Vampire Community Research: Social History and Narrative Identity Themes Within Self-Identified Vampires
This article has originally been published on Black Rose Society's website: https://blackrosesociety.sauromatos.com/vampire-community-research-social-functioning-and-narrative-identity-themes-within-self-identified-vampires/
We interviewed our very own Luna Luv about her ongoing research project on the narrative themes in identity development and social history of people within the Vampire Community.
In providing you with a closer look into some of the goals, challenges and other details pertaining to this research effort, it is our hope you will be motivated to be part of the survey and tell your friends.
Black Rose Society is assisting Vampire Community Researcher Luna Luv with hosting a survey that hopes to identify trends in the social history and identity formation of self-identified vampires.
The results of this independent study will be drafted up into an article/paper titled “Social Functioning and Narrative Identity Themes Within Self-Identified Vampires,” which will be published and distributed exclusively within the vampire community, including the Black Rose Society’s website.
You are invited to share the link to this survey between your friends within the community. We are looking for responses from all corners of the Online Vampire Community
Our purpose:
Self-identified vampires, that is, people who choose to identify themselves as a vampire or as possessing vampiric traits, often come from vastly different philosophical and ideological backgrounds. This survey asks for historical accounts from individuals who identify as vampires (or vampire-adjacent, i.e. medsangs, vampirekin, etc.) which pertain to both their identity and social development. Responses, while anonymous, will assist us in finding trends in social history and identity narrative development that may exist between identity types, or further serve to individuate them.
This survey will take approximately 10-20 minutes to complete. Responses cannot be saved to come back to later, so please set aside appropriate time for yourself to complete the survey.
Please provide as much or as little information as you are comfortable.
NOTE: SIGNING INTO A GOOGLE ACCOUNT IS REQUIRED TO PREVENT APPLICANTS FROM FILLING OUT THE SURVEY MULTIPLE TIMES. NO ACCOUNT DATA IS STORED OR RECORDED BY THE RESEARCHERS INVOLVED.
TAKE THE SURVEY
Interview with Researcher Luna Luv
BRS: What motivated you to conduct a survey?
Luna Luv: I’ve always had a lot of interest in why people do what they do, vamps included. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a concise answer to that question, but I do think that there are ways of getting a little bit closer to that understanding in some cases. Extending from that, I thought that this research area might be very valuable, especially since psychological perspectives have generally been considered distasteful within the community — and definitely not for no reason. Most articles in psych journals mentioning “real vampires” are often sensationalist or align us all with sexual deviancy and/or pica, which in my opinion displays a fundamental misunderstanding or perhaps disinterest in our psychology. I thought a survey like this would be a way of showing the community that a psychological approach isn’t intrinsically invalidating, and can actually serve to provide us with meaningful insight into what makes us align with the archetype “vampire.” I figured a survey would be a good way of obtaining some qualitative and quasi-quantitative data on the topic.
BRS: How have the responses been so far?
Luna Luv: I’ve really been surprised by how much interest this has gotten. The survey has only been out for around 3 months and we already have close to 60 responses. I definitely see us being able to hit our goal of 100 by the 1-year mark, and hopefully if this keeps up we’ll be able to greatly surpass it. I’m really humbled by how many people have reached out to me and expressed the potential value they see in the study, and I’m so excited to share what we find with the community.
BRS: Can you tell us about your background?
Luna Luv: I’ve got a Master’s degree in mental health counseling and am currently working out of the US, with hopes to pursue a doctoral degree in psychology in the future. Consider this survey practicing for my thesis, haha.
As for my relationship to the vampire community, I’m a lifelong medsang who only discovered the word roughly 5 years ago. I’ve dabbled a bit in the offline scene but I’ve made my home in the online spaces, primarily Black Rose Society.
BRS: What are your goals for this survey?
Luna Luv: My primary goal is to identify if the existing relationships we’ve seen between one’s social development (how they learn where they belong) and identity development (how they learn who they are) can extend to the development of one’s vampiric identity, and if so, what the primary influential factors are. What lessons have we learned to tell ourselves, and when did we learn them? Or what other struggles may run parallel — perhaps our vampiric self-discovery coincided with other unique discoveries about ourselves, such as our gender identity or sexuality. I believe it would be worthwhile to see if we can find any significant correlations in these areas.
BRS: What is the timeline for obtaining the results?
