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Authors: Jerry Langton

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These three are all wearing nothing but black and white, though other Goths around also experiment with dark purple and, occasionally, blood red.
Swansong admits that the established hypothesis was true for him. “I had no friends, none at all, not even in my family,” he said. “Then I started hanging around with the Goths at my school, dressing like them, and I had dozens of friends . . . all ages . . . girls too . . . even if they mostly didn’t go to my school.” And his new appearance served as an entree into a larger world. “I went on a trip [to a distant town] with my parents and ran into some Goth kids in the parking lot of a grocery store, and we immediately started talking, hanging out—that never would have happened if I weren’t a Goth.”
Like that other successful fashion movement from the same era, punk (which was initially conceived in Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren’s London boutique), the Goth look is designed as much to anger those outside the movement as it is to please those within it. “People notice me now,” he says. “They don’t all like me, but they never would have anyway—this way, at least, I get a reaction.”
Swansong says he has lots of pleasant (or at least fulfilling) memories of being a Goth, but adds that the consensus in his community is that the golden days of Goth are long over. Two things, he said, have combined to keep Goths away from the clubs: the Internet and the murders. “The murders especially,” pipes in Hellwind. “They blame them on us because we’re different.”
The Internet is a problem, they explain to me, because Goths are generally shy people who are difficult to coax out of their shells, not to mention their homes. And it’s a lot easier for them to make friends semi-anonymously on forums and in chat rooms than it is to actually go out into clubs and face the possible disaster of rejection. Since Goths recruit from those who already feel rejected from mainstream society, not fitting in at a Goth club would be a profound disappointment. It’s hard to imagine how bad it would feel to be rejected by a group of people who got together because they all felt rejected.
Hellwind points out that all the clubs serve alcohol, which means those under 19 aren’t permitted. “And they’re way more strict about it these days,” she says. “When I was young, it was no problem getting into clubs—now they card everyone who looks under 30.”
I take a quick scan around the Goths in the neighborhood and notice that the median age appears to be around 30, maybe higher. I ask about this and my tablemates tell me that there are lots of young Goths, but they’re at home typing away, not coming out to clubs. Making matters worse, the people at the clubs generally feel disdain for the younger, plugged-in Goths.
“They’re not real Goths,” Swansong says, but in our conversation, he has said the same thing about basically every person or group mentioned except those at our table. “And the Internet, it makes them crazy . . . violent.”
The perception that Goths were violent first emerged in 1999 after the Columbine High School massacre, when two teenagers killed 12 fellow students, a teacher and themselves. After the media found that one of the participants had dyed black hair and wore eye makeup in a ninth-grade yearbook photo, the killers were widely described as Goths. Even Diane Sawyer dropped the G-word on national TV.
Although the connection between the Columbine killers and the Goth culture was never decisively proven and is still widely disputed, the link in the public consciousness was made. For better or worse, and true or not, Goths became associated with hateful nerds, ready to lash out at those who had made fun of them in the past. Perhaps making matters worse, Marilyn Manson (a band associated with Goth culture, although rarely by Goths themselves) cancelled three dates in memoriam for the Columbine victims. That sealed it for many.
Of course, other Goths found the link between the Columbine killers and their subculture ridiculous. “Goth is about being beautiful,” Lance Goth (real name: Andrew Lee), then-owner of Sanctuary, told Toronto’s
Now
magazine. “Maybe you’re mourning your existence or the way humanity is, but that doesn’t make you want to get an AK-47 and kill people.”
It didn’t matter; Goths were already identified in the public consciousness as potential killers. After Columbine, the media sought a Goth angle for pretty well every teen crime with varying levels of success. It became routine: a) kid kills, b) media looks in his bedroom and finds some black hair dye, c) media calls him a Goth, d) media interviews local Goths who invariably deny the kid was ever a Goth.
A perfect example came in the person of Kimveer Gill. Large-scale media and public scrutiny was directed at the Goths again in 2006 when Gill, a self-described Goth, went to Montreal’s Dawson College and shot the place up. Despite constantly practicing his shooting for years, Gill proved to have poor aim, firing hundreds of shots that killed one person and injured twenty more before he took his own life after a police officer managed to shoot him in the left arm.
