, it was hard to even take a second and breathe and talk about it because it was such a crazed production and we had to do it so quickly. We hardly had time to meet each other. I mean, I met Dylan Vox, who played Colin, you know, two minutes before our sex scene.

So there was always a bit of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of thing, where we were like, "Can you believe we're saying these words and playing these scenes," and it's hilarious. And of course there was lunch where we would break and talk about things, but there was never a sort of huge amount of seriousness.

There was, of course, a great amount of seriousness in terms of work and production, but we all took a sort of tongue-in-cheek approach. How can't you, when you say "a soft-core gay vampire series"? Come on!

AE: It's funny that you have so much sex on The Lair because rather oddly, your scene in Shortbus isn't explicit.
PS: It was supposed to be. I signed up for it and I was hired for it. I mean, John wouldn't have hired me if I wasn't willing to do it. But on the shooting day where I had my graphic sex scene, John went aside with the producer and kind of came back and said, "You know, we're not going to shoot this explicitly," for whatever reason. But I think at that point in the film, near the end, if you saw me banging away at this guy it would have been very awkward, and it wasn't necessary. So that very day, you know, minutes before my close-up, he decided he wasn't going to shoot it graphic.