As the second most goth villain (Bane) once said to the most goth superhero (Batman), “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it.” I don’t want to toot my own horn here, because self-confidence is not goth, but I’m pretty deep in the spooky alt scene. I got married on Halloween. We adopted our cat from Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I enjoy Queen of the Damned, and not entirely ironically!
As a teen coming up in the mall-goth/Midwest, emo/DIY-punk scene, me and my fellow alt multi-hyphenates figured out that everything can be sorted into goth, punk, or metal. Kind of like how all girls have either cat, dog, or bird faces. For example: diseases. Tuberculosis is goth, obviously. Hemorrhagic fever is metal. And gangrene is punk because you’re likely to step on a rusty nail at a sketchy basement show. But it extends to everything — elements (lead is goth, but all the other heavy metals are, duh, metal), architecture, means of transport, or prehistoric beasts (stegosaurus is punk because of the mohawk). So here, on Vulture’s Goth Day, we put you to the ultimate goth test.
