Seductress Extraordinaire 
Terry Castle
- ‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert Schanke
- Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke
You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi films, I evolved such a baleful Dracula-fear that I began sleeping every night with one arm slung backwards over my neck. This neurotic and slightly awkward posture – still habitual, I’m embarrassed to say – was meant to be prophylactic: even while snoozing, I figured, I’d be ready to fend off any emissaries from the undead who tried to bite me.
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Terry Castle lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford. She is the editor of The Literature of Lesbianism, and the author of Boss Ladies, Watch Out!, a book of essays, many from the LRB. She has a blog at terry-castle-blog.blogspot.com
Other articles by this contributor:
Always the Bridesmaid · Sappho
Travels with My Mom · Terry Castle in Santa Fe
Yes you, sweetheart · A Garland for Colette
Husbands and Wives · Claude & Marcel, Gertrude & Alice
If everybody had a wadley · The Queen of Whale Cay: The Eccentric Story of ‘Joe’ Carstairs, Fastest Woman on Water by Kate Summerscale
Pipe down back there! · The Willa Cather Wars
Desperately Seeking Susan · Terry Castle remembers Susan Sontag
Terror on the Vineyard · Boss Ladies, Watch Out!
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