Darkly Read online

  I should have prefaced all of this by saying that the goth that I describe is my goth, the goth of my youth in the Eighties. Since then all sorts of goth sects have emerged, blending genres and merging with other subcultures to form even more specific identities with their own particular accoutrement and markers: Cyber goths, Fetish goths, Rock-a-Billy goths, Victorian goths, Vampire goths, Bubble goths, Hippy goths, Tribal goths, Fairy goths, Cabaret goths, Corporate goths — there was even a paradoxical moment for Health goths… I suppose I would fall into the Traditional goth category or (god forbid) Elder goth.

  Goth alone is too big, too broad, encompassing multitudes of fashion and ever-expanding musical styles. The Victorian goths have their mourning drag, the Vampire goths their custom fangs, Rock-a-Billy goths their Bettie Page bangs. Since fashion plays such a vital role, it’s easy to dismiss goth purely as style or an affectation. But its ostentatious display is a vital aspect of its dissent. Goth represents a resistance to the mainstream, a self-identifying otherness, a skepticism of blind optimism, with a memento mori modus operandi. It is the melodramatic élan to the dull hegemonic culture of positivity. Goth isn’t just fashion, it is a sensibility and perspective on the world, a gothic perspective. Goth style developed from music that came from Britain and with it a European aesthetic, but what if one’s perspective isn’t British or European, or white for that matter? What does that look like? What are the signs and accoutrements of African American gothness? Is there such a thing as AfroGoth?

  Tracey, photo by Fred Berger for Propaganda Magazine, 1984

  In the spring of 1984, when goth was still in its post-punk nascence, Fred Berger, editor-in-chief of Propaganda magazine, spotted Tracy while walking in Manhattan’s East Village. She told him that her favorite club was Danceteria, her favorite record store was Bleeker Bob’s, and her favorite band was Bauhaus.2 She’s not wearing much makeup, if any, and her pressed hair is spiked up just enough to register as punk. There’s no leather or fishnets, no dramatic eye shadow or a surplus of accessories. It’s just a black girl in a Bauhaus t-shirt and to me Tracey seemed gothest of them all.

  Be Blacker

  If I could pinpoint a date when I formally lost any goth affiliation I might have had, I would say it was sometime between 1987 and 1992. 1987 marked the year my family moved from Detroit to Cincinnati, Ohio and in 1992 the Cure released “Friday I’m in Love.” In Detroit I saw all kinds of Black kids: kids into hip-hop, nerdy kids into Star Trek, rich Black kids, poor Black kids, popular Black kids and arty-farty Black kids like me. When I started at Renaissance High School, I slipped relatively seamlessly into a world of sensitive alternative types — young Socialists, boys dressed in black who smoked and wrote poetry, and Black girls who listened to R.E.M. and everyone seemed to be bi. My Blackness was just one of many and not all that interesting.

  When we moved to Cincinnati, I lost my natal clique of weirdos, and if I was just poetically angst-ridden before, Ohio kicked it up (or down) quite a few notches to just boring old depression. Walnut Hills High School was missing the diversity of Blackness that I experienced in Detroit, and I never met any dark-skinned freaks like me. At lunch the Black kids congregated on the front steps, with brightly colored clothes and perfectly straightened hair (which I never managed to master) and they all seemed to have known each other all their lives. I mostly hid in the art room.

  One day, in response to the fall of the Berlin Wall, some students built a wall made of boxes of office paper six-feet high, dividing the main hallway into a makeshift East Walnut and West Walnut. But, this political exercise inadvertently ended up creating a starkly drawn line between where the Black kids hung out and the white kids hung out, evoking more of a Jim Crow vibe than the DDR. And I was on the wrong side of the wall. Again.

  I stayed in Ohio through college, and by the time the Nineties came around, my accessories had simplified and I spent most weekends at gay clubs dancing to techno and house music. I wore colors. I was in the Graphic Design program at the University of Cincinnati and plunged myself into the very un-goth world of Swiss minimalism, modernism, and form that followed function.

