As her son, the author Christopher Rice, told KQED, the men were decked in 18th-century waistcoats, their long hair tied off in a ribbon. They were, in short, dressed as the main characters of Rice\u2019s said shaky debut novel: Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As the men posed for pictures with a flustered Rice, the author saw personally, for the first time, that the novel Christopher said she\u2019d regarded as \u201cthis black spot on her career\u201d was finally finding its home: with the queer community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/AnneRiceGetty2-2a1f88ce.jpg\")
Authors Christopher Rice (left) and Anne Rice sign copies of their books \u201cThe Heavens Rise\u201d and \u201cThe Wolves Of Midwinter,\u201d respectively, at Barnes & Noble bookstore at The Grove on Nov. 2, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. \u00a0(Amanda Edwards\/WireImage via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
\u201cOver time this underground audience discovered the book, discovered how transgressive it was, how rule-breaking it was,\u201d Christopher said. \u201cAnd all of that really did happen in San Francisco.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d marks its 50th anniversary this year, and Christopher details this very anecdote<\/a> in his afterword to a new semicentennial reissue<\/a> of the novel by Penguin Random House. (His behind-the-scenes nugget that didn\u2019t make the final print edition: how Rice and his aunt \u201cjust went bananas over how attractive these guys were.\u201d)<\/p>\n The novel chronicles the tumultuous life and relationship between Louis and the man who turned both him and their companion Claudia into vampires: Lestat.\u00a0And despite initial mixed reviews, the book and its subsequent sequels making up the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d series have, over the decades, become a bona fide gothic classic \u2014 further popularizing the idea of the vampire as a tortured protagonist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rice also wrote the screenplay for the 1994 film adaptation of \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d starring Brad Pitt, a young Kirsten Dunst and, most notoriously, Tom Cruise<\/a>. Then, in the 2020s, the series was introduced to a new generation of fans through the television show adaptation on AMC.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that the story\u2019s pivotal framing device \u2014 the titular interview between Louis and a young journalist \u2014 takes place in a San Francisco Victorian on Divisadero Street, New Orleans has understandably pulled rank as the \u201chome\u201d of \u201cInterview with the Vampire.\u201d Not only is the Louisiana city a recurring setting in the books, but it\u2019s also where Rice herself was born and raised and where, after finally finding her success as a writer, she lived in a gorgeous historic home<\/a> for over a decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s also where she rests in a family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery, where her memorial<\/a>, attended by over a thousand people<\/a>, was held. And New Orleans has now become a central gathering point for fervent Rice fans, where they regularly hold a Vampire\u2019s Ball<\/a>.<\/p>\n But according to Christopher, his mother\u2019s most famous series of novels \u201cdon\u2019t just have a San Francisco connection.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThey have a San Francisco foundation.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\u2018Rebellion against that darkness\u2019\n<\/p>\n Rice first lived here as a University of San Francisco student, and moved back to the city in the early 60s with Stan, the high-school sweetheart who\u2019d become her husband. They were both in their early twenties<\/a>, and they were in the midst of the Beat Generation and the Summer of Love.\u00a0<\/p>\n But even though the Rices were more observers than participants \u2014 \u201cin the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 60s, I was typing away while everybody around me was dropping acid and smoking grass,\u201d Rice told The New York Times<\/a> in 1988 \u2014 the ethos of the city is firmly reflected in the \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d series.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI like to say the young men who probably inspired Louis and Lestat were people she saw on the streets of the Haight-Ashbury or the Castro District,\u201d Christopher said.