Peter Demas

VAMP! is the intersection between fashion, queerness, and the vampiric. It's an experience that has been talked about heavily, and explored with films such as Rocky horror picture show, yet never given a name. Being a sister of Camp, VAMP! is the embrace of opulence—elaborate costumes, bold makeup, and an aesthetic that dances on the precipice between reality and fantasy. Vamp! borrows liberally from camp's arsenal, creating a visual symphony that transcends genre, gender and resists imitation. It forges a new path where the extraordinary and the queer, in all its sense, is the norm. My piece is not just an extension of who I am and the subcultures that surround me, it is also the most potent version of what VAMP! is. Vampires share a special connection to the queer community not just from their strangeness and otherness, but also from the idea that once bitten, and surrounded by your own, you flourish and turn into who you truly are. You are reborn. An experience, like a ritual, that most people in the queer community, myself included, know all to well. We celebrate our birth to strangeness and live to the fullest ultimately being timeless and living forever, just like Vampire do.