"My Life is One Big Dark Room" : Refelctions on Teenaged Gothdom

My room smelled like patchoulli and smoky Sandalwood incense that i picked up on St Marks Place.... candles burned and i would lay on my bed staring at the too red lips of Robert Smith.....However...Mostly I flipped through the pages of grainy black and white magazines......Sometimes literally photocopied pages...sent through the mail or purchased at some musty shop with a frightwigged proprietor.....I would play loud sad music and stare at the powder white faces  imagining  myself a beautiful slim androgyne wandering through an overgrown cemetery......eyes thrown heavenward...

For awhile these magazines were my only solace...a way of feeling part of something bigger...a way of creating a ripped and ragged community.... a style bible....a secret society.....I was often more interested in the models than the bands...these people like me who desired something dark....children of the night who wore their hearts on their sleeves and rubbed their eyes black with kohl.... who pulled  fishnets over slender limbs and danced like wild animals in pointy leather shoes ..... 

Pouting and posing...playing with sex and sexuality....lovely and lithe.....it helped form my aesthetic and feed my desires.....i wanted ...i LUSTED....i...became..... I saw myself reflected in the stark images and it made me feel powerful....It gave me a strength i didn't know i had....it gave me immense pleasure..... i imagined tangles of pale bony limbs...red red lips pressed against hot flesh...toungues tangled and hands grasping while music thumped with tribal intensity..... Sins of the flesh made all too real....

And though this wasn't the whole of my life it gave teenage me a little bit of hope....alot of desire...and made me feel...like i was a part of something bigger...and darker... and even though sometimes the magazines took themselves a little too seriously...and sometimes they were more ridiculous then sublime....I still appreciated them for what they were....and what i learned from them...

And  time has passed...and the world has changed so much....i still appreciate this dark aesthetic and remember the reverence i had for it and how it inspired me so....and how still some of the images evoke such emotion and desire in me...even after decades pass.......

XOXO

"Love Me , I said, With My Hands in Your Hair......"