Patrons on the back patio of the Frjtz are getting uncomfortable.

Casually hunched over in his chair, William Thorn fiddles with his wooden pipe, occasionally bringing it to his lips and, with a quick flick of a Bic, releases a cloud of sweet smoke from its bowl. Head to toe in black, Thorn is an intimidating figure, with piercing blue eyes that can easily incite a temporary moment of paralysis. He speaks loudly as if he wants the entire world to hear his agitated words, to understand his frustration over the misrepresentation of his community. But tonight, it’s the after-work crowd eating Belgian fries and sipping imported beer who get to hear Thorn’s story.

“There’s a thing of life force, prana, chi…depends on your system of beliefs. It’s often referred to as ‘prana’ in the community,” he fervently explains. “You can either manipulate energy to draw it into yourself, to feed, to bring yourself back into balance. Or you can drink blood. It depends on what your preferred method is.”

“And in your personal case?”

“In my personal case?” he repeats, eyes confidently penetrating like daggers. “I drink blood.”

“What kind?”

“Human.”

People slowly begin to abandon their Belgian fries. Was it something he said?
Hollywood and literary fiction has long romanticized the creatures of the night, creating the myth of monstrous yet sensual blood-suckers. But modern vampires aren’t going to creep through your window at night, and really don’t care whether or not you’re a virgin. Characterized by a condition where an individual has excessive energy needs, real vampirism is alive in the Bay Area, and it doesn’t necessarily sport fangs and a cape.

It’s Feeding Time
“A real vampire is somebody who lives with a condition which cannot be scientifically proven. However, it does not make it any less real, and that’s one thing we try to get people to understand,” says Thorn. “It’s an energy deficiency. Really, it’s a handicap. We’re damaged.”

Vampires crave the source of life energy or “prana,” as Hinduism calls it. This energy is something a vampire cannot produce for himself. He must obtain it from other sources, in this case, from the energy in human blood. Although drinking blood is not necessary for survival, it “fills an extra slot” that cannot be satisfied by regular food. “I don’t need sugar in order to survive, but having chocolate once in awhile is nice and it makes you feel good,” Thorn says.

Feeding about once a month is usually enough for Thorn, whose body tells him with an uncomfortable, unbalanced feeling it’s feeding time, similar to the way headaches indicate it’s time for caffeine.

While some blood drinkers still perform highly-ritualized methods of feeding—hanging pentagrams and crucifixes, lighting candles and even tying up the “donor” for that special bondage effect—Thorn insists it’s all excessive. For Thorn and his previous, long-term donor, an ex-girlfriend who was also a vampire, feeding time occurred on the couch while watching a movie. Using an over-the-counter land set that a diabetic would use to test their blood sugar, just a prick on the finger and a few drops of blood would suffice.

But too much of anything is no good. “Just like a drug, you can become addicted. You can become a victim of your own problem,” he sternly warns. Some vampires have been known to take cow syringes and get a large amount from a donor. “You drink enough blood, you’ll throw up,” he warns. “It’s absolutely unnecessary.”

Thomas* begs to differ. A practicing vampire for more than 20 years, he prefers a more sensual, intimate way of satisfying his need for blood energy. “The easiest way of doing it is to make a wound with a razor blade and treat it like oral sex,” the 38-year-old French teacher says. “The question isn’t how much blood I take, but for how long.”

Both Thomas and Thorn agree that it isn’t easy being a blood drinker, as donors, who are typically close friends or girlfriends, are difficult to find. “Sometimes you have to learn to do without it,” says Thomas, who finds teaching Victorian ballroom dancing can soothe his energy needs.

Despite their reputation for being immortal, vampires are not immune to disease and death. HIV is a big concern in the vampire community, and free clinics and home tests are frequently used in screening donors before the dinner bell rings. “If you’re too stupid to screen your donor then you deserve whatever you get,” Thorn bluntly says.

And the taste of blood? “Some people are saltier and some people are sweeter,” Thorn says with a grin. “It depends on if they’ve been getting enough fatty acids.”

“Oh, really?”

“No, I’m kidding.” That’s the first time he has laughed all night.

The back patio at the Frjtz is empty.

The Other Kind
At Segafredo Zanetti on Powell Street, Cole patiently sits in the center of the row of booths, his head buried in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” as a half-drunken latte sits aside. No wonder he likes this place: the black and red décor compliments his black suit and red dress shirt, as if giving him camouflage to hide himself from the other patrons vigorously chatting and eating their pizza.
Cole doesn’t drink blood, but that doesn’t make him any less of a vampire. Referred to as a psychic vampire, he drinks in energy from people and the environment to appease his energy imbalance. “For me, it’s like drinking water thorough a straw, but instead through my chest,” he explains, his long fingernails tapping on the table. “It’s a refreshing feeling—filling something that’s empty.”
At 17, when Cole was at a night club in his home state of Alaska, a girl who identified as a vampire told him he was absorbing energy. Previously, he had noticed that he often felt fatigued and preferred the nighttime, but didn’t know what he was experiencing. “That was the point when it entered into my consciousness that there was a condition,” he says.
The moment when Cole was given a name for what he had been feeling—what is referred to by the vampire community as an “awakening”—he immediately knew it felt right, but it took him a long time to understand what it meant. “The process of coming to terms with it was chaotic,” he says.