Unlike Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, Gill left the media an easy-to-follow trail of his beliefs, ideas and self-image.
VampireFreaks.com
is an online community for Goths. Users can create profiles, post photos of and information about themselves, and be rated by other members. Started in 1999 as the offshoot of the personal webpage of Brooklyn-based industrial/Goth DJ Jet (real name: Jethro Berelman),
VampireFreaks.com
became instantly popular, as it was the only easily accessible Goth forum online. Now it has over a million users and a number of interest groups (called “cults”). VampireFreaks also releases music CDs of member-artists and sells apparel and other paraphernalia through another offshoot,
fuckthemainstream.com
.
But the mainstream didn’t really notice any of this until Gill started shooting people. When an enterprising Montreal reporter found Gill’s profile on
VampireFreaks.com
, images lifted from the site of Gill posing with a huge knife and pointing his many guns at the camera were transmitted worldwide. And so were the words he used to describe himself:
His name is Trench. You will come to know him as the Angel of Death. He is male. He is 25 years of age. He lives in Quebec. He finds that it is an O.K place to live. He is not a people person. He has met a handful of people in his life who are decent. But he finds the vast majority to be worthless, no good, kniving [sic], betraying, lying, deceptive, motherfuckers. Work sucks . . . School sucks . . . Life sucks . . . What else can I say. Metal and Goth kick ass. Life is like a video game, you gotta die sometime. I hate this world, I hate the people in it, I hate the way people live, I hate God, I hate the deceivers, I hate betrayers, I hate religious zealots, I hate everything . . . I hate so much . . . (I could write 1,000 more lines like these, but does it really matter, does anyone even care) . . .
The word Goth stood out and the media started combing the world for an expert on the subject. They needed one quickly and they found him in Mick Mercer. Frequently described as a respected journalist and author of three books, Mercer was more than happy to comment. He gave the Associated Press his opinion of Gill:
Not a Goth. Never a Goth. The bands he listed as his chosen form of ear-bashing were relentlessly Metal and standard Grunge, Rock and Goth Metal, with some Industrial presence. He had nothing whatsoever to do with Goth.
While Mercer’s opinion became gospel because of the AP quote, something about the stridency of his denial and the pretentiousness of his choice of words seemed specious to me. So I looked up Mick Mercer. He’s a Goth himself and has never written for a widely read or much-recognized publication. His three books on the Goth culture are self-serving and slow-selling. His self-published magazine—which he calls
The Mick
—is mostly about his travels and his cats. It’s free and has no advertisers, but contains many requests for donations. His credentials as an impartial, qualified commentator are iffy at best.
And Gill himself would have disagreed with Mercer, perhaps violently. Not only did Gill describe himself as a “Goth” frequently, but he listed among his likes: Goth everything,
www.VampireFreaks.com
, black clothes, black everything, night, darkness, blood,
The Crow
, ravens, the Grim Reaper, horror movies, demons, Gothic artwork and other dark artwork. Among his dislikes, he listed: normal people, anyone who has anything against Metal or Goth, anyone who has ever said or done anything bad to a Goth girl, and sunlight.
While it could be argued endlessly and pointlessly whether Gill was a Goth or not (though he clearly and frequently identified himself as such), the matter is academic now. Once the media identified him as a Goth and had his
VampireFreaks.com
profile to back it up, people began fearing Goths as ticking time bombs, ready to take revenge on those who had forced them to be Goths.
Jet responded with a press release that said (in part): “Just because someone goes around shooting people and happens to be a member of VampireFreaks, doesn’t mean that this website has influenced him to do such a horrible thing.” He pointed out that just four murders had been linked to the site, which then had 606,000 members. That was a lower homicide rate than the one in the mainstream community, he noted.
