The Fashion Dilemmas of Our Dark Youth
by Jack Neely
They multiply mysteriously. The 11th Street Espresso House doesn't seem like a particularly Goth sort of cafe, especially on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in the summertime: it's a relaxed place where you can get a mocha or an Italian soda and sit and read the paper. But make plans to meet a Goth there and see what happens.
Karla Lear denies her Gothicism, she says she's mainly a mother and wife, but she's dressed all in black, in a loose-fitting Morticia Addams black dress, her straight, black hair cut in bangs. She wears pendant diamond-ish earrings and a totemic dragonfly necklace. With her is a daughter she calls Boo, a bright preschooler who happily sits at her own table and plays an electronic game that plays part of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
At the counter Karla orders coffee. It's Cafe au lait, not black. She tells a reporter about Goth fashions. "I don't wake up in the morning, say, 'How spooky can I look today?'" She's a little too friendly to be spooky, but she's the mistress of KnoxGothic.com's fashion section. KnoxGothic.com has over 330 on its list; it is, without question, one of Knoxville's more provocative websites.
She explains the concept of the Doom Cookie: "You know, the Goth who lies in bed in Crow makeup and writes bad poetry." She has just begun to explain the concept when another, very differently dressed Goth appears. She is called Tori Bat. She wears a high wave of blonde hair, and light-colored clothes; her only black is the black in her houndstooth skirt. Various parts of her body sparkle subtly. "Tori's the pink girl," explains Karla.
Tori would look like an exaggerated '50s chick in a John Waters movie, except that she carries a bat purse. Ms. Bat, who's a student at Pellissippi State originally from Baltimore, says she's just as Goth as anybody else. Sometimes she does wear black. "I'm surprised because people don't recognize me. I'm usually known for pink and glitter."
It's inevitable. A Goth talking about Goths attracts other Goths; they accumulate like bats. Within minutes, six Goths surround our table. One young woman wears fishnet stockings and shredded camouflage and purplish-blue eyelids; another wears a spiked dog collar and a T-shirt bearing a gloomy image of the Golden Gate Bridge.
"Some take it too seriously," Karla says, present company excepted. She cites a locally famous example, a boy from a rural town outside of Knox County who suddenly affected an Eastern European accent. They say his ethnic metamorphosis strained his girlfriend's credulity.
"We're all silly," says Karla. The Gothic silence of the others doesn't necessarily signify unanimity on that subject.
A very thin young man named Mike goes by the moniker The Thin White Duke. He wears eyeliner, plucked eyebrows, and a black fedora. "It's not so much a style as a statement," he says.
They make their statements here at 11th Street and at the Sanctus nights at Blue Cats in the Old City, and at monthly Scareoke nights at Ivey's nightclub in Cedar Bluff. They also have swap meets, where they exchange Goth gear. Organized by a local Goth called Erin, they're called "The Ladies of Misery Present...."
They estimate that, based on the website list and attendance at Goth events, there are maybe a couple hundred Knoxvillians who consider themselves Goth, full- or part-time.
Goth style varies from city to city. "It depends on the climate, and the size of the city," Karla says. "Goths in Miami and Orlando wear less." Chain mail and heat-absorbent black cloaks don't work as well in the Sunshine State. Tori says Goth fashions in Baltimore are "a bit more dramatic" than in Knoxville. "The larger the scene, the more dramatic you have to be to stand out."And most agree that Knoxville Goth is a little more genuine than Nashville Goth, which is generally reviled as pretentious. "When it gets bigger, that's when it starts getting false and tacky," one says.
The question of exactly what Goth is is a torturous one even for Goths; it seems easier to explain what it is not. "We're not Satanists," says JaNell, the group's elder statesman, and the most conservatively dressed. She's wearing a black pullover, sure enough, but nothing spooky. "We have Catholics, Methodists, Jews, some Pagans." They say that among their most devout Goths are a News Sentinel reporter, semi-pro wrestlers, a Rohm & Haas chemist, and a couple of other regular folks "who build robots to defuse bombs."
Karla cites another prejudice. "Not all Goth boys are gay," she says. "And not all Goth girls are straight."
