I am rather confused... I am speaking of Vampirism in fact. I feed on blood, and it can be my sole sustenance. My senses are more attuned, and I have the instincts of the predator. So, what is it that you are talking about? The idea that someone would lead a vampiric lifestyle by choice, rather than necessity, fascinates me.
It wasn't a choice for the Gothic antiheroes of eighteenth and nineteenth century literature any more than it is for us today. Well, okay, that was a bit of a fib. The writings of the Marquis de Sade are full of voluntary vampirism - both in the blood drinking sense and in the "energy" feeding sense: yes, it's Sade himself who coins the term "feeding on energy," in _Justine_, a very Gothic novel. Sade counts as a Gothic writer because he used the Gothic formula (damsel in distress, villain who menaces her, dark brooding castles, dark stormy nights, out of control passions, the fight between virtue and vice, the seductiveness of evil). He might have turned the formula on its head, making the villain the hero, making evil triumph over good, and giving logical explanations for supernatural phenomena, but his novels were definitely Gothic.
Also, Lord Byron was not exactly subtle about his own life - I don't think he objected a bit to Polidori's little short story about a so-called "Lord Ruthven" (the story was, of course, "The Vampyre"). Scandal? Bring it on, it helps the poetry sell.
Still, on the whole, vampires in Romantic and proto-Romantic literature were generally unhappy creatures or monsters. The woman who menaces Christabel in Coleridge's poem of the same name is a monster; the Ancient Mariner, cursed with eternal wandering and undeath, is in a personal hell of his own making; Keat's "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" might have enjoyed enthralling men, but they were trapped in their identities and bodies. Heathcliff and Catherine, protagonists of Emily Bronte's _Wuthering Heights_, are subtly portrayed in a vampiric light, and oh, do they suffer.
Oh. right. I'm babbling. What am I talking about? Literary vampires of Romantic-era Gothic writings. Vampires crept into the public imagination in the Romantic era and grew in popularity throughout the Victorian era (in the writings of H. Rider Haggard, Sheridan la Fanu, Guy de Maupassant, Alexander Dumas, Swinburne, Poe, and others) until Decadent poets like Baudelaire (who was also, by the way, a notorious Satanist as well as a not so subtle vampire) lived the lifestyle, and a certain horror writer, Bram Stoker, fixed the vampire in the public imagination forevermore.
I'm NOT talking about how vampires are inherently Gothic, in the modern sense of the word (either word, vampire OR Gothic). some of us might happen to be Goths, but one does not automatically entail the other. Vampirism as a literary subject and a popular fascination is extremely Gothic. (The medieval and Renaissance Europeans had their own Gothic subculture, and even a form of real-life vampirism, but the legend of the vampire and the vampire as literary anti-hero did not appear until the late eighteenth century). I personally think that the current American and Western European fascination with things Gothic and things vampiric is intertwined, but 1) it's too early to say anything yet - cultural history is hard to study while you are still living it; and 2) this is the popular imagination I'm talking about, in short, it's "them" and not "us." (In theory.)
Sorry for any confusion caused.