Now, at 25, Cole has learned to control when he takes in energy. Often, he finds that taking a walk during his lunch break around bustling downtown San Francisco allows him to absorb enough energy for the day.

While blood is a more concentrated form of energy, according to Cole, he hasn’t fed on it for more than two years. “I like psychic energy because it’s easier, safer and more steadily available,” he says.

And why all the black?

“Vampires wear black because it absorbs more energy,” he explains. “With bright-colored shirts, the energy scatters off. It makes me feel uncomfortable.”

Fear and Fascination
Dr. Kirk Schneider, a San Francisco Psychologist and author of “Horror and the Holy: Wisdom Teachings of the Monster Tale,” believes the allure of horror is part of the attraction to the vampire lifestyle. “Through my studies, people have a great fascination with these monster figures, such as Dracula, in part because they’re touching on these extraordinary realms of human experience, the borderlines between life and death,” he says.

The need to drink blood, Schneider speculates, is overcompensating for a void in someone’s life, and possibly indicates an addictive personality. He compares it to the feeling of power individuals experience when using such drugs as speed or cocaine. “There’s something fascinating about whatever the high is,” he says. “In this case blood, or the notion of incorporating another’s blood into oneself, is almost literally filling oneself with life.”

The blood as a source of life energy, according to psychologist Dr. Rodney Karr, is precisely the point. Vampires are incomplete beings, and require other peoples’ emotional and physical energy to survive. “They don’t have balance,” explains Karr, who has worked with vampires as well as their victims. “We create the balance within ourselves. They don’t.”

To better understand the origin of vampirism, Karr says we must look at cultural history and myths. “Blood has been symbolic in many cultures as a life force,” he says, noting that the Zulu tribe in Africa have, for hundreds of years, drunk the blood of cows, and other tribes have historically drunk the blood of opponents that fell in battle to preserve their life energy.

“Our modern world is very ignorant of the old myths. It makes people vulnerable of being used and harmed, and I’ve seen hundreds of people who have been damaged,” he says. “In older traditions, people are aware of vampires and know how to protect themselves.”

Of course, many psychic vampires are oblivious of their condition, and can drain others’ energy without knowing it. After encountering a psychic vampire, people will often have symptoms associated with their energy loss, including sudden depression, fear, fatigue, insomnia, and a loss of creativity—similar symptoms to those a vampire may experience when he lacks energy as well.

Vampires can be consciously evil if they choose to hurt others, but they have a choice to be safe and ethical in obtaining energy from others. “To me, a person who communicates and consents is not dysfunctional,” says Karr. “The city is full of psychic vampires. To some extent, we are all psychic vampires sometimes.”

Defending the Name, Building a Community
When people think of vampires, they picture dark, seductive, immortal beings that scour the night for innocent victims. While that might be the picture at Goth clubs in the SOMA, real vampires don’t appreciate the negative image given to them, especially when it pegs them as criminals.

On March 23, a 24-year-old man, originally of Placerville, Calif., was arrested for bombing Bolivian hotels. He claimed he was a vampire, and had even given himself the name “Lestat” after the Anne Rice character.

“The word ‘vampire' itself has thousands of years of negative connotations,” says Cole. “And decades worth of Hollywood imagery associated with it.”

“I’m of the opinion, people who do some of these crimes have a vampiric nature and just haven’t found a way of taking care of it,” says Thomas. “I have neither sympathy, nor respect.”

It’s this exact kind of negative publicity that gets Thorn in an uproar. “You have the sociopathic murderers and child rapists whose actions are labeled vampiric in nature by the media or by the self-proclaimed vampires, and that just gives us a bad name,” he says avidly. “The media has sensationalized vampirism and made us look like a bunch of morons.”

Modern vampires have a hard task: to convince society that they are, in fact, normal people who have the occasional need for outside energy. However, with fears of harming their professional careers, they would prefer to do so without exposing their identities. “I don’t hide the fact that I’m a vampire, but I don’t exactly advertise it either,” says Thorn. “Normal people have a problem with weird things, and the weirder they are, the larger the problem.”

For these secretive professionals, Thorn, Cole and four others spent the last five years developing a community in the Bay Area as a hub of information, socialization, and acceptance. The organization, whose name the members prefer remains anonymous, is not a cult or coven. It functions more like a support group, giving people a forum to discuss problems, meet others in the community, and to learn from experienced vampires how to function in daily life.

Some members believe that it’s easiest if mainstream society remains in the dark. “Many vampires are not interested in clearing our name, so much as never acquiring a name to begin with,” says Cole. “So long as people do not know we exist, we are left alone.”

Cole, who helps organize the monthly meetings, would like his group to be accepted, however, realizes that the journey toward tolerance would be a long one. “The vampire scene currently is a bit like the gay scene in the early 1970s. There is almost no mainstream public awareness of it,” he says. “As awareness increases, so will fear, anger and hatred, as has happened time and again with any minority or subculture group.”

The organization meets once a month to socialize and to plan special events, anywhere from picnics in the cemetery to bowling. “We don’t get together and have mass feedings, or have satanic bonfires on the beach,” says Thorn with a humorous frustration. “We’re just people. We don’t do anything different than anyone else. We’re humans.”

For more information about the San Francisco vampire group, please contact Cole at csv@elegantblackcat.com.
*Name was changed.