Cracked Sanctuary Walls

Reevaluating Goth Culture

When I was 16, I moved from New Orleans to Wheaton, Illinois, where one of my high school classmates famously wore a black trench coat every day. At an assembly, our Dean respectfully confirmed that he understood there to be a number of goths at our school and he trusted us all and knew we were good kids, and he would never tell us not to wear trench coats, because he didn’t have to. Trench coats weren’t the problem and neither were we. The reason why this was a significant declaration from a high school authority figure is because the Columbine school shooting had just roiled the country and schools across the nation were implementing panicked dress code restrictions.

I am forever grateful to Dean Dunn for defying news media’s implicit order to take note that the Columbine shooters wore black trench coats and listened to heavy metal. These interests, I can still hear the anchorwoman saying, were ignored warning signs pointing to their being “part of a dark subculture known as goth.” My classmate in the trench coat was convinced that the moon landing was a hoax and passionately asserted this in History class when it came up, citing, as his evidence, that there are no stars in the iconic footage of the walk on the moon. “There are stars,” someone argued, to which he retorted, “Yeah, crappy stars.” That was as close as he ever came to really stirring things up. During finals week, he coped with stress by eating peanut butter out of the jar after he turned in his tests. He flew his freak flag, but he was no danger, and Dean Dunn knew the difference.

Still, the immersive nature of goth culture tends to draw people who want to escape from their day-to-day lives — for a spectrum of reasons ranging from vague frustration that no one understands them to severe abuse and trauma. The alternate worlds that their creators make possible serve as a fortifying sanctuary. But part of what draws us in is risk — the vampire lover, for example, who if he chooses not to kill you will make an immortal killer of you — and where you have masses of socially marginalized young people hungry for connection and thrilled by risk, you have a vulnerable audience, and a responsibility not to abuse that vulnerability.

Anne Rice, for all her theatrical arrogance, was only ever responsible in her gratitude toward fans. When people asked her, “How can I contact Lestat?” she said, “Trust me, you do NOT want to contact Lestat.” It’s not safe, she told them. She’s deservedly criticized for her litigious attitude toward fanfiction, but there are people with Rice-sized egos and litigious minds who will never help scores of lonely readers imagine vivid sensuous possibilities for their lives. She never used her power to prey on anyone’s vulnerability, and when I visited the Anne Rice archives at Tulane’s Special Collections in New Orleans last year, I was moved to find multiple folders dedicated solely to fan mail. Letters, paintings, locks of hair — she kept it all. And what the hand-written letters had in common was their thanks to her for revealing a world which — from their Evangelical or Catholic or small-town confines — they had never felt possible. A world in which they were free to be queer, free to philosophize, free to explore their sexuality or their senses in general. They were not unseen anymore, and they likely didn’t know this was literally true and that she’d treasured their words until the day she died.

I’ve read Anne Rice’s hardcover notebooks, which she kept from the early 60’s until 2016. She does not hold back in these notebooks, which is why she stipulated in her will that they not to be publicly available in her achieves until after her death. She documents her struggles with alcoholism, including pages of unreadable scrawl punctuated with “I’m drunk,” and she laments that she’s too literary for “popular” literature and too popular for “literary” books and will anyone ever read her work? She talks about fights with her husband Stan, and about being in love with someone else and having to make impossible choices, and later when she reaches fame she rants against the new Joyce Carrol Oates novel, saying that it starts out promisingly but disintegrates. She does not talk about interactions with fans.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, was quick to tell a 23-year-old journalist in 2013 that he’s happy to run into “beautiful, poised, adult young women, a little bit younger than you, who tell me that Coraline saved their lives, got them through late childhood.” Answering a question about the most memorable tattoos related to his work, he told Reddit that there was “a young woman who had me, or at least, my face, tattooed on her upper inner thigh.” He praised it as “a really good likeness,” but even though he admits that it “must have been off-putting for friends of hers who weren’t expecting to have me watching them,” he doesn’t sound put off himself. I hope you would be creeped out to discover that a stranger had your face tattooed on their upper inner thigh.

For those unfamiliar with Gaiman’s work, he became a goth icon for a certain generation when the Sandman comics opened up new possibilities for the graphic novel form. Incorporating elements of different mythological and folkloric traditions, Sandman’s main characters are the Endless, human-like incarnations of life’s most enduring states: Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Destruction, Destiny, and, my youthful favorite, Delirium. Delirium was born Delight, but suffered a breakdown when she felt abandoned by her brother Destruction. Delight, a cheerful girl in a pale blue dress, became Delirium, who, when not a girl in ripped fishnet with half-shaved hair speaking semi-incoherently in psychedelically-colored word balloons, could transform into a school of fish.

