Email Diary



Some discussions that didn't get their own pages
 


Newbies

> How accepting are goths of newcomers to the scene?

The answer has two parts, as near as I can figure:

  1. Every scene is different, and the levels of openess differ from city to city. Some cities are very welcoming. These scenes tend to be less gothic for the obvious reason: people who have no goth potential are welcomed along with everyone else, and after a while, they start calling themselves goths.

    Other cities are rather cliquish. There are usually multiple clusters of friends and they overlap a bit. You sort of have to find the groups that are right for you. For example, the mopey people don't hang out with the fashionable ultra-sex people. You can identify your crowd after a few visits to the local club. After a while, you will notice that there is a loose collection of people who dance to the same songs that you do and who wear the same style of clothing that you do. (Notice that this assumes you are already into the clothes and music.) After they have observed you for a while, someone will get up the courage to talk to you, and then you're pretty much taken in.


  2. It's embarrassing to admit the following, but how you look seems to be pretty important in how fast you are accepted. Specifically, if you are:

    1. pretty
    2. young
    3. femmy
    4. gothic

    you will have no trouble getting into any scene any time. The fewer of these properties that you have (listed here in order of apparent importance), the longer it will take for you to be accepted.

    The goth scene is one of the few places that a plain girl or a femmy boy can become very attractive, with the right kind of packaging. It's really great to see these people getting a second chance at life. But it still seems to be true that if you're beautiful by mainstream standards, you can just stroll in.

    Mopes are sort of a special case. You're basically looking at the singularly most shy people in Western culture and they never chat up strangers. I belong to an ill-defined group in my home club, so as an insider, I can tell you that despite appearances, we are very interested in new people, and we make covert inquiries in order to collect information about them. Why? Because we have no social skills and the anxiety associated with meeting new people is unbearable. Just hang in there...





Toten Tanz

 
> Do goths have their own style of dancing?
There are ways of dancing that are identifiably gothic, but not one style. If you're a goth, you'll be able to identify a gothic style of dance, even if you've never seen it before.

Newcomers to the scene seem to acquire one of a few common styles. Senior people have more idiosyncratic and artistic styles of dancing that almost always involve arcane arm movements. These can be swirly or pensive; there's such a huge amount of variation that there's no describing it.

If you are a babygoth (of any age) reading this, don't be intimidated by the senior people. They have been through what you're going through now and they can tell the difference between a genuine babygoth and a poseur. You can fake the clothes and the make-up, but the dancing has to come from the inside.



Spawn

 
> How do gothic parents raise their children?
Children of gothic parents are called "spawn" in subculture. You'd think that this would spell doom to the psychological well-being of these children. But in fact, there are very few spawn that are whiney, sullen, or violent, and there are plenty of normal kids like that. Interestingly, there are almost no spawn that are gothic themselves. This is amazing, when you consider that parents of some religion raise children in that religion. Gothic parents believe that respect for individual choice is more important than transmitting the parental choices. They only wish that normal parents of gothic kids could do the same.

Subculture tourism

 
> Are there like stax of tourists there. Why so many lately. Where are most
> of them from.
Usually, we are left alone in our boring little clubs, but every once in a while, a magazine article or a TV show about goths will appear in the mainstream, and then the zoo is open for business.

The norms that come perceive that the rules are different, and they decide that this means that there essentially are no rules. The result is rarely beautiful to watch: there is usually a lot of boozing going on, mock sex acts on the dance floor, some normal girl gets thrown out for making too many friends in the lav, some frat boys get thrown out for pinching goth girls on the butt, and so on.

Usually, after a few months, the next "in" thing starts and the tourists leave to do whatever that is, and we're left alone again in our boring little clubs.





Greying of the goths

 
> One does not come upon a Goth ... over 30, unless I have not been
> as attentive as I think I have been....I am curious where all the older
> ones are.


There are gothic people (as opposed to goths) of all ages, even some in their 60s. These are the people who, like their historical counterparts a hundred years ago, create their own worlds, and gather with like-minded friends in cafés and bookstores. They do appear in subculture venues sometimes, more out of curiosity than fraternity. They have long-standing social ties outside the clubbing scene, which makes subculture superflous to them.

The oldest "native" goths (people who went through adolescense goth) are entering their early thirties now. They are still tied to subculture because they haven't really known another way of life. Many of these people, faced with work and child-rearing responsibilities, have become difficult to detect, but they still surface occassionally. They can be seen at house parties or child-friendly events like cemetary picnics.

The greying of the goths is occurring, but primarily with the generation born circa 1970.



Conformity

 

> i have never seen more bs in my whole life. if you are all so
> devoted to individuality then why do you have a "fashion"..... you
> go off and make fun of preps and other people but in reality your
> just like them...another label with there own style. get off your
> high horse, your no better than the rest of us.  suicide and pale
> skin and blood and dark lace isnt any different than doc martins and
> polo shirts and khakis if you have that kind of attitude.

This primer only makes two references to individuality (1,2) and neither could have possibly inspired this class of criticism. Check again.

It's pretty obvious that goths do conform, but you want to ask yourself if they are really doing the same thing that norms do.

  1. Norm fashion is created by designers, style magazines, and marketing executives - "the fashion industry." Normal people are not individually and creatively responsible for what they wear.
  2. Norm fashion has no meaning or purpose. On the other hand, a goth wearing velvet and lace probably does consider herself to be romantic and is telegraphing that fact (consciously or unconsciously) to a very small subset of people.