Cassandra Peterson, the actress behind the sultry, gothic icon “Elvira,” has revealed that she lost 11,000 “horny old men” when she revealed she’s been dating her assistant, Teresa Wierson, for two decades. Cassandra originally broke the news in her memoir, Yours Cruelly, Elvira.
She spoke about the mass-unfollowing on the podcast Behind the Velvet Robe with David Yontef. “I knew that there were going to be some horny old men out there who were just not going to like the fact that they didn’t have a chance with me anymore,” she laughed. “And I hate to tell them they already didn’t have a chance with me anyway.”
Cassandra first played Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, when the character began hosting weekend horror show Fright Night in 1981. Like with any other acting gig, the real person behind the character is never the same as who appears on stage or screen. Performance isn’t reality. Straight men felt cheated, however, when they assumed Cassandra was Elvira. Or, rather, she wasn’t what they wanted her to be.
It just goes to show how women operate as sexual fantasies in the minds of these “horny old men.” For them to be so deluded into thinking they ever had a chance with Cassandra just reveals how even harmful straight male sexual fantasies are never just imaginary: there’s always the hope they’ll be able to actualize them. Cassandra’s partner Teresa has had to play bodyguard, as well as being Cassandra’s assistant, when such men have advanced on her in real life.
The trash took itself out. “It’s funny,” she mused, “One of the things that happened was on my social media, I won’t say which platform. In one day, the day after the book came out, I lost 11,000 people who just said, ‘Elvira, you lied to me. I don’t respect you anymore. Goodbye.’ But I got 60,000 new followers the same day. It was funny. I know it was mostly straight older guys who just felt lied to, you know, I don’t know. So you can’t please everybody!”
Cassandra is less concerned with her straight male fanbase than she is her gay fanbase, who have rallied around her despite her fear we wouldn’t. “Honestly, I worried more about my gay fan base,” she said. “Because I hope they embraced it, but I was feeling like, ‘what if they think I’m a big fat hypocrite and I was lying to them’.”
She also elaborated on how she felt when she realised she was so attracted to another woman. “I think I was even more surprised. What the hell was I doing?,” she said. “I’d never been interested in women as anything other than friends. I felt so confused. This just wasn’t me! I was stunned that I’d been friends with her for so many years and never noticed our chemistry. I soon discovered that we connected sexually in a way I’d never experienced. Nobody was ready for that. And apparently we kept it a pretty damn good secret because nobody knew — and everybody was surprised.”
It seems that nobody was more surprised than her horny male fans, who see Cassandra’s real sexual orientation as some form of trickery instead of the performative trickery behind her drag-inspired look while playing Elvira. Who’s surprised?
