My Girlfriend is a Raging Vampophobe

I just found out that my live-in girlfriend of two years, “Tina,” is pretty much an unabashed, unapologetic bigot.

Thursday night during Cheese, Crackers, and Checkers, Tina told a dicey joke that I thought was in really poor taste. Now, I can never remember jokes correctly (Tina loves to pick on me for this), so I don’t recall exactly how this one went, but the punch line might as well have been: “Isn’t it funny that vampires are a weird inferior race with gross alternative lifestyles and special needs that are fun to ignore!” Luckily, not a single one of my confirmed guests showed up that night, making me the sole witness to her disgusting outburst. I first tried explaining to Tina that I didn’t think the joke was funny and that she should think twice before passing that kind of toilet material around, but without a thought, she abruptly disagreed. Thus began an epic conversation turned probably-breakup argument which revealed a heart sick with hate, as black as a Sharpie marker, and, I fear, just as reliably permanent.

The mask really came off when I asked Tina to elaborate on her idea of a typical vampire. I’m not kidding, verbatim, this is what she said (her words not mine): “They all wear black capes and slick their hair back. They live in castles, and they kill people.” WTH! I sleep next to this maniac?! Hearing how casually the hate-spew flowed from her foul mouth made me wonder if I had somehow fallen through a time warp and been sucked all the way back to 2002–when vampires were “monsters” and the world was still an idiot.

It is astounding to me that after four or five whole years of progressive work towards vampire civil rights across all mediums of entertainment, despicable attitudes like Tina’s are still around. She went so far as to say that she “would not want vampires living in her neighborhood!” and her most pathetic line of defense was to continually scream, “Vampires are not real you dipsh*t!” I feel like that excuse has worn quite thin, as we all know now that minorities, vampires, aliens, homosexuals, mermaids, robots, werewolves, and pirates are all like the rest of us–just a little “different”. Well, real or unreal, natural or supernatural, on a great HBO show or living just down the hall, it doesn’t matter to me, there is no gray area, intolerance and bigotry are 100% unacceptable. I’ll bet that every crooked notion that Tina has about vampires is based on old movies she saw or weird books she read from a least six years ago! How was I supposed to react to this?

(Incidentally last fall, in a similar situation, I was forced to part ways with a very close friend. In a crowded cafe he kept loudly describing the refugee characters from the film District 9 as “big creepy insects.” I was severely embarrassed by his insensitivity concerning Apartheid in South Africa. I haven’t seen him since.)

Tina even refused to understand how not being able to go out in daylight constituted a physical handicap for vampires. She didn’t care that they couldn’t mail a package or open a checking account. Tina might have great hair and a full-time job, but her appalling attitude towards the disabled was the last straw. I left the house that night to clear my head, and I’ve been sleeping on the streets since. I assumed that I’d just crash on my yoga coach’s couch, but his secretary told me that he had actually died in a car fire literally just minutes before I called! A real shame because I felt like he really listened when I talked to him about this stuff.

Photo: mediamemo.com

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