Because I travel effortlessly between worlds like a Philip Pullman character, I was happy to attend Gothic.net’s site relaunch party last weekend at Bar Sinister.
(Also, all my whites were in the wash.)
Gothic.net looks like a website Edward Gorey might have designed if Clive Barker had returned his calls; if there were a whimsical Cenobite, he may spend some time here.
“We launched in 1995,” said site co-founder Amelia G. (who may be better known as the doyenne of altporn pioneer Blueblood.com), “back when there was a real difference between .net and .com. The .net signified a community, and we wanted to put together a community of people interested in the lifestyle aspects of horror.”
Gothic.net dutifully reports horror-related film, literature, and music news, and is preparing to publish its first anthology.
How altporn people and horror people spend their private time is probably very similar, though publicly the millennial goth crowd at Bar Sinister was overwhelmingly pale and leather-clad, not necessarily overtly sexual as much as dressed to prepare for a fashionable apocalypse.
Bar Sinister isn’t a location, but a weekly goth and fetish party at the Hollywood club Boardners. Saturday was a rainy night, and I parked about a mile away so that I could walk, drink in the terror, and see what else was going on along Hollywood Blvd. I passed several clubs with the same thing in common: tiny women in tiny dresses, walking in pairs, clutching themselves against the cold. It wasn’t throw-up time yet by 11:30. Still, I avoided gutters.
At Bar Sinister the place was jumping. A private room upstairs featured the sort of things I usually see at parties these days: some spanking, a light crop here and there. Downstairs were go-go dancers and a DJ playing The Cure on a MacBook. I met the charming writer Maria Alexander who, among numerous credits from horror to humor, also wrote the Haunted Mansion entry on the Disneyland web page.
“That gives me cred universally,” she said.
I recognized almost no one, bringing home the fact that Los Angeles is a huge city and the idea that community is a relative term.
“In the towns most people come from, you see the one guy wearing a leather jacket and you know what his story is,” said Amelia G. “In Los Angeles you can’t be too sure.”
In the crowd were April Flores and Carlos Batts; she very red and white, he very black, like the flag of Yemen in porn form. On stage was an excellent band featuring a baritone sax player, a tenor sax player who doubled on bass, and a shrieking alto guitar player with an attitude named Mather Louth.
Like in the gothy Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler,” eventually The Darkness overtook us, and I had to leave. Was it bad luck or could-have-been worse luck that I got an $88 ticket in a midnight-to-1 a.m. parking trap but I arrived just in time for my car not to be towed?
Photo of the model Malice (no, really, her name is Malice) by Tim Sin (no, really, his name is Tim Sin).
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: “Backstage Passes”: Gropey groupies and pre-”Twilight” vampires; Artporn elite remember David Aaron Clark with wine, cheese, castration; The Cropping And Flogging of O
See also: Gothic
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