<\/p>\n The hints of the idea of \u201cletting your freak flag fly,\u201d Christopher said, are there from the first book. But it really crescendos in the second book of the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d series, 1985\u2019s \u201cThe Vampire Lestat,\u201d in which the raucous Lestat holds an earth-shattering rock concert (for vampires!) in none other than Daly City\u2019s own Cow Palace.<\/p>\n In contrast to the Bay Area, New Orleans is Rice\u2019s setting for \u201cthe old vampire world,\u201d Christopher said. But \u201cwhen on the contemporary stage, [Lestat] says, \u2018Vampires should come out, come out wherever you are, and be counted among all the great diversity of the human world.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the city by the Bay, baby,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The Rice family lived around the Bay Area for over two decades. \u201cIn California, almost all of us have an acquired lifestyle: We came here to have it,\u201d she said in a 2014 interview with The California Sunday Magazine<\/a>. \u201cTo be a writer, to be a bohemian, to put our art and our liberal ideas before, say, pleasing our cousins.\u201d<\/p>\n After giving birth to Christopher in Berkeley, the Rices moved back across the bay into a Castro District home at 3887 17th Street \u2014 a place Christopher said he \u201cloved growing up.\u201d<\/p>\n A key setting from \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d is just a 30-minute walk from the house: The Victorian home on 503 Divisadero Street, where Rice set the titular interview. Rice said in 2011<\/a> that she came across the house \u2014 which is now painted a deep, dark blue \u2014 when her professor husband was being interviewed for a radio show nearby.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s where I got the idea of a boy-interviewer,\u201d she said. \u201cLittle things like that spark short stories, novels.\u201d<\/p>\n But tragedy in the city was in full force: In the Castro, Christopher said, the Rice family was \u201cliving at ground zero\u201d during the HIV\/AIDS crisis. Neighbors were dying. There were lines out of pharmacies, he said, and shuttered storefronts with signs reading \u201cClosed due to illness.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI do believe that, in some part, the rock star energy of The Vampire Lestat was about a rebellion against that darkness,\u201d Christopher said. \u201cIt was this attempt to have queerness rise up and put on a leather jacket and sing to the masses, to push back all the death.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The family was still suffering with a personal loss of their own, too. In 1972, the couple\u2019s daughter Michele had died of leukemia at the age of 5 \u2014 before Christopher was born.<\/p>\n Christopher said he learned about Michele by accident in school. Over the course of his life, he got to learn about his sister from his parents, about her \u201cotherworldly endurance\u201d and\u00a0her \u201czen brilliance.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think it was easy for them to be living at the ground zero of another epidemic that was about the blood,\u201d Christopher said. \u201cIt was incredibly influential on [Rice].\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In the years after Michele\u2019s death, Rice returned to an old short story and expanded it in just five weeks into what became \u201cInterview with the Vampire,\u201d written in her North Berkeley garden apartment.<\/a> This version further developed the character of a surrogate daughter for Lestat and Louis, Claudia \u2014 turned into a vampire at age five and forever a child.<\/p>\n \u201dI never noticed when I was writing,\u201d Rice said in The New York Times interview. \u201dIt may be hard to believe, but I didn\u2019t connect Claudia with my daughter at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\u2018The vampire is an outsider\u2019\n<\/p>\n \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d represented a \u201cparadigm shift in how we look at monsters in ourselves,\u201d said author Eric Shaw Quinn, Rice\u2019s friend who helps oversee the estate with Christopher. \u201cAnd our own persecution of ourselves, and of monsters in our culture.<\/p>\n \u201cI was there at the beginning of Interview with a Vampire, and it was such an inspirational moment in my life,\u201d Quinn said. \u201cWe\u2019re all inspired by the San Francisco philosophy of it \u2014 or the Anne philosophy of it.<\/p>\n \u201cBeing you is exactly what you should do; you are exactly as you should be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe vampire is an outsider,\u201d Rice herself told the Daily Beast in 2011<\/a>. \u201cHe\u2019s the perfect metaphor for those things.\u201d And Rice\u2019s exploration of the outsider figure has resonated with its queer fanbase over half a century.