Zero has been an independent member of
the Vampire Community since 1993. Also an Atlanta native, Zero is
active in the offline Community in Georgia as well as a member of
several online forums. She is also a founding member of the Atlanta
Vampire Alliance - House [AVA] and a principal contributing writer to
the VEWRS and AVEWRS. Her background is in cultural anthropology,
folklore, and languages.
I
have been an independent member of the Vampire Community since 1993,
and saw the Community come up from a few strangers discussing their
baffling experiences online to our current community of houses and
circles-of-friends the world over. I have seen our people begin to
develop common ground and a common vocabulary as if we were always a
culture waiting to happen. We only needed to find each other in large
enough numbers, and as the Internet became part of our daily lives, our
Community saw more and more of our people joining what each of us, at
one point in our lives, must have feared was a culture-of-one. The
history of our Community is one of self-discovery, intellectual
exchange and self-sacrifice, which cemented itself as the ethos of the
modern vampire Community when the first generation of public vampires
came "out of the coffin." Our people risked ridicule, social
persecution, sometimes even violence, to ask hard questions and simply
assert their right to be, so that others would also have a right to be.
Now, every time a vampire says, "yes, I am" it gets a little easier for
the next kid in line to Awaken. I have seen our people learn and grow
as individuals and as a culture for the last twelve years, and I like
them. I am proud of them, and proud to be a part of the Vampire
Community. I decided to become a part of the Atlanta Vampire Alliance
because after years of fringe participation, quietly sharing
experiences with others and staying mostly underground, I want to give
something back to my people. I have no real way to thank those vampires
who started the conversation years ago, but I can keep it going for the
next generation of folks who won't ever have to spend hard years not
simply hiding what they are, but never even really knowing.
I have a background in cultural anthropology, folklore, and languages,
all of which I hope to put to use helping to answer some of those
questions that the Vampire Community loves to ask, and for which we
have never gotten a satisfactory answer - does any culture know about
our people? Has any human culture ever known about us, or given a name
to the phenomenon we inadequately call "real vampirism?" Can we be
properly understood by the mundane world today? Can we benefit from
society, and can it benefit from us? Where in the past should we look
for knowledge about ourselves - folklore? Religion? History? I believe
that our people do fit in to the larger human conversation about the
occult, that we're not just a fly-by-night postmodern attempt at
identity politics in response to some hypothetical angst or alienation.
I believe that if we study our history and that of the human cultures
around us, we will find that we have always been here and have always
found a beneficial niche in human society.
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