From there, Gaiman wrote haunting short stories and novels, and amassed fans who borrowed their sartorial sense from Death’s look (which was in turn shaped by the real-life aesthetics of Cinamon Hadley). Decades before gender-fluidity was an element of queerness widely recognized, Sandman’s androgynous Desire showed up at a BDSM club where Delirium was crying because a woman she had mistaken for her sister Death turned out to be just some goth chick. “I want my sister!” she yells, wrecking the sultry vibe of the place. When Desire shows up to calm her down, the bartender asks, “Who are you?” Desire replies, “Well, sometimes…” and the rest of the answer gets its own panel: “I’m her sister.”

I still get a jolt from that line, with almost the same impact as I did when I first came across it as a queer teenager. Gaiman saw us in ways that the adults around us didn’t even know existed. For that, we adored him, and lapped up his carefully-contrived image. Today I might raise my eyebrows if someone told me he had closets full of leather jackets and refused to be seen without one even in sweltering Florida heat, but back then? I just thought that was the fucking essence of cool, as leather jackets have always been and ever shall be.

Friends of mine always seemed to end up where Neil Gaiman was, but I was in my 20’s before I had an opportunity to see him read. The free event took place in a Chicago church, and the line wrapped around the block. Contrary to the usual format of such things, the Q&A was scheduled to take place before the reading, likely because a third of the city’s population had turned up and we all had questions. Microphones were placed near the pulpit, and I accepted that I would be standing in the back of the crowd for a while before my moment came.

But I was more visible than I thought I could be, and after the third or fourth question Gaiman said, “Do I see someone on crutches in the back there? Can we get them to come to the front so that they don’t have to stand?”

All eyes were on me, now, the whole church, and I walked down the aisle as though I were getting married or accepting an award. On both sides of me, the audience burst into applause, as though Saint Gaiman and/or I had actually done something worth lauding, and every pair of eyes felt like cameras. I felt humiliated and self-conscious, but I could tell by the applause that I was supposed to be grateful, so I relaxed my shoulders and stood up straight and did my best to feel what I was supposed to feel. My question felt anti-climactic, flat, after this cinematic build-up, but I didn’t have another one in mind, so I asked it: “What’s your greatest fear?”

He said, “Saying the wrong thing,” and went on to explain that as a Brit, he’s DNA-level obsessed with etiquette and propriety and feels deep anxiety at the thought of misstepping in any way. This is, in retrospect, an unexpectedly fraught answer, because he’s now facing brutal allegations of sexual assault from more than one woman, one whom he met at a signing when she was 18 — a fan, like me — and one who alleges that it happened in 2022 on the first day that she was working as his son’s nanny.

Whatever the results of further investigations underway, something in goth culture seems to invite dubious power dynamics. Joss Whedon, revered creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was also the subject of an in-depth profile detailing allegations of sexual harassment on set. I watched that show religiously from its first airing when I was 14, and found much to love and even discover about it as an adult. The draw of immersive worlds that fear no darkness or sensuality never lost their luster. Paradoxically, I feel a deeper need for them now than I did then. I was drawn to this subculture that does not fear death decades before I dealt with suicidal ideation or lost anyone too soon. For me, an adult understanding of grief rendered these worlds more poignant, more immediate, more important.

I haven’t kept up with Gaiman’s work lately and I’ve never watched any of the TV adaptations: Good Omens, American Gods, Sandman. In the summer of 2021, though, I was in the grip of an untreated depression, and initially resisted Ian when he came home from a grocery run and told me that a block party was happening right outside our apartment and I should go. I didn’t want to go, but he said he knew I’d been lonely and wanting to make friends, and it was right there. I sighed and changed out of the loungewear I had slept in, put together an actual outfit, and emerged as someone with a stronger will to live than I’d felt in a while. At first, the event didn’t promise connection: fashionable people visibly younger than me were gathered in clusters, not hostile to my greetings but not eager to do more than return them.

I was about to go back inside when I caught sight of brightly dyed hair that looked supernatural in the sunlight. As I stood there perceiving, the owner of this hair gave me a slight wave, and after looking around to make sure it wasn’t intended for somebody else, I approached him. Like me, he had actually come to this thing to make friends, but, he said, it seemed like most people already had their friends, a vindicating assessment. He had, it turned out, come to San Francisco from Los Angeles to study Creative Writing, so I asked him who his favorite author was.

“I like Neil Gaiman a lot,” he said, and suddenly time caved in on itself and history altered and I was no longer my depressed self in 2021. I was some other amalgam of selves that hadn’t come through what I had come through and I could converse about Gaiman’s work with a flow that frankly surprised me. Not only had his influence gone that deep, it had become something even more vital: my symbol of a hopeful existence.

