"We All Become Non-Vampires": Identity, Modernity, and Gamer Chicks In Corsets

Joseph Laycock is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School who is currently working toward his doctorate at BU. He recently published a book called Vampires Today: The Truth About Modern Vampirism . (Pro tip: they do not sparkle.) Bostonist: What should we know about vampires? Joe Laycock: There is previous scholarship about vampires, but it’s mostly been done by “occult crime” specialists, and it’s been done to present vampires as totally other. You can do that, and you can even make money hiring yourself out to law enforcement—they’re actually paid tax dollars to set up little fake altars and teach about what your son is doing if he plays White Wolf games, and these are the signs that your kids will kill you in your sleep. But what I’m trying to do with this book is say that, if we set all that aside for a second, there’s a lot going on here with modernity. Vampires can tell us a lot about the state of modernity. Modernity’s been a gradual shift from an identity that is ascribed to one that is achieved. If you were to go to a medieval village and look at the peasants, they’re all the same religion; they’re all going to live in the same town their whole life; they don’t have to worry: are my talents going to waste, being a peasant? Nowadays, you have to discover a career; if you stay in the same town where you grew up, that’s considered a failure; if you stay in the church that your family’s from, that’s considered an inauthentic form of spirituality. There used to not be concepts or categories to describe different sexual orientations. So I see vampires as the next logical step… This is the first time in human history you’ve been able to say, maybe I’m not ontologically the same as everybody else. Bostonist: Do you expect that vampires will read your book? Laycock: Yes. Vampires are reading my book. Vampires are doing more than anybody else to promote the book. They’re happy that somebody is actually doing this in a way that’s not sensationalistic. I’ve gotten complaints that Amazon can’t get the book out fast enough. Bostonist: How do colleagues and faculty at BU feel about your research subjects being a major market for your work? Not every Catholic grandma runs out to buy Robert Orsi ’s books. Laycock: I don’t think the verdict is in on that yet. A lot of the faculty at BU have been really, really supportive of this… I told them, MTV contacted me, should I do this? And some of them were like, hell yeah you should go on MTV! Huston Smith didn’t know anything about religion, [but] he was on TV. My advisor said, basically, you need to watch it with this shit, there is a risk in having done a bunch of popular stuff, that could hurt in the job market. But there is no job market for religion professors. So I kind of don’t care. I’ve adopted almost a Marxist view about academia: once we realize that there are no tenure track jobs—that we’re doing this for nothing—then we’re finally free. We can start actually figuring out what our next move is. None of us are going to get tenure, so we might as well do what we want. Bostonist: What was the concept of the MTV show? Laycock: They said they wanted to do a show where they have an expert who goes around the country and interviews different vampires. So they needed an expert that was (a) young, and (b) not a vampire. [The woman in charge of the show, having been referred to Mr. Laycock through multiple vampire sources] contacts me, and she’s like, how old are you? And are you a vampire? This is a totally serious question, and I don’t get the job if I say, yes, I’m a vampire. That’s another point I’m making: once the category is out there, we all become non-vampires. We used to not have to think of ourselves as non-vampires. But now, if I hadn’t been a non-vampire, I couldn’t have gotten that job. There used to be no concept of homosexuality. If you’re a man, you’re supposed to have sex with women; if you have sex with a man, then you’ve sinned. And if you have sex with lots and lots of men, then you’re a sinner. But you’re not “gay.” You’re not different from other people, you’re just bad. Now we have this category of “gay,” and all of us start thinking of ourselves as “straight,” whereas before there was no concept of “straight.” Bostonist: And now we have a concept of “vampire” instead of just “people who happen to drink a lot of blood”? Laycock: Well, if you drink blood that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a vampire. There are blood fetishists. This is something I talk about in the book: there people who used to describe themselves as vampires and now describe themselves as blood fetishists. And I’ve seen symbiotic relations form between blood fetishists and vampires. Some of my contacts have said, it’s not sexual for me, I don’t find anything sexual about this, I have to do this to maintain my health but if I happen to meet a guy who just really gets off on me cutting him and drinking his blood—it’s a symbiotic relationship. For him it’s sexual, and for the vampire it’s a health issue. Bostonist: When we were at Hampshire College, you were King of the Gamers. Does it help at all, when doing your research, to have been part of a misunderstood niche yourself? Laycock: Absolutely. In high school, I was in the Camarilla. I would go on weekends and play Vampire: The Masquerade with college kids, and that really helped because a lot of this actually comes directly from White Wolf live action games, especially the New York vampire scene. I talk about it in the book: the New York vampire scene is extremely baroque. They have courts of vampires and titles and stuff like that. And it all comes directly from White Wolf. Father Sebastian, who was a fangsmith and helped organize the New York scene and now lives in Paris—I was talking to him long-distance, [he was in] Paris and he