  One day I was approached by two students preparing a seminar on “minorities” in design. Since I was the only Black person in the department they wanted some assurance that I would be there and hoped I would contribute to the discussion. They asked me, completely in earnest, if I would “act as Black as possible.” I gaped at them with confusion, but before I could ask them what the fuck was that supposed to mean, they blurted a chipper, “Thanks!” and walked away.

  Of course, I knew exactly what they meant. I knew they didn’t mean I should act “Oprah Winfrey” Black or “Condoleezza Rice” Black. I knew they didn’t even consider “Grace Jones” Black and wouldn’t even know about “Poly Styrene” Black. I didn’t have a crystal clear vision of the Black person they had in their mind, but I imagine they were thinking something loud and sassy with lots of neck rolling and finger snapping. I wanted to stroll in the next morning, fifteen minutes late with a Colt .45 in one hand and a bucket of fried chicken in the other. Or I could have picked my hair out into an Angela Davis afro and stood defiantly head down and fist up. Maybe I’d recite some def poetry? I resigned myself to a silent protest, refusing to participate.

  Out of everything in that encounter, the “as possible” part of that request intrigued me the most. It had inadvertently hit upon something that still haunts Black folks to this day: quantifiable Blackness, Blackness as a scale from “Oreo to ghetto.”3 Challenging me to be “more Black” than I already was, was for them a way to be as “less white” as possible. Perhaps they were worried that I was too much like them and would have a point of view and a frame of reference too close to their own? Apparently, I’ve never been Black enough to satisfy anyone, Black or white. Ralph Ellison described Blackness as “something-else-ness,” a phrase that has an uncanny quality, a weird inconceivability which felt pretty applicable to me.

  In an alleyway on a side street near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, one could spend a Friday night drinking cheap red wine and listening to a lecture on spirit photography or the Anatomical Venus or the Grand Guignol. I was drawn to the Morbid Anatomy Museum by an ad for a talk called, “The Saddest Object in the World,” given by Evan Michelson, owner of Obscura Antiques & Oddities and goth doyenne of New York City. I became a regular there, but as I looked around the room, like most rooms in most places I went to, I was often the only Black person, or one of two or three at the most. Still.

  I started this project with this intent of researching the Black goth scene and what it was like to be a part of a subculture perceived as being “white,” how it felt to navigate a world where you are twice marginalized when you are the only one in the room. In a post-Hot Topic, post-Obama world, in a time when Pharrell Williams was making Blerds (Black nerds) cool, was it even an issue? Was there anything really to talk about? Then I found articles online like: “Goth So White? | Black representation in the Post-Punk Scene,”4 and “Being Weird and Black Doesn’t Mean You’re Interested in Being White,”5 and I began to think that not much has changed since that summer at the YWCA. I came across a thread on a message board which began with the statement: I really hate when I see black goths.

  After several comments mocking photos of Black goth boys and rating the relative hotness of Black goth girls, someone asked, “So’s anyone going to explain why black goths are weirder than any other kind of goth?” There was one reply, “Because their black. Seriously, its that simple. [sic]”

  There’s an acceptance of white weirdness, an assumption that there will always be white folks on the fringes of society with subcultures and affiliations that rebel against conventional norms and societal expectations. But being Black in America is already kind of weird, so despite the mean and racist overtones, that flippant answer was somewhat right. Adding an extra layer of oddity on top of an already marginalized group, flies in the face of “respectability politics” and qu
estions the validity of so-called Black authenticity. It’s a refusal to conform to social standards despite being taught that conformity to those social norms is the dream, the goal, the endgame, to finally for once not be the other. So when normalcy is denied for centuries, the refusal of normalcy is a radical choice. If the illusion of whiteness as the standard of an idealized American persists, Blackness by its nature repudiates that illusion. To then completely reject all notions of standardization is a double condemnation. If lightness is the goal, goth embraces darkness. If white is good, pure, and enlightened, goth chooses black. If gravitas denotes pride, goth embraces whimsey. If Blackness requires vigilance, goth deigns to daydream.

  But materially Black goths are pretty much the same as white goths. Goths in Nairobi dress about the same as goths in New Jersey.6 Goth folks generally like the same stuff, and listen to the same music. These are the things that identify a goth as goth after all. Except that when they go to shows there are fewer of them in the crowd, brown dots in a sea of white. And unlike white goths, they’re, well… Black.

