Although the connection between the Columbine killers and the Goth culture was never decisively proven and is still widely disputed, the link in the public consciousness was made. For better or worse, and true or not, Goths became associated with hateful nerds, ready to lash out at those who had made fun of them in the past. Perhaps making matters worse, Marilyn Manson (a band associated with Goth culture, although rarely by Goths themselves) cancelled three dates in memoriam for the Columbine victims. That sealed it for many.
Of course, other Goths found the link between the Columbine killers and their subculture ridiculous. “Goth is about being beautiful,” Lance Goth (real name: Andrew Lee), then-owner of Sanctuary, told Toronto’s Now magazine. “Maybe you’re mourning your existence or the way humanity is, but that doesn’t make you want to get an AK-47 and kill people.”
It didn’t matter; Goths were already identified in the public consciousness as potential killers. After Columbine, the media sought a Goth angle for pretty well every teen crime with varying levels of success. It became routine: a) kid kills, b) media looks in his bedroom and finds some black hair dye, c) media calls him a Goth, d) media interviews local Goths who invariably deny the kid was ever a Goth.
A perfect example came in the person of Kimveer Gill. Large-scale media and public scrutiny was directed at the Goths again in 2006 when Gill, a self-described Goth, went to Montreal’s Dawson College and shot the place up. Despite constantly practicing his shooting for years, Gill proved to have poor aim, firing hundreds of shots that killed one person and injured twenty more before he took his own life after a police officer managed to shoot him in the left arm.
Unlike Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, Gill left the media an easy-to-follow trail of his beliefs, ideas and self-image.
VampireFreaks.com is an online community for Goths. Users can create profiles, post photos of and information about themselves, and be rated by other members. Started in 1999 as the offshoot of the personal webpage of Brooklyn-based industrial/Goth DJ Jet (real name: Jethro Berelman), VampireFreaks.com became instantly popular, as it was the only easily accessible Goth forum online. Now it has over a million users and a number of interest groups (called “cults”). VampireFreaks also releases music CDs of member-artists and sells apparel and other paraphernalia through another offshoot, fuckthemainstream.com.
But the mainstream didn’t really notice any of this until Gill started shooting people. When an enterprising Montreal reporter found Gill’s profile on VampireFreaks.com, images lifted from the site of Gill posing with a huge knife and pointing his many guns at the camera were transmitted worldwide. And so were the words he used to describe himself:
His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death. He is male. He is 25 years of age. He lives in Quebec. He finds that it is an O.K place to live. He is not a people person. He has met a handful of people in his life who are decent. But he finds the vast majority to be worthless, no good, kniving [sic], betraying, lying, deceptive, motherfuckers. Work sucks . . . School sucks . . . Life sucks . . . What else can I say. Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime. I hate this world, I hate the people in it, I hate the way people live, I hate God, I hate the deceivers, I hate betrayers, I hate religious zealots, I hate everything . . . I hate so much . . . (I could write 1,000 more lines like these, but does it really matter, does anyone even care) . . .
The word Goth stood out and the media started combing the world for an expert on the subject. They needed one quickly and they found him in Mick Mercer. Frequently described as a respected journalist and author of three books, Mercer was more than happy to comment. He gave the Associated Press his opinion of Gill:
Not a Goth. Never a Goth. The bands he listed as his chosen form of ear-bashing were relentlessly Metal and standard Grunge, Rock and Goth Metal, with some Industrial presence. He had nothing whatsoever to do with Goth.
While Mercer’s opinion became gospel because of the AP quote, something about the stridency of his denial and the pretentiousness of his choice of words seemed specious to me. So I looked up Mick Mercer. He’s a Goth himself and has never written for a widely read or much-recognized publication. His three books on the Goth culture are self-serving and slow-selling. His self-published magazine—which he calls The Mick—is mostly about his travels and his cats. It’s free and has no advertisers, but contains many requests for donations. His credentials as an impartial, qualified commentator are iffy at best.
And Gill himself would have disagreed with Mercer, perhaps violently. Not only did Gill describe himself as a “Goth” frequently, but he listed among his likes: Goth everything, www.VampireFreaks.com, black clothes, black everything, night, darkness, blood, The Crow, ravens, the Grim Reaper, horror movies, demons, Gothic artwork and other dark artwork. Among his dislikes, he listed: normal people, anyone who has anything against Metal or Goth, anyone who has ever said or done anything bad to a Goth girl, and sunlight.
While it could be argued endlessly and pointlessly whether Gill was a Goth or not (though he clearly and frequently identified himself as such), the matter is academic now. Once the media identified him as a Goth and had his VampireFreaks.com profile to back it up, people began fearing Goths as ticking time bombs, ready to take revenge on those who had forced them to be Goths.
Jet responded with a press release that said (in part): “Just because someone goes around shooting people and happens to be a member of VampireFreaks, doesn’t mean that this website has influenced him to do such a horrible thing.” He pointed out that just four murders had been linked to the site, which then had 606,000 members. That was a lower homicide rate than the one in the mainstream community, he noted.
