regard for the Gothic.

The Gothic has become a bit of punchline for the macroculture, for a seemingly false posture, a misanthrope, a social oddity, for someone who has gone "wrong". The macroculture however labels something once and never really bothers to examine it, to get past its appearance because it can't really be troubled to accept something so profound that might upset its limited ideas of what's true. 

And the truth really is that the Gothic is at the deep black heart of the world. 

Mythologies tend to begin with Darkness before the creation of the earth & sky, man & beasts. Even before the gods appear to cast first light, or land & sea marry, there is Night, primordial & chthonic -- it's integral, the canvas against which all is painted, and what's left in those same mythologies after the turpentine of time washes all that creation away in fire & flood, bangs or whimpers. Darkness is the permanent in a universe of impermanence. 

Goths recognize this: That besides being made of stars, we are also just as much, if not more, made of shadow, the spaces between the matter where the invisible desires of gravity and attraction hold everything together. The unconscious recognition of this force is something far beyond the misperceived need to be different, or to belong to a clique, or the compulsion to dance to majestic memento mori music. 

And so often we're asked by both the disrespectful & the sincerely curious just what is the Gothic, and all too frequently I've watched an equal exchange of the dismissive and sarcastic -- and that's sad, because it makes us no better than the intolerant. If we wish to be understood and not just culturally scapegoated by the media and those who don't question its pronouncements, then it would pay to be ready for when the braver passersby do stop and directly voice their wonder at the insight we represent. 

Why care what the rank & file think? Because there can be consequences if we don't. How many times do you see the flicker of Columbine behind the hateful eyes of others? And of course we know those little trenchcoated prats who stroked off to endless games of "Doom" & dog-eared copies of "Mein Kampf" were never Gothic, but damned if the major networks didn't decide to label them from day one as such. Ignorant bastards and their lazy journalism married to the now orthodox pop psych trend of blaming everyone but the individuals responsible. 

While the scene is thought of being predominantly gangly Caucasian teens who feel socially disenfranchised by the norms, this is just the holdover from the sun deprived & undernourished Anglais of an early 1980s London. That stereotype no longer holds, if it ever was an ideal more than a default. Now you go to Goth clubs like Roderick's Chamber in San Francisco, with its sinewy black men & mysterious Asian women, or Toronto's Sanctuary and see violet-eyed Hindu girls doing the kick-and-turn in big numbers, and it confirms that it truly is not so, and that our tribe's beauty & variants cut across all veins. 

Having endured for so long to carve out our hard-won legitimacy, we certainly don't owe anyone apologies nor are we to be held accountable for explanations about whom we choose to be in our grand excess of eyeliner & blackened fingernails, but we can grace the world with a winning diplomacy & patience we're more than intellectually capable of. 

Ultimately, with all the specialized niche media and marketing, there's enough room in this house of alternate ideas for all the subcultures to thrive, while being given the mental real estate to adorn themselves more richly as they grow -- if they are able to evolve as judiciously as the Gothic has. I've just never agreed with anyone that mistakenly thinks we have to be nasty about it when someone wants to take a look over the fence and try to see or understand what's happening in our garden. They may even taste its dark fruit and decide they like it far better. And even with such new blood we will never be the macroculture -- thankfully -- but we will always be present, the shadow between the buildings where the light never reaches, a perfect pitch inside the heart's secret conservatory, the eternal stillness that compliments the pulse, for we really are no less than the undeniable dark at the heart of the world.

#    #    # 

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

on being the Gothfather.

My 20-something friends have taken to calling and sometimes even introducing me as "The Gothfather," which isn't so new, having jokingly been called "O.G." for "original goth" to pun off the hip-hop patois.

And while I would love to take credit for Goth in Tucson as a whole, I'm afraid it certainly isn't true, Gothic Exemplar that I am. But my thinking about it has raised the question: How did the Gothic germinate in Tucson?

My memories of the whole affair remain quite muddled in the haze of clove smoke and Boone's Farm, hypnotized away by silver serpent rings on pale fingers, skull-buckled boots, and a worldwiew outlined in kohl.

