Coming out of the coffin: On Goth
- cryptidkidsideshow
- Mar 1, 2025
- 5 min read
Goth clubs feel like home to me.
Excitement builds in my chest as I stand in line outside the club, as I watch club goers emerge out onto the sidewalk for a smoke in all their gothic finery. Once I get onto the dance floor I'm in heaven. The haunting sound of the music fills the room, with the vocalists keening high and moaning low. I can feel the steady drum of the bass reverberate on my skin. The dancers around me writhe and sway in time with the music, and my body starts to move on its own. I am overwhelmed by the display of beauty and creativity around me. Femmes wearing fishnets and corsets blend with butches with silver-buckled boots that make them six feet tall blend with men with neon hair blend with girls in flowing skirts. When I'm with my girlfriend she is dressed all in white, glowing in a sea of black. She bounces and undulates her body to the hum of the music, making my heart beat hard in my chest. I feel a sense of belonging I feel nowhere else, and stay out until I'm too exhausted to move.
Goth culture emerged from the music of the late 1970s in the United Kingdom, pioneered by bands like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus, and Sisters of Mercy. It grew out of music of the post-punk scene, where anti-establishment attitudes were expressed through funereal music and angsty lyrics. Music journalists described this melancholic blend of post-punk and early 80s rock music as "gothic rock." The UK was in the middle of a bleak economic depression at the time, and gothic rock provided young people a means of expressing their sense of disenfranchisement and gloom, with its dark and haunting sound and its fascination with death. As gothic music has evolved it has incorporated a touch of romance, as young goths strive to find beauty in their despair and dissatisfaction.
This preoccupation with darkness, edgy anti-establishment attitude, and melancholy sense of beauty is reflected in goth style and fashion. Gothic clothing subverts the respectability and conventionality of mainstream fashion. Typical goth clothing includes black leather and lace, but could include anything from fetish gear to victorian garb.
Gender bending and goth style have always gone hand in hand. Vampires, most beloved by goths, are intrinsically genderqueer, as there is an ambivalence towards gender in vampirism that disturbs traditional roles. Male vampires are seductive and elegant, while female vampires are fearsome and bold. The sexual act of sucking blood is the same for both sexes.
In line with this blurring of gender in vampirism, there is in goth subculture what Simon Pascal Klein calls, an "aestheticisation of both sexes" in style. As goth has roots in punk, there is a strong DIY approach to goth fashion, which translates to strong individualism and experimentation in gender expression.
In goth style, women, men, and everyone in between are admired for dramatically experimenting with masculinity or femininity. This happens partly by refusing the heteronormative, particularly the normative male, gaze. Self-identified men can experiment with femininity without being vilified as "gay." Self-identified women can safely dress hyper-feminine without being derogatorily labeled "sluts" and subjected to male harassment. And nonbinary folx can play with anything in between without being condemned.
Put another way, goth style is a space of symbolic liminality where gender boundaries blur, mirroring the symbolic blurring of concepts of life and death. This blurring is accomplished through playfulness, melodrama, and spectacle, or in Christina Goulding, Mike Saren, Pauline Maclaran, and John Follett’s words: a “theatrical show of exhibitionism and performance.”
This use of goth style to push back against mainstream values and expectations of femininity isn't limited to European or American goths. Japanese women and girls who adopt a gothic Lolita aesthetic create a subcultural form of beauty and cuteness that rebels against the pressures normative society places upon women to get a job, a boyfriend, a degree, a position of respectability. In An Nyguyen and Jane Mai's words, gothic Lolita fashion is:
"A self-centered undertaking, an activity of adornment that is not connected to socially productive presentations of self."
In "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," Dick Hebdige describes "style as a form of refusal" for the disenfranchised:
"The challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style."
At a personal level, I related to this feeling of disenfranchisement as a young person. I grew up in an abusive household with a volatile father and an emotionally neglectful mother. The earliest feelings I can remember having were intense feelings of powerlessness and depression.
I felt an intense need to rebel against my situation and turn the despair I felt into something positive. But I had no outlets available to me. Except music. No one could stop me listening to music. I was lucky enough to have friends who kept me well supplied with bands like Soundgarden, Muse, and Porno for Pyros. But I loved one band above all others. My friend with short hair and rubber bracelets introduced me to HIM. Many queers talk about the first time they see themselves in another, and that’s how I felt about HIM’s lead singer, Ville Valo. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, with black-rimmed eyes, dark hair that curled around his neck, roseate lips, and indigo tattoos covering his left arm. In his music videos he slunk back and forth behind his mic, his black clothes draped around his lithe body. I was entranced. I was enamored.
I was transfixed. Emphasis on the trans. But I had no means of expressing this new gender I had found. I tried. I saved up my money to buy a HIM t-shirt - the only piece of clothing I ever bought for myself. I loved it. It was bright fuchsia, and Ville had his black shirt gaping open to reveal the tattoo over his pelvic bone. I never even got to wear it. My mom took one look and in shock and revilement, yelled, “Why would you do this to me?” I told her I was sorry through a haze of tears, and gave the shirt away the next day.
Once I had enough money to justify spending on clothes, I bought a HIM shirt. In the years since I’ve thrifted or bought myself a whole wardrobe of goth clothes, including an unreasonable number of black platform boots. When I look in the mirror, I look like one of those boys in goth rock videos, swaying back and forth with their hair high and their voices low. In style, I’ve found a way to transmute emotional pain into aesthetic beauty. I feel, as An Nguyen writes, “So pretty yet still rotten and always working towards the beautiful and sublime.” And, though it sounds cliche, I feel my inner child heal a little at the sight of myself.
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