Of course, most people found that reasoning specious. Parry Aftab is a lawyer specializing in Web-related crime and security issues and the executive director of Wired Safety, an organization that monitors potentially dangerous websites. VampireFreaks is one of the sites her group looks at most closely, and she claims the group’s members are a lot more criminal that Jet allows. “We’ve had lots of problems with VampireFreaks,” she said. “We’re finding many of the kids who are highly troubled and those who are making trouble for others are gravitating to that site.”
The problem, as she sees it, is that when people collect in sites like these, it tends to “normalize aberrant behavior.” While people might be reluctant to share their opinion in person, they are often emboldened to do so when surrounded by others who they perceive as like-minded.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself. I grew up as a fan of a certain American football team. Since they rarely won and were located in a small market far away from where I lived, I was the only fan of theirs I ever knew about. It was a situation very much like many Goths faced—I had an interest that was important to me and nobody to share it with. But once I got on the Internet, I found dozens of forums devoted to the team and spent many hours talking with my new friends from places as far away as Hawaii, Barcelona and Singapore about our common interest.
And there are forums and chat rooms devoted to everything now, from bird watching to child molesting. The theory—supported by many psychologists I spoke with—is that when people talk with others who share their opinion, it reinforces their opinion as correct. When someone has an interest that’s outside the societal norm (or even against the law)—like dog fighting, for instance—they can find like-minded individuals to share their stories and opinions with. And, if you subscribe to the theory, they will be encouraged in their interest and reinforced that it’s an acceptable one to have, in spite of the laws and popular scorn. The theory has been used repeatedly in the pursuit of evidence to use against Internet-based child pornography collectors.
And there is competition for attention among the online communities. “I think the site is starting to breed a different [kind of ] Goth,” Aftab said. “Some of these kids who are troubled know they’ll only get att
ention on there if they do something different than everyone else—you have to up the ante.” My own experiences on VampireFreaks. com have shown this to be true, as I have seen many members appear to try to be sexier or more gruesome than the rest.
Media scrutiny of VampireFreaks.com hasn’t been limited to Canada, although both Jet and Aftab agree that the site is more popular with Canadians than any other nation. In the first part of the twenty-first century, murders and other crimes committed by teenagers identified as Goths or associated with the Goth lifestyle have made front pages in places as widely separated as England, Kansas and Australia.
In early 2006, a 23-year-old Long Island man, Eric Fischer, was charged with rape when a 13-year-old girl he had sex with went to police. Fischer later admitted using VampireFreaks.com to meet young girls. He’d arrange to meet them in a local cemetery after dark and then attempt to have sex with them.
The site made front pages again later in 2006 when the bodies of a husband, wife and young son were found in Medicine Hat, Alberta. The prime suspect was the 12-year-old daughter of the family.
She was arrested the following day not far away, in Leader, Saskatchewan, with her boyfriend, 23-year-old Jeremy Allen Steinke.
After the arrest, the story unraveled. Though it has been frequently reported that the couple met on VampireFreaks.com, this may not be true. They both had accounts at the site. His stated a fondness for “blood, razor blades and pain,” while hers listed “hatchets, serial killers and blood” as her interests. But a close friend of hers attests that she actually saw them meet at a concert in Medicine Hat.
After their initial meeting, they communicated mainly via Nexopia. com, another social-networking website popular with young people in Western Canada. She lied about her age—Nexopia.com requires that users be at least 15 years old—and called herself “runawaydevil.” To introduce people to her profile page, she wrote: “welcome to my tragic end.”
After the parents found out about their daughter’s relationship with Steinke, they grounded her and forbade her to see her boyfriend. A few days later, they and their young son were murdered, and their daughter and Steinke were on the run.
But before they left Medicine Hat, the runaway couple stopped by the apartment of a friend. He also had an account on VampireFreaks. com, but no definitive link was ever established between him and the suspects on the site by local law enforcement. The friend claimed to be a 300-year-old werewolf and performed a “marriage ceremony” that he claimed would unite the couple throughout eternity. Then they ran and, not surprisingly, were caught right away.
The daughter is the youngest person ever convicted of multiple murder in Canada. She received the maximum penalty for an offender under 14 years old—ten years—which will include four years in a psychiatric institution. Steinke has yet to be tried.
As was the drill, a reporter from the Edmonton Journal asked a local Goth what she thought of the media coverage. “Now I don’t know about any one else,” she responded, “but I’m completely outraged by the information they actually printed in this article, it hints at every single person fitting this ‘description’ to be a murderous blood-fending [sic] vampire.”
I found that a strange opinion—that a free media should be censured for reporting pertinent facts regarding a murder suspect because it could bias the public against a group she considered herself part of. I wondered if she would hold the same opinion if the suspect were, say, a football player or a collector of true-crime books.
Swansong and his friends agree with her, though. “As Goths, we have to put up with a lot of bullshit,” he says. “We’re already labeled enough things, we don’t need to be called murderers too.”
After a long pause, Hellwind agrees. “Murders happen all the time, but when a Goth murders someone, it makes the front page.” I ask her why she thinks that’s the case. “Because people want to be able to identify a bad person,” she answers. “People want to be able to point at anyone who’s not normal and say ‘I know you’re bad.’”
