my "dark side" has always been subtly hiding under the surface my whole life... As a kid it was Adams family and Beatlejuice I enjoyed on TV (i only got two channels), I liked monster movies (read vampire) and other horror. 1994 was the year I really delve into it, sort of... I didn't really know what it was, but it all started with seeing a movie poster for "The Crow" (cliché i know... but hey, whatever) and it really peaked my interest. I really dug the soundtrack and a new friend in jr. high informed that his dad had all these bands in a HUGE record collection in his basement... So I spent several month making tapes of anything that caught my eye or ear... That got me into the Goth/New Wave/Hard Rock/Metal of the 70's, 80's and early 90's

Being a westcoast teenager in mid 90's however drew me into the grunge rock of the 90's for a spell, but at least I had Smashing Pumpkins

I never lost my collection of tapes though and they were replaced by CD's and MP3's in time... I got "back on track" when I was 21. After going through a rather depressing breakup (cliché I know... but you'll see this becomes a theme) I broke out all my "old music" and reconnected with a lot of it, this would also be about the time that "Symphonic Metal" was starting to make it's way to my end of the world. Almost for a joke, I bought myself my first trench coat at the local thrift store. It was rather perfect and I have never found it's like again, however it gave me a rather odd problem, I couldn't bring myself to wear anything other then black with it...

So there I was at 21, in my new favourite coat, wearing all black and a set of boots. I was feeling depressed about myself, listening to The Cure on the hood of my car outside a coffee shop 2am. It was after a local pub concert (Bif Naked) when I got into a discussion about music with metal head that frequented the same coffee shop. He made an off hand comment about me being Goth and I kind of blinked... he said "Dude, go look it up..." which I did right after i finished my cigarette, black coffee and bad poetry for the evening...

I'm trying to wean myself off coffee with sugar in it. I need my coffee to be black like my despair

I see you're a "Crow" fan too? It was from that movie I wanted a leather trenchcoat, and later on the desire grew from watching the first Underworld movie. Oddly, The Matrix Trilogy comes in as a third source of inspiration. As much as I like those movies, I don't watch them enough.

Surrrre, I listened to a lot of Marilyn Manson in my teens.... but really I wanted to emulate Eric Draven and later a Death Dealer (the vampire warriors from Underworld) more than be a Mansonite. Thirdly, I wanted to invoke the awesomeness of Neo

I did go as the Crow once for Halloween though.

The more I think about it, the more I remember some Gothic tendencies I had...
Once, when I was about 10 (A few months before I started realizing my Darkness?) a friend asked me if I was going to be Goth when I was older. I wasn't sure why she had asked (though another friend told me it was because I wore black pants often... Though I did wear colour quite a bit because it was what I had... -.-)- I said no. But I obsessed about it a little bit, as if, maybe I wanted to be and was hiding it from myself...
I also remember being in love with this relaity show on television. It was called Estate of Panic and took place in this dark and creepy mansion at night. (My dream home!) Unfortunately for me, they canceled it after only a few episodes...

I was 32! (I'm 35 now)

I'd always been attracted to the darker side of life and it was only on searching the net because I watched NCIS and loved Abby that I found out what goth truly was. I just merged it with my being pagan and started to dress in the black clothes I loved rather than the nasty and garish stuff that "fashion" dictated I should be wearing (as a plus-sized woman, some of the stuff out there would have made me look like a walking, flower bedecked barn!!)

So, as the dock worker in Ghostbusters 2 says when the phantom Titanic arrives and starts disembarking ghostly passengers... "better late than never"

Just brought back so many memories of how I would write these crapic (part epic, part crap; they were pretty damn long and descriptive but so angsty and dark) poems about how much I hated the people who made my life miserable.

I would have had potential if I wasn't so unhappy at the time. :P

If I had actually read Byron, Shelley or Keats back then I might have had some hope. I had only read Poe.

I think I was seventeen (I'm eighteen now) when I finally embraced it. Senior year of high school.

I've always loved dark things (sounds like everyone else on here, I'm sure), even when I was little, although my mom tried (and still tries) to stear me away from it. I was never allowed to be anything dark or creepy for halloween because those things were considered "dark". But I always wondered what was so bad about dark things. I wondered what was so wrong with witches and vampires and ghosts who (I believed at the time) were born with their deformities and powers. The idea that there was something more to these dark things that my mom was so afraid of intrigued me.

I didn't really start getting into darker things until I read Twilight in seventh grade (silly, I know). My mom was against me reading it at first, but I showed her that it was nothing more than silly romance. It did make me look up darker things, and strangely enough, I watched Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time because of it (it's my favorite Christmas movie, now). Before the book got popular (Twilight), the kids in my class told my friends and I that we were "weird goth kids" for reading books about vampires.