Luna Luv: Initially, I wanted to run data collection from March 2024 to March 2025 and have the paper out by the end of the year. However, considering how much traction this survey has gotten thus far, and how we’ve only recently begun expanding to other social media sites, that deadline is likely to be pushed. I wish I could give a definitive answer — all I can say is that I’m going to try for December 2025, but this may not end up being feasible. 2026 at the latest! Haha
BRS: What challenges did you encounter while organizing this survey in the OVC?
Luna Luv: Honestly, and I should’ve expected this — mistrust. Which is entirely fair; the Vampire Community holds anonymity as something sacred, and in designing this survey it was my intention to preserve our respondents’ anonymity as much as possible. The purpose of utilizing Google Forms to host the survey, in addition to not having access to a more secure survey-hosting site at the time of development, is to prevent (or at least minimize) the submission of multiple responses. However, this requires a respondent to log into a Gmail account, which a few people were not thrilled by. This is why I make a point to emphasize that no account data is stored or recorded by any of the researchers involved in the study, and the email address utilized to access the study is not collected.
BRS: Are there any potential biases, either from your role as the survey organizer or among the participants?
Luna Luv: Oh, absolutely. The primary one being that the survey is being shared almost exclusively through social media, and as such the majority of the responses involve people who primarily participate in the online community. Unfortunately, I personally do not have much access to offline community spaces which may be able to blast this study to community members who may otherwise not see it. Regarding my own biases, I definitely have my own perspective on vampirism based in my personal experiences and knowledge-base. I do not intend on hiding this fact — rather, I simply wish to add my own perspective to the pool of discussions surrounding the nature of whatever it is we’re all going through. Perhaps we will find a more substantial relationship between the specific flavor of one’s vampiric identity and other common factors in their social development history, or even demographic information.
BRS: Lastly, is there anything you would like to say to our readership?
Luna Luv: I appreciate each and every one of you for taking the time to even look at my little project. I’m not trying to pretend that this is some extremely thorough and well-put-together study that’s going to have groundbreaking ramifications on the community… This is just something that I’m really interested in and passionate about, and I’m so humbled by how many people have expressed interest in what I’m doing. I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am for the support I’ve gotten. Thank you all so much for reading, and participating if you have!
What are your favorite and/or go-to blood/feeding substitutes?
I always find myself ordering blood sausages like sundae (순대), kishka, and jelito, plus duck blood dishes and nutrient-saturated/whole organisms like oysters, clams, crickets, and intestine/tripe dishes. Meal replacement drinks and strong/tangy/iron-rich teas, fruits, and meats will also work in a pinch.
Curious to hear what psi feeders have to say about this!
In the past few decades, people who feed on blood have formed their own community, largely thanks to the pop-culture popularity of their fictional counterparts.
Today, there is a worldwide community of human vampires, or “real vampires,” as scholars typically call them. Real vampires are not undead, nor immortal, nor can they be weakened by garlic or vanquished by silver. In fact, they’re biologically typical in almost all ways, except in how they get part of their nourishment: from human and animal blood (vampires of this type call themselves “sanguinarians”), or by draining psychic energy (“psychic vampires” or “psi-vamps”), or both (hybrids).
For its participants, real vampirism isn’t a fad to be adopted one day and discarded the next (and those who treat it as such dismissed as mere “lifestylers” by the community). They feed out of what they are convinced is a biological need, one that generally appears during or just after puberty. Without their monthly, weekly, or sometimes daily feeding rituals, vampires claim, it becomes difficult for them to function—if they go too long without blood or “energy,” they can become weak, developing a host of physical and emotional symptoms that only a feeding can soothe.
In the two years I spent studying the vampires of New Orleans for my dissertation, I found that apart from their need for blood or its psychic equivalent, there were more genuine differences among them than commonalities. The people I met were equally men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 50. They were self-described atheists, monotheists, and polytheists; they were single, married, and divorced; and their sexual orientations were diverse. In fact, the only thing that truly united them all was the obvious exception to their otherwise “normal” existence: the impulse to take in blood or energy.
Some vampires, but not all, also choose to adopt the trappings of vampiric fashion, like Gothic dress and prosthetic fangs (some buy them stock, and others have custom acrylic dental prosthetics made from molds). These things are common, but they’re not at the core of the vampire identity—rather, they serve as external markers of the vampires’ internal state. Just as same-sex desire is distinct from the socio-cultural practices of the gay community, so being vampire is first a bodily need, then a set of personal and social practices for expressing it.
