Teen Gothic

Hi all, I am an old punk but I was around a lot of Goths around probably 1993 '94. From what I remember it was kind of the very beginning of a scene that got bigger later on in the '90s.

I'm writing a country album about my experiences and couple of the characters are goth kids. The setting is a small town, the type of place where weirdos who grew up in the surrounding rural counties would have congregated. Think college towns or tourist towns that ended up with like an LGBT community or other weirdos. I was personally in Asheville at the time but that was not at all like Asheville is today. At the time there were a very small number of weirdos/artsy types in small towns, as it was a lot harder to find subculture since there wasn't really an internet.

The folks I actually knew back in the mid '90s are no longer reachable.

Help me out with some memories: What did you do that was part of Goth subculture when you were being romantic, flirty, mysterious seductive with your significant other "back in the day"?

Was your significant other also part of the that scene? What would date night have looked like? What about if you lived together and had a date night at your place?

I dated one of these pagan goth folks for a while and we were part of a scene that was into the occult. Kinda remember a lot of tarot cards and candles and red wine but I wasn't very serious about the occult part which makes my memories kind of hazy about what my significant other was doing much of the time when we were hanging out.

We and lots of other weirdos used to go to an old cemetery, not that all surprisingly. There was some hanging out on rooftops downtown and a little bit of 'by the railroad tracks' stuff but I'm really looking for suggestions on what to make my characters do indoors on date night because it's relevant to a song. Right now I have a couple of different songs where people are messing around with tarot cards in the candle light but I can't reuse that same image for multiple songs

Bear with me as I'm a babybat. Around the late 1980's and early 1990's, movies such as the Lost Boys, the Craft, the Crow, Interview with a Vampire, etc. were sensationalizing the goth scene, and I think this really gave them a brief period of significant presence within popular culture. I think the Goths of the 90's were a really pivotal point for the scene's history.

Then around the early 2000's we started seeing this "goth" or "gothic" stock characters appearing in media, which more or less still exists in the 2020's, with each incarnation of this stock having lesser and lesser resemblance to its roots.

I cannot really remember a movie in recent time that's meant to resonate with our scene. There was that one movie (name I forgot) where a man becomes a popular Goth singer, and then moves to Europe because his father might have been a nazi or something, but I think that film was trying to more or less mock the subculture because the protagonist "sheds" their Goth-ness by the end.