The Thin White Duke adds, "All Goths can be summed up, 'We are dark.'" Tori Bat, in her pink ribbons, sits politely as the exception. To all Goth rules, there are Goth exceptions. That's what Goth is all about.
Even without the youth culture, the word Goth is troublesome to define. It has taken some unexpected turns in the last 1,600 years, its complicated evolution reflected in its many definitions. Gothic can mean "Germanic"; "barbarous"; "pointed at the top"; or "gloomy and mysterious." Gothic architecture, which is not Germanic in origin but French, tends to be elaborately ornamented. But the Gothic typeface is one of the plainest and simplest of all.
The original Goths were the Germanic barbarians who overran the Roman empire in the 5th century AD. They weren't known to be particularly mysterious people; their needs and urges were simple ones. If an actual Goth, a Visigoth or Ostrogoth, perhaps, showed up at Hot Topic, the Goth supplier in West Town Mall, the Goths who run the place would call security, and wisely so.
However, in the meantime, the word Gothic had taken on a second meaning. In France, between the 12th and 16th centuries, architects began assailing some rather daring stunts with stone, yielding vaulted ceilings, high-peaked windows and slender supports. The style was called Gothic, for reasons mysterious: the actual Goths, already a people of the misty past, had been better known for tearing things down.
In the late 18th century, about the time that Knoxville was founded, Gothic had molted again, acquiring still another meaning. A certain school of European intellectuals, in a sort of rebellion against the sunny, hyper-rational Enlightenment of Descartes and Hume, insisted that even after everything was explained by the philosophers and scientists, there was plenty that didn't make sense. They celebrated the world's remaining shadows in novels and poems of mystery and horror. Perhaps because they rebelled against classical forms much as the Visigoths had rebelled against classical Rome, they called themselves Gothic.
The earliest novels of the sort, like The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, were published in the latter 1700s, but the best-known would be Mary Shelley's 1816 story about a misguided scientist who brings the dead to life. About a decade after the publication of Frankenstein, a physics professor at our university attempted to duplicate Dr. Frankenstein's success with a large galvanic battery and the body of a hanged murderer in a Market Street church. Dr. Stephen Foster was, perhaps, Knoxville's first Goth.
The literary movement was slower to catch on in the U.S., but we had a taste for Gothic literature even here. The first novel ever published in Tennessee was published in Knoxville, in 1832. Woodville, it was called, named for its Byronic title character, and it was a novel of exotic locations and Gothic horror, a rumination about being in love with your sister and murdering her husband. Author Charles Todd, a Presbyterian apostate later arrested for murder, himself, may have been Knoxville's second Goth. He claimed Woodville was based on a true story.
It wasn't necessarily a very good one, though. American Gothicism reached its apex just a little later in Edgar Allan Poe, whose dark stories and poems of the 1830s and `40s horrified the readers of his time and those of generations to come.
But then, it was the dawn of the Southern Gothic, an altogether different school of literature which relied more on absurdist humor than Shelley or Poe had. Knoxvillian George Washington Harris who, from about 1840 to the time of his strange and sudden death on Depot Street in 1869, wrote bizarre stories about Southerners, often indulging in black humor, is sometimes recalled as the founder of the Southern Gothic, which later surfaced in the styles of Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner. But read a paragraph of Sut Lovingood's Yarns, and you'll realize that Gothicism took a wild bounce when it hit the Southern Appalachians. Sut's not so much Goth as hillbilly punk.
Nobody's quite sure when the current crop of Goths started showing up, but most agree that it mutated from punk, perhaps from fans of bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees sometime in the early 1980s.
What was once an underground rumor is now an industry. Karla has brought several copies of Gothic Beauty magazine featuring women in unexpected hair colors, wearing mostly black and red, and cleavage. One ad advertises a CD called Sex, Death, and Eyeliner, which may be as close to a definition of Goth fashion as we're likely to get. One of the hot things in Goth presently is chain mail, which is hard to find at Proffitt's.
The most important question about Goth, of course, is Where do people get all this stuff? Thrift stores are one dependable source, as they were for punk rockers of 20 years ago. Another, for only the last three months, is one of the newest stores at West Town Mall: Hot Topic. Through a pseudoindustrial faux-iron archway, like the entrance to a spooky ride at Disney World, is the Gothest store in the whole mall.