Of course, most people found that reasoning specious. Parry Aftab is a lawyer specializing in Web-related crime and security issues and the executive director of Wired Safety, an organization that monitors potentially dangerous websites. VampireFreaks is one of the sites her group looks at most closely, and she claims the group’s members are a lot more criminal that Jet allows. “We’ve had lots of problems with VampireFreaks,” she said. “We’re finding many of the kids who are highly troubled and those who are making trouble for others are gravitating to that site.”
The problem, as she sees it, is that when people collect in sites like these, it tends to “normalize aberrant behavior.” While people might be reluctant to share their opinion in person, they are often emboldened to do so when surrounded by others who they perceive as like-minded.
I’ve experienced this phenomenon myself. I grew up as a fan of a certain American football team. Since they rarely won and were located in a small market far away from where I lived, I was the only fan of theirs I ever knew about. It was a situation very much like many Goths faced—I had an interest that was important to me and nobody to share it with. But once I got on the Internet, I found dozens of forums devoted to the team and spent many hours talking with my new friends from places as far away as Hawaii, Barcelona and Singapore about our common interest.
And there are forums and chat rooms devoted to everything now, from bird watching to child molesting. The theory—supported by many psychologists I spoke with—is that when people talk with others who share their opinion, it reinforces their opinion as correct. When someone has an interest that’s outside the societal norm (or even against the law)—like dog fighting, for instance—they can find like-minded individuals to share their stories and opinions with. And, if you subscribe to the theory, they will be encouraged in their interest and reinforced that it’s an acceptable one to have, in spite of the laws and popular scorn. The theory has been used repeatedly in the pursuit of evidence to use against Internet-based child pornography collectors.
And there is competition for attention among the online communities. “I think the site is starting to breed a different [kind of ] Goth,” Aftab said. “Some of these kids who are troubled know they’ll only get attention on there if they do something different than everyone else—you have to up the ante.” My own experiences on VampireFreaks. com have shown this to be true, as I have seen many members appear to try to be sexier or more gruesome than the rest.
Media scrutiny of
VampireFreaks.com
hasn’t been limited to Canada, although both Jet and Aftab agree that the site is more popular with Canadians than any other nation. In the first part of the twenty-first century, murders and other crimes committed by teenagers identified as Goths or associated with the Goth lifestyle have made front pages in places as widely separated as England, Kansas and Australia.
In early 2006, a 23-year-old Long Island man, Eric Fischer, was charged with rape when a 13-year-old girl he had sex with went to police. Fischer later admitted using
VampireFreaks.com
to meet young girls. He’d arrange to meet them in a local cemetery after dark and then attempt to have sex with them.
The site made front pages again later in 2006 when the bodies of a husband, wife and young son were found in Medicine Hat, Alberta. The prime suspect was the 12-year-old daughter of the family.
She was arrested the following day not far away, in Leader, Saskatchewan, with her boyfriend, 23-year-old Jeremy Allen Steinke.
After the arrest, the story unraveled. Though it has been frequently reported that the couple met on
VampireFreaks.com
, this may not be true. They both had accounts at the site. His stated a fondness for “blood, razor blades and pain,” while hers listed “hatchets, serial killers and blood” as her interests. But a close friend of hers attests that she actually saw them meet at a concert in Medicine Hat.
After their initial meeting, they communicated mainly via Nexopia. com, another social-networking website popular with young people in Western Canada. She lied about her age—
Nexopia.com
requires that users be at least 15 years old—and called herself “runawaydevil.” To introduce people to her profile page, she wrote: “welcome to my tragic end.”
After the parents found out about their daughter’s relationship with Steinke, they grounded her and forbade her to see her boyfriend. A few days later, they and their young son were murdered, and their daughter and Steinke were on the run.
But before they left Medicine Hat, the runaway couple stopped by the apartment of a friend. He also had an account on VampireFreaks. com, but no definitive link was ever established between him and the suspects on the site by local law enforcement. The friend claimed to be a 300-year-old werewolf and performed a “marriage ceremony” that he claimed would unite the couple throughout eternity. Then they ran and, not surprisingly, were caught right away.
BOOK: Rage
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