Curious, I searched for "goth" on Google, and found this site. I didn't even realize that the things I already liked were sort of "trademarks" of goth (like a love for darker things like nighttime, graveyards, monsters, Edgar Allen Poe , etc. ) I looked up the music and fell in love. Even though I used to dress the exact OPPOSITE of goth (I wore pink everyday with high pigtails with bows on them...*sigh* those were the days) people used to call me "that pink goth girl". I stalked this forum a little more (still didn't join, though, because I was afraid that my mom would freak out. I don't think she knows now, but I no longer care) and officially became goth my senior year of high school.

My mom has started to notice my change in dress and interests (although nothing's really changed, she's just starting to notice them), and has started giving me lectures on how "I should be more black," and "black kids shouldn't dress that way" or "that stuff is evil". But I really don't care.

I'm still trying to get everything together as far as clothes go (after almost a decade of wearing nothing but pink, and no money, my gothic wardrobe is very, very limited), but I know that clothes aren't what makes someone goth, it's the attitude (and the music).

I still have to go out to a goth club, though, but there are none in Detroit or the burbs nearby. Even so, I don't think any of my friends would go with me.

Gigglez.

My ma did the "that stuff is evil" bit but never the "you should be more black" thing. It's probably because she's as much of an outcast from most black people as I am.

In fact, my whole family is made of race traitors. :P

Story of my life. I get ragged on because I'm the exact opposite of the "stereotypical black girl" (natural "nappy" hair, listen to metal and goth music, etc) What's weird is that now that I am in college, some black people I meet like the goth thing, but are afraid to do it themselves 'cuz they don't want to be "outcasts".

I told them to join the dark side, but they don't want to listen. Meh, their loss.

Next time your mom tells you you need to 'be more black' tell her that you are embracing your roots by loving your natural hair.

Haha, trust me, I tried. She still doesn't "buy it" (even though it's the hair I was born with).

One of the longest-running gents in Ann Arbor's (tiny) goth scene is a Black guy who rocks a bit of a deathrock look. He has a patch on the arm of his jacket that says "I'm So Goth, I AM Black". If that doesn't help, become acquainted with 4AD group Colourbox --a different sound from the bands normally associated with that label, but their first singer's voice got kinda spooky at times. Wouldn't be out of place following up some of the poppier Siouxsie songs.

:O

Holy shit - where have these guys been for most of my goth life?!

I want to say that Detroit's goth scene would be a bit more diverse, but in all honesty, I can't really say since I've never been to any of the goth clubs around here (most prominent is the Leland City Club, which I hear from some people is full of posers or something).

To a lesser extent, we have had a greater turnout at the World Steam Expo. P:

Yeah, living in Metro-Detroit and Ann Arbor never really impressed me. There's not really a night left in Lansing to speak of (at least not that I've found yet, but I only go looking when I have money, which is a rare thing these days, even though my rent is $100less than it used to be). Factory @ The Nectarine Ballroom (now "The Necto" -- but yeah, I lived in Ann Arbor that long) kind of sucks; last time I was there, the only people really dressed up was the couple who always come head-to-toe in latex, and more than a few people were more homophobic than I was really comfortable with. When I was in Chicago earlier this year, Late Bar has a great night called Bittersweet --a good mix of 80s and 90s music, and some newer stuff that hasn't, in the owner's words, "sold out to techno"-- but yeah, that's not doing you much good.

...but yes, always glad to pass on music to people. If you've got slsk, I'm YoungSoulRebel, and my sharefolder is broadly organised by genre -- I can be kind of nit-pinky about what goes where, too, and am prone to shufle things around when the mood hits me (just as a warning).

-- Wed Nov 30, 2011 5:30 am --


I can beat that

When I was four, I wanted to run away to live with The Munsters (only made it as far as the library at the corner, cos that's as far as I was allowed to go on my own). When I was five or six, I read this book for children about Egyptian mummies and, according to my mother, soon after attempted to mummify roadkill. Also about then, my sister started dating an exchange student who was into the goth scene (they're about thirteen years older than me), and soon after married; he was always nice to me and not in the condescending way most adults were, so thinking on it, that's probably what solidified it for me.

I didn't know there were clubs around Detroit/Pontiac/Ann Arbor that actually played music that wasn't "Top 40" pop. Which I don't mind, but the majority of the guys that go to those kinds of clubs (that I've seen) are creepy-guido-jersey-shore wanabees.

But I digress.

FairyInBoots: Haha I remember the Munsters! They used to scare me. Actually everything scared me until I was ten...