By the time I managed to get the car from my 'rents, and a passable explanation for where I was going to stay out so late, there were already maybe 15 or so core people wearing the black. Petite & doll-eyed Little Norma, now dead of pneumonia in the wake of AIDS. Laura & Suki, both evil twins who loved to hate each other. Patrick, both doorboy darling and verbal whipping boy. The antics of our very own local deathrockers Fall From Grace, including the devilish Frye brothers when they were young and cruel. Jen & Jenn, the Dress taller than her cohort, both dommy of stature and attitude, cleavage queens of The FineLine. And the Barbara, so problematically cute and somehow unwinnable. All were larger than life, and I remember it all dearly if not clearly. And then the first blush of those later '80s baby bats, Teri, Leslie, Kim, Emily, Zev, Maxx, and the others. "Trainjumpers", regulars grumbled. But if it were not for those new passengers, our night train might have derailed long ago.

Where are most of them now? Slipped away from the lifestyle, a period disregarded as an acid-soaked tab in the books of their past, or moved & lost to the mists of time. But I'm still here. Like the setlists that still repeat from The 'Line to The Cage, Abysmal beneath The Double Zero, to the Teagarden's Haunted Palace, in the Heart V, a day at Eclipse, through the unshui-itude of Asylum, back to the Surly Wench's "FineLine" monthly, to The Motherland this very night, maybe I am a fixture, a small cultural lynchpin in my own iconoclastic way. The Gothic is mine, as much as I am its.

As much as memory allows I can place the scene's genesis in The Old Pueblo as early as 1986, which would be only 4 years post-Batcave, which is fair catch-up in a pre-internet world. Whether that was by an issue of "Propaganda" landing in a progenitor's hands at punk-indie Wrex Records on East 6th St or an actual transplant from NYC or LA, I'm unsure. I'd emailed Dick Plowman, the in/famous proprietor of The FineLine, but he's probably too ill at this point to shed any light on the matter. The all-ages dance cabaret/bar catered to a homosexual clientele most other nights of the week which supported the what initially was a fairly small turnout. Door counts were soon bolstered by more affluent suburbia punks, peacocked new wavers, skins, and more adventuresome preps, though the night was still felt to be owned by the Deathrockers/Gothics. Bear in mind there was no mall outlet for our fashion, everything was either mail-ordered from specialty locales or self-crafted: Fishnet shirts were actually strategically torn fishnet stockings, black nailpolish was cheap drugstore dark brown Wet 'N' Wild either multicoated into near black or judiciously mixed with ballpoint pen sludge. And, of course, the whiteface. While it seems almost ridiculous now, then it was nearly de rigeur for most, and some really did achieve an alabaster stature. There was a feel of inventiveness, daring, and transgression at that point in time. We were an amalgam of old and new, dark-clad harbingers of an insight we were only subconsciously beginning to define. We behaved aloof & serious as a heart attack to the world at large, but irreverent, glad to be with, and to have found one another. Early social self-defense or ego-mechanism? Probably some of both and the usual exclusionary anthropological earmarks to both preserve and keep us secure individually and collectively. Fortunately we no longer require outward anti-social behaviour to survive.

And why consider the Gothic in the first place? You ask anyone in the scene as to why they wear the black and you'll get likely get different answers everytime. Ultimately there's an attraction and identification that's both instinctive and aesthetic, a knowing, if you will, of this perspective. (See my "regard for the Gothic." entry.) Given Tucson's warmer weather, it's always been harder road of fashion to walk, but Tucson's never lacked a Gothic high-profile subpopulace.

My dedication may sound resolute, yet there's always been a certain amount of purposeful distance. I've watched the drama bomb explode twice in a social holocaust that leaves its damage so that things are never the same again. The second time it actually shut down a venue as the promoter was involved. The scene's a fragile thing, and if it's important to you, then respect that. Even big cities only have goth populations in the lower triple digits, and given how insular a subculture we have, it can take very little time at all for small things to become blown out of proportion and cause damage not only within, but without. I'm not saying we have a proclivity for drama more than say our love of horror literature or Victorian coats, but I know to stay out of it because I believe we're more high-minded than the rest of the world and its celebrity-obsessed lunchroom cafeteria hater clique dynamics. From day one there've always been disaffected people who think this or that sucks or is boring but take closer look at their posturing and see how it really reflects a deficit of imagination or character. Remember, the scene's what you make it, and while there've been some good but unrewarded attempts like Parasite at Matt Bevel and Doomsday at Skrappy's, others have succeeded, and on a personal scale, it's how one lives that makes it a rewarding lifestyle.

So if you want to light your candle from my torch, this so-called "gothfather" would be honoured. And here I'm not only setting the record as straight as I can, but also setting it down for the record itself. It's our legacy. Be glad to be part of that. I am.

[Plowman at the 'Line's third incarnation on Lester St in 1999.]

#    #    # 

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.