Vampirism, the Human Condition, and How We Grew Up A  Graduate School Thesis Proposal Presented at an English Department Conference Gia C. Manalio www.lifeissurreal.com    My thesis is going to be a memoir in which I reflect on what it was like growing up in the midst of depression, isolation, loneliness, drugs, and suicide—all masked behind the costume and attitude of the alternative/gothic community. The alternative culture has always been attractive to people looking for somewhere to fit in. It appeals to people who often feel insecure about themselves and exiled from their peers. This culture is especially appealing to teenagers, like me and my friends, who spend a great deal of this period in their lives looking for their niche, and ultimately their own identity. And most importantly, this community is not difficult to find.    Popular culture embraces vampirism with open arms. Pick up J. Gordon Melton’s The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Dead and you’ll find this on the back cover: “Death, immortality, sexuality, rebellion and temptation. The vampire has embodied many literary and legendary images over the centuries.” Throughout my thesis, I will be consulting Melton’s work.    The Vampire Book includes a plethora of information on vampires in the media, all of which have become cult classics. It offers synopses of vampire literature from Poppy Z. Brite to Anne Rice, introducing the characters that have taken on lives of their own and have become our heroes. In fact, for a while I had a crush on Queen of the Damned’s Lestat. Perhaps you can see the problem with our relationship. I was fine with his being undead, but it was the fictional thing that proved to be the real obstacle. Not to mention that he already had a girlfriend who was none other than the Queen of the Damned. Wanting so badly to be a part of that lifestyle and sensing my competition in the romantic arena, I gave myself my own name— the Duchess of Despair.   But anyway, the Encyclopedia looks at contemporary Gothic movies from Blade to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which we watched over and over until we could quote the lines. And it went without saying (and is true to this day) that we would be making a group trip to the theater on these movies’ opening nights. When we were home, or more appropriately at other peoples’ homes (whoever’s folks were out for the night would be our most gracious host), we had our TV. Melton gives a glimpse of some of the supernatural series that played on that miraculous picture box from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The X- Files, whose reruns flood the channels and were usually playing in the background of any of our get- togethers.   I will also look at what Melton has to say about Gothic music and the musicians who foster the culture, such as Marilyn Manson—the music we danced to in our bedrooms on school nights to let out a bit of teenage angst because our dads wouldn’t let us take the car to the mall. Melton speaks of the genre’s growing popularity: “The majority of large urban centers in the United States now have at least one nightclub that regularly features gothic music” (Melton 301). For us underage goths, it wasn’t nightclubs but VFW halls where our friends’ bands had gigs or in someone’s basement where those same bands practiced—practiced the same chord over and over and over. Another source I will frequently consult is http://www.punk77.co.uk/index.htm. This site has links to punk history, interviews, band, photographers, even women in punk—a genre my girl friends and I took great interest in. Basically it covers all that is, or was, punk.  But how can we really define this alternative community? My thesis is going to attempt to do this. The community is more than movies and books and music. Today it has taken on a cult-like mystique, even with its own set of “religious” undertones and beliefs. It’s full of ideologies that my friends and I embraced and structured our lives around. Melton picks apart the Gothic culture, delving into Gothic society in America and other countries. He explains, “Gothic authors have challenged the accepted social and intellectual structures of their contemporaries by their presentation of the intense, undeniable, and unavoidable presence of the nonrational, disorder, and chaos” (Melton 298). And this is how we acted, more or less. We told ourselves and anyone who asked and even those who didn’t, that we were dangerous, with lives that had no order and no rules. In reality, most of us were pretty close to straight-A students on our way to pretty prestigious colleges. We rarely got in trouble and if we did, we were usually let off with a warning. But that’s not the point. We had something to say and this is how we said it. In fact, it was rare that we shut up. We said it partly through our sexuality.  In the section “The Atmospheric Gothic World” Melton explains, “…based in part upon the androgynous ideal, the gothic world has continued a self-conscious critique of the dominant sexual mores of late twentieth-century society” (Melton 302). “How to Be an 80s New Wave Pop Star” (http://80music.about.com/c/ht/00/07/How_80s_New_Wave0962933957.htm) advises: “Ambiguous sexuality is fundamental.  Boys might be boys or girls and vice versa.” We all wore big, baggy clothing. Boys wore skirts and girls wore men’s tank tops. Girls chopped off all their hair and boys wore eyeliner. And not only we were androgynous; we looked like death, literally. Melton discusses our rather melancholic style: “Dark clothing combined with pale makeup and dark lipstick presents an overall image of death” (Melton 302).   