<\/p>\n While the book may have initially been received as a gay allegory, it is now widely understood to be \u201ca full-on queer narrative,\u201d Christopher said.<\/p>\n The audience that made the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d into what Christopher called \u201cunderground hits\u201d was \u201clargely made up of queer people,\u201d he said. \u201cThey were the people who saw the passionate, romantic connection between Louis and Lestat and their determination to raise a child.\u201d<\/p>\n This narrative heavily imprinted on many fans at an early age. Like Grey Starr of Oakland, who first encountered Rice\u2019s work after watching the 1994 film adaptation when she was young.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always been queer, so I could always suss that out as a kid,\u201d Starr said. \u201cI read the books when I was way too young \u2026 I used to go to school wearing a shirt that said, \u2018Red Beans, Anne Rice.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe sensuality of that book really got me at a young age, because this was right around the time that I\u2019m hitting puberty, I\u2019m discovering kind of my own sexuality,\u201d San Francisco drag performer Piranha Psychotronica said.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a kid visiting the city, Psychotronica remembered being excited to pass Castro Street, because the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d series featured a vampire bar \u2014 called Dracula\u2019s Daughter \u2014 in the area. \u201cNot realizing really at that time that it\u2019s also where all the gays were and where I eventually would be,\u201d she said with a laugh.<\/p>\n The series also explored gender identity. Rice herself told an interviewer in a 2016 interview<\/a> that it was \u201cvery hard for me to remember that I have a gender.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of surreal that this media has essentially shaped our lives in such an amazing way,\u201d Starr said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\u2018A home to androgynous pansexual ancient vampires\u2019\n<\/p>\n Psychotronica is just one of the acts in Starr\u2019s forthcoming \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d-themed drag show in Oakland, right before Halloween. (Starr hosted past themed drag nights as Lumpia Anne Rice.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Another of the performers slated for that night is Sacramento\u2019s Alexa Gerrity \u2014 a cosplaying burlesque act who\u2019ll be performing as Louis.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gerrity counts herself as a newer fan of the \u201cVampire Chronicles\u201d\u2019 thanks to her best friend Desrea Sabo \u2014 a Rice fan who described cutting their own bangs as a kid \u201cbecause I thought they would grow back like Claudia\u2019s<\/a>\u201d \u2014 introducing them to the AMC television series.<\/p>\n What inspired Gerrity about the series was a major change it makes from the books in the casting of Louis and Claudia, portrayed variously by Black actors Jacob Anderson, Delainey Hayles and Bailey Bass. Along with a shift in time period and a more overt portrayal of sexuality, the show reimagined Louis not as the white plantation owner of the books but as a Black brothel owner in 1900s New Orleans.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAs a Black woman, it just really hit a lot harder \u2026\u00a0him coming to terms with who he is as a person,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe queer experience, trying to see how he feels coming to terms with his sexuality \u2026 those are things that I can relate to growing up as a Black woman who grew up in the South as well and coming out to my family, to my friends,\u201d Gerrity said.<\/p>\n \u201cI think [Rice] loving it so much was one of the things that really made me fall in love with the city. Now I can\u2019t imagine living anywhere else,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n \nVampire-themed gatherings and events in the Bay Area in October\n<\/p>\n To mark \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d\u2019s 50th anniversary, we\u2019ve compiled a list of vampiric affairs across the Bay Area, including elegant masquerades, fashion shows, raves and drag.<\/p>\n \nEarth Gala\u2019s Vampire Ball at Verdi Club\n<\/p>\n On Friday, Oct. 9, at the Verdi Club in San Francisco, there will be a vampire ball and fashion walkway<\/a> centered on \u201ceco-couture,\u201d where the winner can receive a $1000 cash prize. The gala is serving as a fundraiser for the Amazon rainforest.\u00a0<\/p>\n General admission <\/a>costs around $108, but late entry after 10 p.m. is around $40.