“Wipe that shit off your face, you look like a faggot.”
It’s 1994, rural, rust-belt Pennsylvania, I just came home from middle school wearing make up and this is my mother’s response. The Cure and Nine Inch Nails are my favorite bands. They are both led by enigmatic, tender men who are not afraid to be angry, but also not afraid to cry. They wear make up and play with gender presentation. I sneak into my mother’s room on the rare occasions she isn’t home and steal her make up, to go out at night, always hurriedly, and maybe a little shamefully trying to wipe it off before I get home. I sneak out into the woods by myself and play in borrowed dresses and tights. Small town Pennsylvania, and the alpha male attitude reigns supreme. I’m bad at sports, I don’t want to play them, and I would rather read or write. I cry easily. My mood swings become more severe as adolescence drags on. I hear my friends’ parents whisper about therapy and medication when they think I can’t hear. My mother will have none of it. I just need to toughen up.
My room becomes a refuge. The homophobic jocks at school and indifferent teachers can never reach me here. Music by bands like Skinny Puppy, Front Line Assembly, and The Sisters of Mercy inspires me. That harsh duality I so crave is ever present in the music. There is sadness, yes, but also that undercurrent of revolt against a world which we have no control over. I see it in punk, and I’ll see it again in a few years when I escape Pennsylvania and immerse myself in the Anti-Globalization/Anti-Capitalist movement of the late 90’s/early 2000’s.
Sites of desolation and almost unbearable loneliness start to feel like home. The world feels quieter, safer, I feel more at ease. I wish I could go out only at night. The cemetery, abandoned houses, the woods, abandoned buildings, the remnants of weird, rural, rust belt machinery from an era past. I haunt it all as a teenager. In my head, I like to imagine myself as similar to a small town British Punk Rocker in the 80’s, living in both a world of “No Future” and one of endless possibilities at the same time.
In the music, I find that tenderness I can find almost nowhere else, it’s okay to be sad, to cry. The state of the world is enough to make anyone despair. Its okay, the music holds me though long Pennsylvania winter nights. I can’t sleep, and there is nowhere to go, and nothing but snow and scary rednecks for miles. My adolescent brain finds it analogous to living behind enemy lines. I have the music, I put on my make up at night, get my tights and dresses out of their hiding places. In this space, I feel safe. I don’t have to be such an angry boy all the time; I don’t have to be a boy at all.
Punk is changing my life forever too, but the type of punk I’m finding seems to offer me more cynicism and anger than anything else. It’s a survival tool. My friends think anything beyond the scope of emotions offered in Black Flag songs is stupid and weak. I want to listen to The Cure or the Sisters of Mercy at night after the show, or the party, much to the derision of my friends. I wear make up to see the Oi! bands that were so popular in the American north east in the mid to late nineties, again much to my friends’ derision.
“Why do you have to look so Goth, to go to a PUNK show?”
I’m wildly in love with punk too, but I feel limited. I want to feel. I am unashamed. I want it all, tenderness and pretty boys singing softly in make up too. I feel grounded in my sense of justice that something is wrong with our culture, and all the ways people find to express that sense of injustice, of anger, of sadness, seems valid to me.
It’s like I can see beauty for the first time ever, not some preconceived, prescribed notion of it that exists only on television. I see the world as a beautiful, wondrous, place that I live in, instead of survive in. I see it in my friends, in everything, like being awaken from a long sleep. Most all, I see it in my skinny, awkward, body that everyone has been telling me is inadequate, and shameful for as long as I can remember. I can see myself through smeared eyeliner, and ripped dresses. Though I doubt it, and struggle with self loathing still, it’s like my body can feel my genderqueer future ahead of me, and is begging me to hold on, to stay safe, to stay alive inside.
I’m glad I did.
Now it is 17 years later, and I’m near 31 years old. The Pennsylvania rust belt and my mother’s hateful words are behind me forever. The cold, dark, void of dogmatic Christian spiritual desolation is banished forever. None of them can ever touch me again, never reach that all holy, vulnerable core of my being. I am free; I am born again every night, in eyeliner, in ripped tights, in black lace, in glitter. I see the androgynous divine peering back at me in the mirror. On some nights I can still see that wounded kid who made it through. Mostly, I see our wild, unfettered genderqueer future, and it looks amazing.
In a sense, I owe so much of it Goth movement. It provided a safe space for me to explore, to play with gender, to subvert that fucker. Goth helped me learn how to feel, how to not stifle any emotions that do not make you immediately tough, like so many of us who are socialized as male are taught to. It was a much needed refuge growing up, in what felt like a teenage warzone. It provided a space to explore the feminine aspects of myself in the midst of homophobic death culture. The seed of revolt against the gender binary, that was planted when I wore smeared black eyeliner for the first time as a teenager, has taken root and become the well rounded, fierce, genderqueer adult that I am today. The desire to subvert masculinity in what initially seemed superficial ways grew into an open sense of revolt against patriarchal death culture. Even through moments of doubt, I’ve never looked back, and never felt so blessed that I had finally come home.
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