Okay that said, my paper will examine what actually drew us to this community. What was it that made us (smart kids, dressed like bag ladies attacked by Mabelline, wasted and blaring music about how everyone and everything sucks and annihilation is the key to happiness) flock to this scene? It isn’t difficult to see what might attract the self-conscious, brooding alterna-person (that would be us) to the blood sucking undead. Vampires are dark, mysterious, dangerous, and more often than not (at least in recent depictions) sexy. They live an alternative lifestyle, the nightlife where anything is possible and fantasy-like. And quite importantly, they form bonds stronger than most real-life family connections. The community is a family in its own right. Yet like with any family, it’s filled with and often ruled by dysfunction. At the same time, vampires are lonely. They are ostracized by humans and other creatures of the night and many are destined to live immortal lives without any other of their kind. Sound familiar? They are the embodiment of the dark side of human beings, something that has been called the Human Condition. My friends and I embraced the more romantic side of vampirism (the literature, the art, the music, the emotional bonds), but more than anything, we related to the darker side, the sadder side, the Human Condition side.    The Human Condition can be defined through a variety of angles from sociological to psychological disciplines. I’m going to take a look at these in layman’s terms. However, the topic is so vast that I will in no way be able to do anything but just touch upon the subject. Yet, I feel that a glimpse of the theory is all that’ s necessary for the reader to be able to recognize it in our experiences. And maybe in her/his own. At the core of all of this analysis will be a story about me and my best friend Dan. We met as teenagers in the way most teenagers meet—in school. We hung around with a particular crowd—band geeks by day, punk band rockers by day when we weren’t in band, and at night when we were out of that hellhole you people call school (unless we were marching at a football game and then we were band geeks but usually drunk band geeks as we would slip a bit of the vodka we stole from our parents into our hot chocolate). We hated ourselves (or at least we said we did, now when I look back, we seemed to have been rather fond of ourselves), we hated our parents, and most of all, we hated society. And we wanted people to know it. We stuck safety pins all over our jean jackets and in our ears. We wore combat boots with dresses. We had permanent scowls on our faces. We didn’t speak about it, not really. We dressed it and we wrote poetry about it. We were goth embodied.    I don’t remember what first attracted me to Dan except that I had been friends with his brother. Or more realistically, I had befriended his brother when I needed a ride to go see the U2 concert in New Haven. Anyway, there was something that just connected us the minute we met. Maybe it was because he could really get into hardcore, especially Black Flag, and had a certain fondness for The Smiths and Robert Smith and polyester disco pants. Maybe it was all the presents he used to give me such as homemade mixed tapes and pig fetuses in jars that he stole from bio lab. (I would just like to mention that I never accepted the jars of foeti or the dried up sucker fish that never even made it into a jar.) Perhaps it had something to do with later that year, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic and I could identify with him although I didn’t see his angels flying around the corners of the room.    As promised, dysfunction ran rampant alongside those angels the entire time. Seemed neither one of them ever tired. I’m going to show my reader the various things that plagued our daily lives, such as drug abuse and mental illness—Dan’s schizophrenia was only the beginning. To support what might seem like unbelievable experiences, I will call on experts such as Alan D. Schmetzer, MD and his “Phencyclidine (PCP)-Related Psychiatric Disorders” from eMedicine and David L. Rosenhan and Martin E.P. Seligman from Abnormal Psychology, 2nd Edition.     I pride myself on the belief that I write in my own unique style but cannot deny that  mystyle has been influenced by the amazing memoirs that I’ve read. I have been touched and terrified as I related to Susanna Kaysen’s fight against depression in Girl, Interrupted. (Guess which character I related to?) I saw figures and experiences from my own past as Noah Levine made his spiritual journey from the drug- infested punk culture to Buddhism in DHARMA PUNX: A Memoir. (I became a Pagan rather than a Buddhist, but it’s really all just a matter of semantics.) And I have chuckled at David Sedaris’s ability to keep a sense of humor and laugh at the complete irony and absurdity of life in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. (Well, all I can say about that one is that sometimes I wear jeans.)     I understand that even in a 1,000-page book, I could never capture the entire scope of what we went through on a physical or emotional level. However, I want to tell a bit of our story, to draw the reader in, to show the reader what it was like to live in our world. If I’m successful, I will not only interest the reader, but offer her/him a glance into the darker side of her/his own life—not to scare, but to allow the reader to see that in the dark hours, (s)he is not alone. And that you can get past this stuff and actually grow up and have a somewhat maybe even very productive life. We did okay. Some of us are working toward higher degrees; some of us are executives; some of us are both. Some of us grew skinheads into dreads, ran off with The Dead, and were never seen again. And of course, some of us are no longer here on this planet. At least physically.