  In 2003 James Spooner released Afro-Punk, a documentary about being Black in the overwhelmingly white punk music scene. The movie spawned a music festival in Brooklyn and has since grown into a global brand encompassing art, journalism, activism, and fashion with festivals in Atlanta, London, Paris, and Johannesburg. Afropunk, the organization, sees itself as “a platform for the alternative and experimental” and “a voice for the unwritten, unwelcome and unheard-of.” Today, the phenomena that is Afropunk, is written about extensively and is extremely welcome in fashion magazines and style blogs as photographers flock to the dusty field of Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Park to document a spectrum of Black Birds of Paradise. There is criticism that the festival stopped being about the music, that its corporate sponsorship is antithetical to its purpose, that its focus seems to be more about photo-ops than punk music, that its tenants of radical inclusion have become more lip service than anything. Nonetheless, it remains a space for Black alterity and self-expression, and is a place where an Afrogoth aesthetic fits comfortably with Afrofuturism, Black Dandies, queerness, natural hair and a general Erykah Badu / FKA Twigs vibe.

  Midnight Bustle by Kambriel, photo by Nadya Lev, courtesy Kambriel

  The proliferation of Afrogoth Facebook groups and Tumblr feeds, provide spaces for goth diaspora visibility in which corsets and vampiric paleness are replaced with African-ish “tribal” jewelry, sculptural braids, beads and patterns of white dots on Black faces, proving it is possible to represent gothicness without representing colonialism. Then I came across a photo of a black girl in a shirt that read SO GOTH I WAS BORN BLACK. After the initial “I see what you did there” chuckle, it occurred to me that this was a rather complex concept for a novelty t-shirt. What is the equivalency between “goth-ness” and “Blackness?” What is it about the gothic, beyond the color black, that is Black? Is Blackness inherently gothic?

  Theresa Fractale, photo by Marko Smiljanic

  Most subcultures have a uniform, a style, a language, a posture, something that unifies people together and identifies the “us” versus the “them” — a prescribed and understood visage that signifies I am one of you. But clothes can change, make-up can be removed, poses can drop. One can feel goth and not look the part. I like a crisp, white button-down shirt, or a chambray dress now and then. I wear little makeup and prefer a single statement ring rather than one on each finger. Aside from usually wearing black, the only thing that would identify me as a “goth” is if I told you I was. However, what I am immediately and unequivocally seen as is Black. I can’t take off my Blackness and change into something else, and if Rachel Dolezal thinks she can do the reverse, she is mistaken.

  When I was accused by Black kids of acting white, or when I was asked by my college classmates to act as “Black” as possible, they were critiques of varying constructs of Blackness, neither of which were me. The specificity of the goth aesthetic is clear, Blackness is not. Ellison calls this tension the “blackness of blackness,” one unifying theory of Black culture clashing with subjectivity. Blackness is already objectified and marginalized, but with the addition of a qualifier (Black + goth) the otherness is doubled. It pushes the margins off of the page. It’s being Blacker than Black and what is more black than goth? If you’ll allow me the This is Spinal Tap reference, there’s none. None more black.

  Goth (or punk or any other subculture outside of the mainstream) exists both inside and outside of society. Goth kids wouldn’t be weird if there weren’t any normal kids to compare them to. Blackness is the same —it wouldn’t exist without non-Blackness to compare it to. Both goth and Blackness are performative identities with foundations in transgression, a familiarity with death and aestheticized mourning, and a keen awareness of the darker side of human nature. Poet and scholar Fred Moten wrote that “black performance and black radicalism” are inseparable, that Blackness comes with a built-in resistance to objectification, and that this is “the ‘essence’ of black performance and indeed the ‘essence’ of blackness itself.” Otherness is Blackness. As Sacha Jenkins from the band the 1865 says, “When you’re Black you’re punk rock all the time.”