<\/p>\n \nCAVE RAVE: CLAWZ \u2013 VAMPIRE RAVE at The Foundry\n<\/p>\n This rave on Friday, Oct. 9 at The Foundry in San Francisco starts at 10 p.m. Tickets can be found online<\/a> and are around $20.<\/p>\n \nInternational Vampire Fest at The Balboa Theater\n<\/p>\n On Saturday, Oct. 17 at The Balboa Theater in San Francisco, there\u2019ll be a series of vampiric movies playing all day long from 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Individual tickets <\/a>are around $15. A full day pass is $30.\u00a0<\/p>\n Particularly exciting for this reporter: two of her favorite movies of all time are part of the international lineup: Sweden\u2019s \u201cLet the Right One In\u201d (2008) and Iran\u2019s \u201cA Girl Walks Home Alone at Night\u201d (2014).<\/p>\n And if you aren\u2019t able to make it that day, the following day in Richmond there\u2019s a free screening of \u201cFright Night\u201d(1985) in 16 mm<\/a> at The Planetarium venue.<\/p>\n \nVampire\u2019s Ball at SP2 Communal Bar\n<\/p>\n On Saturday, Oct. 17 at SP2 Communal Bar in San Jos\u00e9, there\u2019s a vampire\u2019s ball with a best-dressed contest. It is free to enter before 10:30 p.m. and $12.51 afterward<\/a>.<\/p>\n \nTh\u00e9\u00e2tre des Vampires Drag Show at The Thee Stork Club\n<\/p>\n On Thursday, Oct. 29 at Thee Stork Club in Oakland, there\u2019s an \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d-themed drag show featuring music from the television show\u2019s third season<\/a>, \u201cThe Vampire Lestat,\u201d by Pretty Frankenstein. Tickets are available online for $12 and at the door for $15<\/a>.<\/p>\n \nHelena\u2019s Masquerade at QBar\n<\/p>\n Not quite vampire-themed but very important for any emo kid, the broken, the beaten and the damned<\/a>: On Thursday,\u00a0Oct. 29 at San Francisco\u2019s QBar, you\u2019ll find a Hot Topic-filled dance night of My Chemical Romance, Evanescence and Paramore. Tickets<\/a> range from around $7 to $14.<\/p>\n \nThe Halloween Vampire Tour of San Francisco\n<\/p>\n On Saturday, Oct. 31 in San Francisco, a six-stop tour with Mina Harker<\/a> throughout the Nob Hill Neighborhood. Tickets<\/a> are around $40.<\/p>\n \n\u201cDracula Kiss\u201d at Coqueta\n<\/p>\n On Oct. 31 at Coqueta in San Francisco, there\u2019s an immersive production of the play \u201cDracula Kiss.\u201d Tickets<\/a> are $44.52.<\/p>\n \nThe Black Cat Hotel at The Palace Theater\u00a0\n<\/p>\n This immersive theatrical experience runs through Halloween at the Palace Theater in San Francisco. Reservations <\/a>start at $39. (Keep in mind, this is not a real hotel!)<\/p>\n \n\u201cDracula\u201d at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts\n<\/p>\n Throughout October, the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts presents a stage production of Dracula. Tickets start around $44<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n \nLe Bal Des Vampires at Alameda Elks Lodge\n<\/p>\n On Saturday, Nov. 7 at the Alameda Elks Lodge<\/a>, there\u2019s a vampire affair in an elegant ballroom featuring music throughout the centuries: 18th-century Baroque contredanses, 19th-century Victorian rotary and Viennese waltzes, 20th-century tangos, blues and rock and roll. Tickets <\/a>are around $50.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/260929-annericesf-00064_TV_qed-c1495c2d.JPG\")
The 50th Anniversary Edition of the Anne Rice novel, \u201cInterview with the Vampire\u201d in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2026.\u00a0(T\u00e2m V\u0169\/KQED)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/260929-annericesf-00030_TVA_qed-060d71af.JPG\")
A Victorian home located on 503 Divisadero St., which inspired Anne Rice\u2019s novel, \u201cInterview with the Vampire,\u201d in San Francisco on Sept. 29, 2026.\u00a0(T\u00e2m V\u0169\/KQED)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/GettyImages-502548923-a900e677.jpg\")
Anne Rice on Aug. 15, 1995.\u00a0(Bernard Weil\/Toronto Star via Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/InterviewVampireGetty-11ba3b20.jpg\")
Kirsten Dunst in a scene from the film \u201cInterview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles,\u201d 1994. \u00a0(Warner Brothers\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/AnneRiceGetty3-c6d0f1da.jpg\")
(L-R): Mark Johnson, Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, Delainey Hayles, Assad Zaman and Eric Bogosian seen onstage at the AMC Networks media presentation of Anne Rice\u2019s \u201cInterview With the Vampire\u201d during the 2024 TCA Winter Press Tour at The Langham Huntington, Pasadena on Feb. 6, 2024, in Pasadena, California. \u00a0(JC Olivera\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n