Reply #66: Honestly, most of us aren't doom and gloom. [View All]

Especially we older ones who have jobs and aspirations and education and ahem... money. We're the "perky goths" in general. The baby-gloomers tend to be the depressive sorts, the ones who haven't got their meds worked out yet or who haven't realized that high school is not the end-all, be-all of existence. Most of us are intelligent, driven, interested in building communities of our own and in living in a world where sex and death are things we face, accept, educate about and embrace as natural parts of the human cycle.

I like my dress-up clothes; they're fun and they make people react to me on my terms, not on what ever box they want to put a short, busty Irish chick into. Any tool that comes to hand.... I gotta wear something, and given the choice, I'd rather patronize someone who hand-crafts their materials and works for themselves than some mindless, soulless mall-corp that off-shores their labor and pays their workers nothing.

And there are endless varieties of goth - baby-doomers (post-apocalyptic punk, usually young and not coping with the world well); baby-gloomers (death and depression, in equal measures, usually with a bit of poverty thrown in) baby-bats (rich kids with Mummy and Daddum's credit cards who believe that Hot Topic is the beginning and end of all things both Goth and cool who are playing at Goth to mess with their parents' minds), vintage-goth (recreators of any time period from 1800 to 1949 who are usually disgustingly knowledgeable about a particular era and find it endlessly diverting), retro-goth (recreators of time periods from 1950 to 1990, also disgustingly well-read), elegant-goth (think Marlene Dietrich and Bette Davis), ....

Classification is nearly impossible. We elders are sadly dismissive of the younger ones, usually for their own flaws and lack of development, but so it goes. Such is the case with almost any culture, not just a sub-culture like Gothism.