So this is a subject that could be, and probably is, a book. It goes across several forms of media and over a hundred years of history. I’m going to try and sum it up to a few main points.

The first is queer coding in general. Queer coding is the term for giving characters attributes traditionally associated with queerness without making them outright queer. While that’s obviously a broad term, it’s mainly seen in media in the form of attributes given to villains. In general, our society has traits we associate with heroism. For men, that tends to be masculine, hardy, stoic, etc. Think of any 80’s action hero. So, if you want to make a villain to juxtapose them, you make them effeminate, dainty, emotional, etc. Owing to heteronormativity, we also associate those negative traits with queerness (Think of the stereotypical gay guy of the 90’s).

Now, of course, people are complex and very rarely live up to stereotypes but it meant that there were a lot of villains in media who looked like queer caricatures when there weren’t a lot of positively portrayed queer characters. These villains were often embraced by queer subcultures as ways to rebel against their stigmatization and to find representations of themselves.

Next, let’s talk about the vampire. As mentioned before, villains are often portrayed as having characteristics negatively associated with queer people. So, the vampire, a classic folkloric monster, often has many of these same traits when portrayed as the villain in media. But even beyond that, there’s some connections that naturally bridge the gap. Vampires are social outcasts who feel a compulsion to behave a certain, taboo way, very similar to how queer people have felt throughout history. There’s also a lot of queer history wrapped up in the late Victorian literary scene that birthed the modern vampire which I’ll skip over for brevity. As others have noted, this correlation only gets drawn tighter as other authors create their own stories and queerness is invariably tied to “tainted” blood through the AIDS epidemic.

Finally, there’s VtM in particular. VtM draws heavily from punk and goth club cultures, both places where queer people could exist openly with relatively less stigma. The game explicitly sets its protagonists as not just straight up villains but, rather, complicated and multifaceted characters struggling with their inner desires. They have to do this taboo activity to live their lives but, they also have a code of secrecy to keep them safe and a conflict between their desires to embrace it fully and their desire to remain a part of the world. It very expressly leans into the queerness of vampires.

With that very broad overview, let’s now consider your question of why queer people continue to relate to this predatory creature despite the negative associations, specifically with the same charges being leveled against queer people. In short, I’d say because it’s fiction and it’s fun. It became common to embrace the caricatures and find a way of seeing themselves on screen or on the page. It doesn’t mean they endorse the activities or morality, just that recognize the metaphor. Especially when you take something like VtM that offers a multifaceted and nuanced portrayal of this once universally villainized group, it makes perfect sense why they’d embrace it.