JerseyTim: Goths?

Actually yeah. They were big with us. A lot of goths are LGBTQ. Back in the 80s, postpunks/goths were the most inclusive clique in most towns in America, with others rejecting LGBTQ adolescents outright. Stoners, jocks, and preps used "gay" as an insult back then. Gay teens and young adults found themselves in the closet if they were hanging around with those groups, or even when they were with the nerds, band geeks, or other cliques. In the postpunk/goth groups we found a home and family of other social rejects, which is what being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or nonbinary got you in those days of the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ people being openly derided. This was an era when literal gay-bashing-- chasing down gay people and beating them with bats or rocks or fists-- was still very much a thing in parts of the country.

If you went to a New Order concert in 1987, a large portion of the crowd was goth. Actual goth. Not this Hot Topic 2000s goth vampire crap. Most of the time, when people say "goth" now, they're referring to a hot chick showing lots of skin, who wears death metal accessories she bought in the mall, dyes her hair black, and covers her arms in tattoos of skulls and fire and crosses. That ain't goth. That ain't even punk. That's death metal mixed with vampire kid.

This is goth:



This is not goth:



The fact that people have mixed this all up is frustrating. The whole point of us being goth is that we weren't the supermodels and traditionally preppy-beautiful people, and we didn't have expensive store-bought clothes that were custom-made to look goth. We were broke-ass people from varying walks of life, with nontraditional beauty, who thrift-shopped our clothes and used our artistic tendencies to make them look cool.

So again: Yes, goths loved New Order. Big titty "goth" girlfriend archetype faux-goth models did not. Death metal fans and Juggalos who got mistaken for goth (for some reason) did not. Emos did, but we goths did not like the emos because they were purely performative, whiny biatches who bogarted parts of our style but had none of our vibe (emos, who came along much later, were the mentally-disturbed nerds who figured that dressing like us would make them less reviled, but all it did was amplify their glaring personality issues.)

Goth died in 1989. What's left is halloween dress-up and cosplay/playacting, like when people would put on poodle skirts or leather jackets in the 1980s to pretend to be from the 1950s. You can't be an actual greaser, you can't be a flapper, you can't be a beatnik, and you can't be a goth outside of their respective eras.