Well, people aren’t symbols, and it’s morbidly poetic that the influential relationship that conversation sparked came to its own painful impossible end. Come to think of it, my deep connections with people entangled in goth scenes have ended painfully in many instances. I don’t want to give credence to the fearmongering news anchor from 1999, but there might be reason to proceed with caution into a culture that romanticizes enduring sadness and encourages romantic risk.

Which is not to get hysterical about Depeche Mode or the Cure or Siouxie and the Banshees or the poetry of Poe or the novels of Poppy Z. Brite, or The Crow (1994) or The Crow (2024) or Tim Burton or Little Shop of Horrors or Helena Bonham Carter or Industrial rock or ripped fishnets. As Emily Dickinson tells us, “The heart wants what it wants — or else it does not care,” and goth culture is one in which everyone deeply, deeply cares. .

Perhaps this inclination to care and a hidden longing to be cared for is what’s so easily exploited by people who put themselves in the position to lord over adherents of this culture. Marilyn Manson’s former girlfriend, the actress Evan Rachel Wood, came forward with horrific accounts of life as, allegedly, his prisoner, beholden to him sexually and otherwise, under continuous threat. It’s as though the men who create these darker-than-death larger-than-life images of themselves become convinced that the world they’ve created is the real one, and they’re beyond human laws of empathy or respect. Couple that simmering belief with a charismatic ability to charm everyone in media, and you’ve got a uniquely dangerous nexus of power. They don’t just get away with it. They explicitly make it their thing.

Of course, anyone who wants power over others will find a way to get it. Just as Dean Dunn refused to believe there was inherent evil in black trench coats, I refuse to believe that those of us who’ve found solace in the potentially scary have to cast it all off if we don’t want to support alleged sexual predators. “Separate the art from the artist” is murky where Gaiman is concerned: since the dawn of social media, he’s cultivated an active online presence with which he’s cemented his reputation as a vocal feminist, one, in fact, who specifically supports the #MeToo movement:

Joss Whedon famously touted the importance of “strong female characters” and filled Buffy and other shows with explicitly feminist messaging. If this was all a ploy to get young beautiful women to feel safe around them and accommodating toward them, Whedon and Gaiman are hardly the first to employ the tactic. But they’re two whose alleged manipulations were part of influential fictional worlds. Maybe we should’ve prepared for those worlds to be made of cobwebs and tattered black silk and not imagined strong pillars. Maybe we shouldn’t have assumed that people whose art speaks to us understand or care about who we are.

In the wake of these allegations, I’ve seen a lot of people conclude that you simply shouldn’t trust people you don’t know, and that we should never be shocked when someone with Hollywood’s backing is revealed to have abused their power. I had an existential crisis in college when a professor told us about a Nazi soldier who painted while listening to Mozart. We want beauty to obliterate evil, but beauty has never promised to do that.

I think there’s a middle ground between the way my voice trembled when I asked Neil Gaiman, “Can I give you a hug?” and closed-off assertions that there’s no hope for men or no hope for artists or no hope for successful people in any field. I think there’s value in the love of fictive kin and I think that love is worth the risk. The secret is not to feel a connection to a stranger (or their art) that outshines connections we have with the people who do know us, and who’ve chosen to love us for reasons other than the praise we offer them. Resisting the urge to fill in the blanks is really, really hard, especially if your surrounding community doesn’t offer the caliber of conversation or avenue of connection that a piece of art seems to provide. We don’t have to believe that the people whose art we value are better than us, but we’d like to believe they’re not dramatically worse.

When the Gaiman allegations first broke, I had a lot of conversations with disheartened young people who said that he had been a powerful influence on their work: on their comics, on their writing, on their drawing styles, on their very desire to create. I assured everyone that their art was still their own and that whatever might be discovered about this once proudly-referenced influence, he’s not making their art, they are. I said this with conviction, though I was inwardly navigating similar despair. I felt like I had been implicated in someone else’s lie, that I had been one of the enablers who made it possible to perpetuate his alleged behavior. I keep having to remind myself that rarely can anyone be certain about anything. Certainty, ideally, shouldn’t even be a goal.

When a king falls, the people shall reign, or something to that effect. Goth culture has always been replete with Dark Princes, from Lord Byron to Trent Reznor, and maybe where the black velvet brigade went wrong was its accent on the “prince.” We invited hierarchy — is it a shock that artsy men who’d been teased for book-nerdishness in high school were ready to ascend the ladder we built by clasping our hands as a step for their boots?

Night falls over everyone, and all of us cast a shadow. Darkness, in other words, is democratic. Perhaps the castle has not crumbled, we’ve simply lowered the draw bridge. Grief is expected, but the ghosts can take new shape. Anything can be an offering, but we should be careful who we make them to and why.

Persephone and Hades as illustrated by Jade Lynn Goh for my retelling, “A Softer Darkness”