  Gothic

  This book is about more than goths. Goth is too specific a term, too loaded with affiliations that aren’t my own. The goth-ness of Blackness can’t be found in the usual haunts, so for that we must go back to its origins and put back the “ic.” The words gothic and goth can mean very different things to different people, but they have attributes that run parallel to each other and occasionally overlap. While they share a similar bone structure, they inhabit slightly different bodies. While both words have different cultural and historical origins, they both conjure the same images of gloom, the macabre, the melancholy, and the romantic. They are both slightly out of place and out of season from the rest of the world and they both take pleasure and comfort in those things that ought to repel and disgust. They both snip off the rose bloom in favor of the thorny stem.

  Cologne Cathedral. Cologne, Northrhine-Westfalia, Germany

  Poster for a marathon reading of Dante’s Inferno, held annually during Holy Week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Client: The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, Designer: Michael Bierut, Firm: Pentagram, Date: 2009

  Goth is a music genre and its associated subculture, but the gothic is much broader in scope. It can represent a fifth-century Barbarian tribe, a seventeenth-century post-Reformation political affiliation, or a medieval revivalist style of architecture. It’s a genre of literature that spans from Mary Shelley to Stephen King. It’s a category of typefaces, ironically not the medieval blackletter, but modernist sans serifs. St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ novel The Monk qualify as gothic, but so does fashion designer Alexander McQueen’s 2007 Autumn/Winter collection, “In Memory of Elizabeth Howe, Salem, 1692.”

  The word “gothic” originates from the Visigoths and the Ostrogoth, Germanic tribes who sacked Rome in 410. The age of Enlightenment brought a rebirth of classical Greek and Roman forms of culture in which everything was to be rational, instructional, proportionate and harmonious. Rome became equated with culture and intellect, and since the Goths busted in and ruined it, “gothic” became a pejorative. Gothic became synonymous with the Middle Ages and a belief in the superstitions, the supernatural, the obsolete, and outlandish. Gothic architecture with its spiky, skeletal, overly ornate arches, was considered vulgar and barbaric. Gothic novels and their neo-medieval romanticism were thought to be a bit trashy.

  In the mid-eighteenth century, a new form of romantic literature emerged that renounced the rationality of neoclassicism and embraced the phantasmagoric. The dull predictability of scientific reason did not have the same thrill that comes with submission to uncertainty. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, was a throwback to the age of chivalry that centered on old familial curses, doomed romances, and tragic deaths. Complete
with dark passageways, trapdoors, mysterious noises, and paintings that move by themselves, it is considered to be the first gothic novel, and would set the tone for a genre spanning from Edgar Allan Poe to Scooby-Doo.

  Gothic is less of a genre and more of a mode, a way of thinking, more of a sensibility than a style. While England is the birthplace of the gothic, the ingredients that make up the aesthetic allows for a fluidity that opens up a reading not limited to Europe. Gloomy skies, desolate landscapes and decrepit buildings are not the sole domain of the United Kingdom and not the only topographical and meteorological means of establishing gloom. Darkness is everywhere, even in oppressive glare of the noonday sun.

  American Gothic

  “My name is Fountain Hughes. I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. My grandfather belonged to Thomas Jefferson.” Hermond Norwood recorded his interview with “Uncle Fountain” as he calls him, in Baltimore, Maryland in 1949 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) program. There’s a pause after he introduces himself and you can hear the sound of dishes clinking together over the soft hiss of the recording. There’s an occasional car horn and squeak of a chair. Hughes lectures him about the dangers of debt and how at the age of one hundred and one he doesn’t owe anyone anything. “Don’t spend your money before you get it. So many colored people head over heels in debt.” Norwood asks him how far back he can remember, and he says, “Things come to me in spells. I remember things more when I’m laying down than when I’m walking around.” He begins another train of thought about children’s shoes and how he didn’t have a pair until he was twelve years old. Norwood asks him who he worked for and he responds, “You mean when I was a slave?” He talks about the slaves on the auction block being bought and sold like cattle, about his master not being too bad. He talks about trying to survive after they were freed, sleeping wherever they could, let loose into the world with no money, no education and no home. His voice is softer, sadder, and while I want to know more, I miss the passion and vigor he had when he was talking about fiscal responsibility. The recording is clear, the voice loud, the fidelity is better than the last conference call I had on my cell phone. While he may be long dead, Fountain Hughes sounds like he’s right here, right now, and I’m reminded again that there are only few generations between me and Monticello.