So this vampire story--this is a movie? If so, which? If not, is it a story? A dream?

It is a description of Neil Jordan's Byzantium, it is a beautiful film, and I think everyone should see it. I don't own it on DVD, but want to. I saw it at the Brattle last fall with rushthatspeaks as the first half of the most thought-provoking double feature about gender and horror I've ever seen.

What sort of erasure does Mary Gentle do?

See very lengthy reply to ashlyme above. I knew I had problems with Ilario when I had started typing, but I had not fully articulated them to myself, and I got sadder the more I wrote. I like so many things about the world of Gentle's First History, including the fact that the conceit exists at all. I want more novels with non-binary protagonists and their lovers and their wholly supportive cis family members (Ilario's mother tries to kill her child for being a social embarrassment and a point of political vulnerability, but Ilario's father, the soldier Honorius, is thrilled to meet his child, complicated gender and legal status notwithstanding, and the only thing he ever gets wrong over the course of the novel is an understandable confusion of pronouns—Ilario uses both, based on however they are presenting at the time—which at least yields the glorious farcical moment in which Honorius, misapprehending Rekhmire''s relationship with Ilario and the cause of Ilario's physical condition, bellows across the lagoon of Venice: "How dare you get my son PREGNANT!"). I just want more novels with non-binary protagonists and their non-binary lovers and their wholly supportive cis family members that does not presume that being cis female is still this awful unredeemable fucked-up thing while being cis male is, you know, actually kind of okay.