The vampire's mirror: the parable interpreted

I wrote the parable "The Vampire's Mirror" as part of a continuing reflection on the theme of invisibility (cf. the poem "Transparency"), and more specifically about a phenomenon that I would call "cultural reflectivity." Cultural reflectivity is the extent to which one sees one's own reflection in the prevailing culture, the extent to which one's values, ideas, and assumptions are reflected in one's surroundings. There are some groups for whom there has been a more or less deliberate attempt to ensure that their existence is not reflected in the culture, to erase their presence from the societal mirror, as the presence of women, people of color, and so many others has frequently been erased. In the ancient world, slaves and non-citizens were referred to as "aprosopoi," which means "faceless." But it means more than this. Prosopon in Greek means both "face" and "person." To be one of the aprosopoi means to have been depersonalized, dehumanized, devaluated. It means to be one of those whose presence is never mentioned in the story by which a people defines its identity.

And yet the vampire's mirror is about something more than this. Specifically, I wrote the story in response to some statistics that were referenced by a friend of mine, a psychologist, regarding the relatively high rates of depression, disease, and suicide among gay and lesbian people, as a way of thinking about how this invisibility affects those who suffer it.

Vampires are invisible because they are dead, because their very presence constitutes an unwarranted intrusion upon the land of the living. And I think that this cultural invisibility contains within itself the seed of a kind of death. It has all the approbative force of a societal mandate: "you should not be here, you do not belong here." Is it any wonder, then, that those whose presence has been thus erased fulfill this collective mandate in their own lives? When gay and lesbian people engage in self-hatred, self-destructive behavior such as use of drugs, risky sex, and suicide, they are in effect acting on our orders. "You are dead." They fulfill the mandate we have given them: to disappear.

Although their lives are undeniably a part of the human experience, gay and lesbian people are surrounded by books, billboards, magazines. television programs (and yes, churches) in which they do not exist, in which there is no sense in which their presence is reflected. They are invisible.

And for this reason, when I read about the litany of physical and psychological maladies afflicting the general homosexual populus (though by no means all homosexual people, as I should hasten to point out), my immediate response is "To what extent am I responsible for this?" As Fr. Zossima taught us, we are to make ourselves responsible for everyone and everything. I wonder to what extent I, by silence and complicity, have contributed to a cultural landscape that could inspire such self-loathing in homosexual people. I wonder how I could contribute to a world wherein they would value themselves enough to make positive and healthy choices for themselves and those they love.

St. John Chrysostom wrote regarding the parable of Lazarus and the rich man that the greatest pain afflicting Lazarus was that "he could not see another Lazarus." He stood outside a world of plenty looking in and seeing no reflection of himself, nothing there that confirmed that he ever existed. People who passed him at the gate looked past him, beyond him, through him.

I wonder how it feels to be invisible.