They sell CDs by Goth and punk bands, all sorts of dusky garments, and fashion accessories, like spiking gel.
There's some painful awareness of the irony that Goths have to go to a national-chain store at a happy Simon shopping mall to buy Goth gear. On KnoxGothic.com, one conflicted Goth posts a message with helpful advice: "I just enter through the fire exit next to the store. That way I don't have to see any of the annoying mall people."
Another plugs her favorite store with a manifesto: "most of us are confident enough in our dark and spookiness to accept cheaply made dark and spooky goods.... Lip Service clothes, rock T's, and Demonia Shoes are just as evil if you get them at HT."
The chat group suggests that there's a bitter siege going on in the halls of West Town. Preppy Hollister is just across the hall, its summery front porch facing Hot Topic's forbidding portal. The people at Hot Topic say the Hollisterites have spent the summer trying to get them in trouble. They speak of them as if they're a mob of villagers with torches.
Look around the mall beyond the dread gates of Hot Topic, and Goth seems to be catching on everywhere besides Hollister. A new, gloomy plus-size boutique with the provocative cognomen Torrid seems to specialize in blacks and reds, has been mistaken by casual passers-by for a Goth store. Even in once-sunny shops like Limited Too, a sanctuary for pre-teens, unmistakeably Goth fashions like black shirts with cryptic monkish lettering, are even creeping into the circular racks.
Goth's mass-retail appeal may cause some distress to those who for the last 20-odd years have valued Goth's place as a refuge for the distinctly different. But the folks at 11th Street are making the best of what remains.
"We look different because we are different," says April Renee, the one in the shredded camouflage skirt. She is, this very evening, planning to shave off her luxuriant dark hair to replace it with plastic dreadlocks made of black garbage bags and electrical tape. It's one of the latest things, maybe one of the few ways the true believers of KnoxGoth can distinguish themselves from the mall Goths.
Most of them have stories of being misunderstood. Several claim they've lost jobs over their maligned Gothicity. All get stares and disparaging remarks. Karla says the people most interested in her dress tend to be older ladies. "Older ladies either love my look," she says, "or go ughh."
"If they don't react," says the Thin White Duke, "I wonder what's wrong."
The T-shirts on the racks at Hot Topic bear all sorts of provocative messages. One says, "Thank goodness for strange girls. Without them, what would strange boys do?"
JaNell praises Goth fashions as a way that "a normal-sized woman can be beautiful. There's a way for everybody to look beautiful." She has a point; Goth fashions emphasize cleavage, and the rule with cleavage is, more or less, the bigger the better. Maybe that explains the dark influences of Torrid. Goth women are often plump; Goth boys, rarely bodybuilders, are often tubercularly skinny. Goth makes them all look intriguing—or, at least, that's the idea.
Karla likes to think of the KnoxGoth folks as an inspiration for youthful misfits. "I know there are kids growing up who think there's nobody else who's different," she says. "We're just like them, but we're older. We're here."
Contrary to their image that they're troublemakers, JaNell says, "We're self-policing. We calm everything down. We're very protective of each other." They way they describe themselves, Goths begin to sound almost like the Shriners, and they have at least as much fun. There's even a local Goth paintball team. So far, they've only made war against other Goths.
Karla shows a check in her AmSouth checkbook. The bank has obligingly offered the design if of the ornate interior of a Gothic cathedral. "See, I told you. We're really nothing but silly."
Some Goths aren't even Goth. Some of those who are regulars on KnoxGothic.com, admits the Thin White Duke, are "more Knox than Gothic."
Literary Gothicism was a rejection of the Age of Reason, and maybe of the tyranny of reason itself.
One Goth says they're misunderstood, that black is unfairly maligned as a color of death, that Goths in general have little fear of, or even interest in, the subject of death. But she also insists that their primary origin is the literary Gothicism of two centuries ago, which was very much about the horrors of death.
Another Goth, who has just insisted that there's no Goth uniform, that Goths can wear blue jeans like anybody else, nonetheless announces that he's taking off "Goth points" for this reporter's white buttondown shirt and old tennis shoes.
Goth may never make perfect sense to us rational types. That's what's so Gothic about it.
August 14, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 33
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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