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

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 Sebastiaan, 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 Sebastiaan] 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.]