In general, vampires keep the trappings of their vampirism hidden during the day—it’s rare for one to show up to work in the morning wearing fangs, for example. But, when the lights go down, when the shops close up for the night and the moon rises overhead, the fangs go in and the vampires come out.
Feeding is governed by The Donor Bill of Rights, a pact between donor and vampire to promote safety and well-being, both physical and social. Real vampires perform the blood-letting ritual only with willing donors—friends, family members, significant others, or members of donor networks—and usually only after both the vampire and the donor have their blood tested. Some vampires use sterile single-use thermoplastic medical tubing to extrude blood into small receptacles for drinking on the spot, or for later storage; others may use sterile blades to make small incisions on the donor, and drink directly from the wound before cleaning and bandaging it. The Bill of Rights also applies to psychic vampires, who must refrain from “feeding” unethically—that is, taking energy from donors without their knowledge and consent.
Real vampires do not always feed. They socialize as well, especially with others of their own kind. Older, more experienced vampires (known as “elders”) will often form “houses” or “covens” to counsel younger, less experienced vampires on how to live with their condition. For psychic vampires, this guidance may also include instruction on the various methods of feeding—“contact feeding” through physically touching the donor; “ambient feeding” by taking excess energy that is naturally generated in high-traffic public places; or even “tantric feeding” through sexual encounters.
The use of terms and practices like these across the vampire community has been crucial to unifying it, helping its members construct a narrative about themselves. In popular culture, vampirism is associated with psychopathology, excess, and a general sense of social disconnection. But in reality, vampires say, they’re just a community like any other, one made of like-minded people who share rules and traditions.
A true sense of community among vampires began to emerge in the 1970s, as people who consumed blood or drained energy for nourishment began attending themed social gatherings—Dark Shadows conventions, events for blood fetishists, and bondage and S&M conventions—that allowed them to network with potential donors, and often to find others who shared their condition in the process.
In the early 1970s, some of the first organizations dedicated to studying vampires were also taking shape. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club (now The Vampire Empire) in 1965, originally as an organization dedicated to Dracula and vampire fiction and film. But between 1970 and 1972, Youngson began receiving letters from people who self-identified as vampires. By 1974, after meeting with some of her vampire-fans, she extended the group’s purview to include real vampirism, demonstrating some of the first intellectual interest in the topic.
Around the same time, the paranormal investigator Stephen Kaplan formed the Vampire Research Center, the first organization dedicated entirely to the study of real vampirism. Through it, Kaplan supervised a “vampire hotline,” where anonymous callers could phone in to tell Kaplan and his staff about their vampiric behavior.
By the 1980s, ethnographers began to identify sub-sections of the vampire community, including people who experience sexual gratification through blood-letting rituals. The community grew in the 1990s, but real vampires still existed mostly in isolation or in small groups, relying on nearby fan conventions, low-circulation newsletters, and print correspondence.
Then, all at once, a confluence of cultural trends facilitated the rapid growth of the real-vampire community.
The first was the rise of Anne Rice conventions. Rice had begun writing her gothic fiction in the 1970s, but the 1994 film adaptation of her book Interview with the Vampire ushered in a new era of mainstream interest in vampires. The conventions quickly became meccas for vampires as well as vampire fans, doing for the community what Dark Shadows gatherings had done to a lesser degree a few decades earlier. Just as before, they provided closeted real vampires with opportunities to meet others like them, as well as people willing to satisfy their appetites.
The second was the publication of the 1991 role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade. Essentially Dungeons & Dragons with vampires, the role-playing game introduced a social space within which real vampires could congregate and network openly. It also helped to provide a lexicon of terms, protocols, and identifiers that the real vampire community could adopt for its own needs. And finally, by the end of the decade, the Internet had begun to dissolve geographic limitations, helping the niche community to grow through chat rooms and online forums.
But through its growth, at least one thing has stayed the same for the real vampires community: the stigma. Even in an era that has embraced previously fringe identities at face value, a taste for human blood remains a difficult practice to accept, especially because almost no one has found any real basis for the condition. But in fact, vampires are a proud, living critique of normalcy—which is, perhaps, the thing about them that frightens people the most.
for future reference, keeping a penny in your mouth while drinking warm pomegranate juice with dark chocolate, cloves, and a little bit of salt, ALMOST soothes intense blood cravings, just in case any other vamps out there need that