I asked them if they’d had any problems because of the media portrayals of Goths. “We get so much abuse on a day-to-day basis, it’s hard to tell where people’s prejudices come from,” Swansong says.
“But I noticed people became especially nasty after what happened to little Johnathon,” Hellwind adds.
“He was no Goth,” Swansong snapped, referring not to the victim or the killer, but his accomplice, Timothy Ferriman. “He was a vampire.”
I immediately say the most wrong thing possible: “I thought you all dressed up like vampires.”
They think that’s an absurd statement and go into long colloquies about what Goth really is and isn’t. Most of it is self-praise, but it boils down to one main distinction: Goth is a dress-up routine, but there are really people out there who consider themselves actually to be vampires.
I ask if they can introduce me to some. Again, they can’t believe how stupid I am. “Goths and vampires rarely mix,” says Hellwind angrily.
Okay, I say, can they point some out? They take me outside and show me a couple of guys milling about. They look kind of Goth-y but without the makeup and with more leather—floor-length coats and almost knee-high boots. They look very much like the very best interpretation of Victorian-era noblemen as filtered through K-Mart. The main difference between the two of them is that one has long hair and one has short hair.
I introduce myself and tell them what I’m doing. At first they decline to speak to me because they believe that the “mainstream” media distorts everything about them. But I can tell it’s just an act, that these guys badly want the attention, and I tell them they can meet me in the coffee shop, if they change their minds.
When they show up, the Goths leave. The vampires sit with me and refuse to give their real names. One claims I couldn’t pronounce his real name anyway. They seem so touchy, so on edge, that I don’t argue. They assert that they are vampires, and not just pretend ones like the rest of the people I’ve been talking to.
I ask them if they drink blood. They both say they do—that is, after all, what makes them vampires. They tell me that they call blood by its proper name, “spiritus.” One of them then informs me that’s the Latin word for blood.
I have to restrain myself from them telling it isn’t—“spiritus” means breathing in Latin, “sanguineus” means blood—because their self-burnished veneer of intellect seems so very important to them.
Instead, I ask them where they get it. They demur until one says that he can usually convince one of his “lovers” to cut themselves for him. This makes some sense. As noted by the British study mentioned earlier, many Goths and their associates practice self-harm, including cutting themselves. Self-cutting is normally associated with adolescents, usually girls, and can be an indicator of low self-esteem and/or pathological perfectionism. Convincing a self-cutter to contribute their blood doesn’t seem like a very difficult task.
He then shows me his weapon of choice and I’m a little bit disappointed that it’s not fangs. Inside the small sterilized foil packets he hands me are lancets—tiny blades intended for diabetics to use to draw blood for samples. “They’re quick, clean and almost painless,” he tells me.
Then comes the hard question—why?
“You wouldn’t understand,” they both answer simultaneously.
I ask them to try me.
“Well, there’s a spirit to it—that’s why the Romans called it ‘spiritus’ and we do too—it adds something to your . . . your . . . spirit that you can’t get otherwise,” the long-haired one said. “It’s a spiritual thing—you wouldn’t understand—we know we’re vampires and our destiny is to drink blood.”
In their defense, blood is pretty nutritious. It has plenty of protein and, obviously, iron. Those facts are known to many cultures and cooking with blood is not uncommon in many parts of the world. Blood pudding (also called black pudding) is commonplace throughout much of Europe, including the British Isles. The
Masai and other East African peoples frequently drink their cattle’s blood. I remember eating at a Vietnamese restaurant when my wife ordered the rare beef soup. The helpful waiter asked her if she wanted the blood “in the soup or on the side.”
But that’s animal blood, which is normally prepared and served in a hygienic manner like any other animal product. Drinking human blood, on the other hand, is an easy way to transmit disease. I called the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and told a doctor there I was planning on drinking human blood. After she suggested I see a psychiatrist, the doctor I spoke with told me that I should be inoculated against cholera, influenza, filariasis, anthrax, typhus, leptospirosis, lyme disease, malaria, meningitis, black plague, tuberculosis, intestinal worms, rabies, typhoid fever and yellow fever—just in case. She also told me I was taking my chances with HIV/AIDS and that there are “plenty of other ways to have a good time.”
But these self-described vampires aren’t interested in nutrition and only obliquely concerned about safety. They drink blood, not as a foodstuff, but as a sacrament. And they are quick to point out that Christians do the same thing (at least symbolically) through the sacrament of Communion. They are convinced that drinking human blood heightens their spirituality, just as warriors from many different cultures ritualistically ate various body parts of their enemies to give them strength. They believe this, it would appear, because they so very much want it to be true.
But they tell me that their spirituality doesn’t extend towards awakening the dead, super-long life spans, shape changing or near invincibility, when I bring them up. “That’s all typical Hollywood bullshit,” the longhaired one tells me. Again he’s wrong. Those attributes are actually essential parts of the original vampire myths; the only parts added by the film industry are the wardrobes, which these guys ape obsessively. “Vampires aren’t monsters with magic powers,” the shorthaired one tells me. “Just people with a different belief system.”
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