I used to frequent a bar in St. Pete, FL. that was a hangout for the goth crowd. Let me tell you, they were some of the nicest people I have ever met. No sarcasm, no judgmental remarks. I’ll take a bar full of goths any day over a bar full of pretentious suburbanites that haven’t outgrown their high school attitudes.
Oh my god, a coeval. IIRC, “artfag” came from a Dead Milkmen song.
I never had any problem with them. It was a simple mathematical calculation: I’m in a group that’s 90% male. They’re in a group that’s 90% female. Their club is upstairs from mine. This isn’t hard.
BTW, Mike Meyers said that Deiter was based on a waiter in a club he used to go to in Toronto. The monkey part he invented, though.
I have a theory that the basic Goth worldview is nothing new for teenagers. Fifty years ago the gloomy kids who are now Goths were wallowing in Edgar Allan Poe stories, the original Gothic novels, and A. E. Housman’s poetry (the stuff that spawned the parody beginning “What, still alive at twenty-two/A fine upstanding lad like you…”). They just didn’t have bands and a distinctive dress style.
I think that a lot of people think that goths are criticizing them for being sheep, and for some reason they give a shit about their imaginings of how teenagers are criticizing them, and they get so insecure about imagining that a teenager is criticizing them that they empty their contemptoguns full-barrel onto the hapless teenagers.
Jesus! Give it a rest!
I hung out with lots of goths and punks and skinheads in my teenage days; and while I wore a cape and decorated my face with eyeliner, I didn’t really qualify as a goth (I used the eyeliner to draw cracks across my face as if it were breaking apart). I spiked my hair, but I didn’t really qualify as punk (I made a row of spikes across my face, as if I were behind bars). I carried a staff that I’d carved with the Ogham Alphabet (copied from a New-Age set of cards) and decorated with moonstones and feathers. And I entertained myself by frightening street preachers and fratboys in downtown Chapel Hill.
Was that mature? Oh, hell no. I was a teenager, for god’s sake. Teenagers do weird things. And then they grow up, and do different weird things.
But the angsty poetry–hoo boy, did I ever write the angsty poetry. 'Course, I also wrote the poetry mocking the angsty poetry.
Why did goth appeal to me? It appealed to me because life as a teenager was extremely miserable for me, extremely miserable. I lacked the emotional tools to deal with loneliness, with sadness, with stress.
says e.e. cummings, and adulthood was one gigantic fog bank for me. But everyone was talking about how their teenage years were the best years of their lives, and encouraging me to be more happy and upbeat, and it all just seemed so wrong to me, so much like a denial of my experience.
But goth music did not. Goth music was as angsty as I was. It gave shape to my fears and my depression, and it helped me get a handle on them.
Wearing black made me feel like I was using my clothes to express my mood, and expressing it helped me understand it and get it under control. The melodrama with the cracking face and the hair-bars did the same thing.
As a special bonus, people who before had teased me mercilessly became freaked out by me, and sometimes even a little in awe of me. Machiavelli says it’s better to be feared than to be loved; I learned that it was better to be feared than to be mocked.
So that’s my experiences. I have very little black in my wardrobe these days, but my brother runs music at a local Goth club, and it’s hella fun to go there every now and then and dance to some Siouxsie, take me back to my youth.
Daniel
Yeah, that’s me, too. People ask me if I’m trying to be goth or something and I just go 
I like what I wear and just because I happened to feel like wearing a black and white outfit today makes me goth? My hair is dark and stringy, so that apparently, that makes me a goth, too.
Music is a big thing, too. I’m more into the heavier rock bands, though, so people get surprised with that, too. I don’t really know what goths listen to. I don’t know very many of them.
And I don’t wear black eyeliner or any other sort of make-up. Not even lip gloss. I’m a bit of a nerd, too. I wouldn’t be very surprised if most goths were.
See, that surprises me. I remember once taking one of those silly online tests, a goth purity test, and scoring very poorly except in the literature area, where I excelled. When I was arrested for part of a nonviolent protest at the age of sixteen, I ended up in juvie for a night. The next morning they had me take a math assessment test, which I aced, which flummoxed them. When they asked me what math I was working on, I straightfacedly asked them, “Do you have any books on numerology? It’s the study of the unique characteristics of numbers.” Naturally they didn’t, so I did a little chart for myself based on Crowley’s numerological system.
Today I’m pretty damned skeptical and nowhere near the numerology-believing self that I was as a teen–but even then, I confess that my skepticism owes a large debt to something Crowley wrote, and that has stuck with me many years after reading it:
Doubt.
Doubt Thyself.
Doubt Others.
Doubt Thy Doubt.
I wrote angsty poetry, but I also knew my poets pretty well: I knew most of “The Raven” by heart (I’m not sure if I ever managed to memorize the full thing), had my favorite bits of Shakespearean nihilism, and loved e.e. cummings, with his bad misanthropic death-loving self.
Indeed! A college friend of mine once took me to an ultra-goth club in San Francisco, and she taught me the delightful positive feedback loop of laughing at the pretentious goths. When you laugh, it makes them even more snootily disdainful, which makes them even funnier, which makes you laugh even harder, which makes them even snootier… if you don’t watch out, it can be lethal. Fortunately, the disdainful ones are relatively rare and easy to avoid.
kittenblue, you were asking for advice on what you can do to let her know she can lean on you. My advice would be to accept the aesthetic she’s chosen and compliment her specifically on it. Let her know that it’s something that’s not quite to your tastes, but that it’s kind of interesting to you. Don’t ask her, in a pained voice, why it is that it appeals to her. It’s a difficult question to answer, and not one that’s especially interesting to anyone (try asking someone who dresses in jeans and flannel why it appeals to them, and watch them glare back at you). Just accept that it’s working for her, and talk to her about other stuff.
Daniel
Ahh yes, the old high school whisper-in-my-ear-while-you-point-at-people thing, great fun.
Is she a Visigoth or an Invisigoth? It helps to know.