Piss On Your Conservative Views

There’s a pernicious misrepresentation of the truth that I’ve encountered in recent years: We’ve always been here. The goth subculture doesn’t discriminate. We’ve been a part of the culture since the beginning. You just have to accept us. We have as much right to be here as you.
This sounds like such a common refrain for anyone feeling marginalized that the rest of what I have to say could go either way, and I’d wager a lot of you are becoming nervous about where this is going. I can’t blame you; conversations with people I’ve considered friends or artists whose output I’ve admired for years are now soured when they feel emboldened into coming out as conservative. They even have their own revisionist history (a popular tactic of the Right) that starts with “Goth is apolitical because it was a rebellion against the failed Leftist politics of punk rock.” This twists the facts that early punk was anti-establishment and nihilistic rather than Leftist, but facts really aren’t important to the Right, now are they? I feel no remorse in making a statement against a wide social group, who ironically only wish to see nuance applied to themselves.
Goth, as contrasted with Punk, was a rebellion against only one thing: the increasingly restrictive rules on musicianship that said no goal other than the biggest racket and no theory beyond three chords and one drumbeat was acceptable. There’s a reason that bands in the UK scene were referred to as “positive punk” before some split off and took on the mantle of goth: a contrast to nihilism and the “No goals, no skills” shock tactics that ultimately left more creative minds unfulfilled. A reason this tactic of making unfounded claims works so well and sits at the core of so much GOP rhetoric is that it takes only moments of thought to make up any unfounded assertion, but a commensurate effort to disprove their bullshit is disproportionate. They know this; they bank on it. Part of the “flood the plain” tactic they have used for years is to throw out a number of ridiculous accusations (which sound plausible only on the surface) in order to force people to either spend countless hours countering their statements or ignore them, in which case they claim that not being immediately refuted gives their statements legitimacy.
The crux of the issue is that you can’t claim to deserve a space in a community like the goth scene, which supports the same people your vote for the Right works to actively suppress. No amount of revisionist talk will change this fact. Conservatives know this, and they KNEW it since at least the 90s. The claim of “we’ve always been part of the scene” skirts around the fact that they were never ousted because they were quite aware their political views would get them shunned. These are the folks who said for years “Let’s leave politics out of it” because doing otherwise would have exposed their odious views to ridicule and being shunned by their friends. Now they feel emboldened by recent events to act like they have a say or a place in our spaces because they kept quiet for so long? That’s not how social circles work. We are a scene built of disparate parts and all the more beautiful for it. We embrace the diversity of our parts which are marginalized by mainstream society. In the long-running joke of the “goth card”, voting Republican should immediately revoke yours and get you perma-banned from our table. You can’t sit with us, you can’t identify with us, don’t even address us until you expunge the racist/sexist/queer-phobic views you have that marginalize others.
As a final note: if you read this and feel uncomfortable? Re-assess how you relate to marginalized people. Or just fuck off. We can always be better but it starts with accepting your privilege.