said he was running these games and he was like, yeah, all these really hot chicks would come. And I think this [that really hot chicks would come] was something that even the Hampshire gamers would notice. They would go to LARPs at Umass, and be like, there’s a lot of female gamers at these LARPs. They don’t play the tabletop games, but the excuse to run around in a leather corset will bring them out. [Father Sebastian] was like, basically I wanted to maintain a way to keep that atmosphere going, but to get rid of all the nerds, get rid of all the power gamers. And he eventually succeeded in doing that, and created this culture in New York. Vampire culture is not like that anywhere else in the world. In Atlanta, it’s the Bible Belt, so it’s very much on the down low. In Los Angeles, no one cares if you’re a vampire; people are very worried about power-tripping and stuff like that. But in New York you really have hierarchy and courts and who-is-your-sire. There’s a documentary you can see with one of these courts, and there’s a herald at the door, and as you walk in, he announces your name and who your sire is, your title and so forth. Bostonist: Geographically, where are most of the vampires? Where is the community concentrated? Laycock: I started this project because of a global survey by that group in Atlanta. They found vampires in every state except the Dakotas and Alaska. And there probably are vampires in the Dakotas; they probably don’t have internet access. A.B.D. McHarvardpants: That’s werewolf territory. Laycock: That’s werewolf territory. We’ll talk about the werewolves later. There were big concentrations [of vampires] in New York, in California, in Ohio—that’s partially because Michelle Belanger is out there in Ohio, and has drawn people to her—and in Georgia, and also Florida, Florida had a lot too. New Orleans used to, I think, have a pretty big vampire culture, and then Katrina kind of destroyed that. First Atlanta got a reputation for being a cool city to be gay in. They had a gay mayor when I was living there. You’ll see rainbow flags and stuff like that, and when you leave Atlanta you’ll see Confederate flags, and you’ll stop and take the rainbow sticker off your car… Gays started moving [to Atlanta], gay professionals. The same thing happened with vampires. Word got out that Atlanta was a cool city to be a vampire in. Various vampires began moving there. And there was some theory floating around, about ley lines. Katrina had shifted the ley lines from New Orleans over to Atlanta, so that all of the mystical energy of New Orleans was now in Atlanta. [The survey] found a lot of vampires in Canada. They found a lot in Australia, a lot in the UK, a fair number in France, some in Germany. And then there were some random ones: Malaysia, Jordan. Bostonist: So what’s the vampire scene like in Boston ? Laycock: Pretty dead, from what I’ve heard. Bostonist: You mean that not as a pun. Laycock: Yes. My contacts in Atlanta only knew of one vampire in Boston, and he was here because he was sick of the politics of New York. So he said, I want to move to another east coast city, where there’s no vampires. Bostonist: So he’s like everyone else who moved here from New York? Laycock: Yeah, basically. Bostonist: As you’re probably aware, there was a vampire scare at Boston Latin . Laycock: I don’t know a whole lot about that. What it sounded like was that there was, basically, a goth girl at the school, and that this all emerged out of conflicting stories: that there was a student drinking blood, or that there were Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires living underneath the school. What surprised me was that the police came out. If I were a kid, I would not believe that there were vampires unless the police came out and told me there were no vampires. I saw that the Boston Police had a Twitter account—did you see it, with the zombies? Bostonist: Yes! The BPD will tell you if the zombies attack. Laycock: So apparently the Boston Police will respond to all supernatural threats. It’s not like a horror movie, where the police always deny there being anything supernatural. Bostonist: I have to ask: how has Twilight been received by the Vampire-American community? Laycock: I don’t think they really care. When somebody told me that the vampires in Twilight sparkle in the sunlight, I didn’t believe them. I thought, that is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Bostonist: Did you read it, or watch it? Laycock: I finally watched it last night. I thought it was the most boring vampire movie I’ve ever seen. The only thing that was good was—I watched it with Swedish subtitles. The word for “stop” in Swedish is “sluta.” So every time the vampires start to get hot and heavy, they’re like, “Sluta! Sluta!” One consequence [of the Twilight franchise] has been—I think this happens with all subcultures, like punk rock and things like that, there’s a real split between the older vampires, the ones that are in their twenties and early thirties and older, versus Twilight kids. [Older vampires] have produced all these articles that are on the internet—”If you think you’re a vampire, read this article,”—[ Twilight kids] don’t do that, they just start emailing them asking the same questions over and over again. There’s transcripts of leaders in the vampire community saying, What are we going to do about these Twilight kids? And one of them started making YouTube clips, because maybe they’ll watch a YouTube clip instead of reading an article. Michelle Belanger was on Coast to Coast AM recently and she said, I do not sparkle in the sunlight. She felt that was necessary to say. Bostonist: So there are vampires, and there are non-vampires, and there are non- Twilight vampires. Laycock: Exactly. [Full disclosure: This Bostonist and Joe Laycock went to the same college, and sat at different tables in the geekiest room in the dining commons.]

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"We All Become Non-Vampires": Identity, Modernity, and Gamer Chicks In Corsets