It’s Not a Phase Mom

A Personal Essay About the Intersection of Bisexual and Goth Identity

In middle school, I figured out two things about myself: I'm bisexual and I'm goth.

Realizing I was bisexual was one of those things that felt like I had found the word for something that had been on the tip of my tongue for a long, long time. However, realizing I was bisexual was also one of the scariest moments of my life. While that was the case for many reasons, the most pressing was that I was in a small, conservative town in South Texas, where Friday night varsity football games were treated with the same reverence as Sunday morning Mass.

It's a small town that has at least one church for every five residents, and five residents for every six closeted queers who would rather try their hand at traditionalist conformity before even the slightest bit of perceivable eccentricity.

But the good thing about being bisexual is that most of the time, people just shrug it off as brushing with the edges of rebellion with a hearty pinch of experimenting with one's identity. Many of the girls I knew in middle and high school also claimed to be bisexual, but the second that stopped being the cool new thing to identify as, they went back on their word. Whether that was because they were trying to follow some rebellious trend in a conservative small town in the South or if they hid themselves back into the depths of their closet to pretend it never happened, I'll never know. I lost contact with most of them a long time ago. But a word of advice to my fellow small-town queers: if what you call a "phase" goes on for longer than five to ten years, then I hate to be the one to tell you that maybe it wasn't a "phase" in the first place. Ask me how I know.

Being goth, on the other hand, was less of a finally-figured-it-out type of realization like being bisexual was and more akin to finding a way to express myself that felt good. When I was in grade school, I was obsessed with the hippie aesthetic of the seventies and eighties, which I'd see in movies and television. Psychedelic patterns and vibrant colors swirling in endless harmony with flowy and beige knitted cover-ups were all I could daydream about looking like. But then I turned thirteen, and like many thirteen-year-old girls growing up during the late 2000s and early 2010s, I decided that it'd be cooler to be counterculture in a dark, spooky way rather than a rainbow-thrown-up-on-me-while-doing-LSD way.

And somehow, between these two, my mother was still more shocked that I identified as a goth than she was that I was bisexual. Like, c'mon, I was watching The Nightmare Before Christmas every year during the holidays on the Disney Channel since I was six and obsessively trying to write short horror stories for an annual local writing contest that took place in my small town's very own "haunted" location. If I didn't end up goth, I don't know what all of that would have meant.

I've always felt that being goth was just as much of an inevitability as being bisexual for me. It all made sense with everything about me. 

However, as I've said, I grew up in a conservative small town. It didn't matter how many horror stories I wrote, or how many times I could recite all the songs in Corpse Bride, or how many times I watched movies like Beetlejuice or The Addams Family, or how many pictures of conventionally attractive goth girls I saved to my Pinterest boards. I could never convince anyone that I was "goth enough" when I was a kid because dressing like that was just outside of reach. Somewhere between the consistently hot weather and my middle school's dress code, all alongside my desperate need to fit in and not be perceived, there was no way I'd be able to express myself in the way I wanted to.

My earliest memory of exploring the idea of gothic fashion was when I was in the eighth grade. I was part of the National Junior Honor Society, and one of the responsibilities we had was organizing the annual Valentine's Day dance. That year, though, Valentine's Day was on a Saturday. Since we were in middle school, we couldn't hold the dance that day for whatever administrative-related reasons. Instead, we opted to have a dance on the Friday before, which was, obviously, Friday the 13th.

Something that remains true about me to this day is that I don't really do make up or do up my hair. But when you're fourteen and you're going to a Friday the thirteenth Valentine's Day dance and you're trying to be goth in a conservative small town, all the norms you set up for yourself go out the window. I was planning on really embracing my gothic identity for this middle school dance. If I couldn't embrace my sexuality openly to my peers out of fear of ridicule and becoming a social pariah, then I was going to express myself in another way that was at least thematically appropriate.

I remember finding a picture online of a truly gorgeous goth girl. She was what is known as a "trad goth." They believe in themselves, love themselves, and their identities and individuality. Trad goths represented everything I wanted to be. They were my holy bible when the other bible gave me nothing but reminders that my sexuality was, at worst, a sin and, at best, a phase that I'd get over once I got out of my teen years.

After finding the picture of a trad goth girl, I told my mom that I wanted to tease my hair like the photo for the dance. It was a simple request, I thought, and my mother laughed at me.

"No, no," she told me between giggles, "no, we are not doing that to your hair. You'll look stupid."

My mother—until this point in my life, at least—had been supportive of my creative endeavors and my desire to express myself in various ways. She encouraged me to write horror stories for local contests and to pursue the things I wanted that made me feel good about achieving them. She wanted me to feel good enough being myself. However, for some reason, expressing myself through fashion, even in the slightest way outside of what I normally did, was considered "stupid." It was a blow to my ego, sure, but more importantly, it's had a lasting impact on how I express myself to this day, over a decade later.

When I was younger, it was hard enough to love and be confident in myself. I was overweight with asthma and other medical issues that made me an easy target for grade school bullying. When I was about to enter middle school, three things happened in the same summer: I got braces, I got glasses, and my school changed its dress code, allowing us to wear only polo shirts and khakis. While the latter was changed due to the very vocal outrage of my hometown community, it wasn't changed until some time into the school year, meaning that I looked like I had walked straight out of Revenge of the Nerds from 1984 for at least a month. To want, even crave, agency in what I looked like and to be promptly told to my face that it was stupid did not do anything for my self-esteem in the slightest.

It's something I still think about when I tell myself that I should do something different with my appearance in any way. And I think about it when my mom asks me why I keep my hair up in a claw clip all the time, when "it's so pretty when it's down."  Something that she doesn't even remember saying to me has changed the way I view myself.

Whether it's my gothic style or my sexuality, I am so tired of trying to fit in while being ousted just because I don't present in the way people want me to. I am going to be bisexual in the way I want to be bisexual, which means that I will be loving women, and I will be loving men. 

I am also going to be goth. The fun thing about being goth is that there is no one way to be goth, and you can do whatever the hell you want. The only real "rules" to being goth are to listen to the music, as it is a music-based counterculture (though it's fine to listen to Sabrina Carpenter or whatever, you'll be fine), and to believe in the politics, which means no conservative goths can exist (sorry we're cooler than you losers; get better values). Fashion is not only a personal preference, but it's entirely up to you what you do with it and how you present it. I fantasize about the day I can look like the trad-cyber-rockabilly goth of my thirteen-year-old self's dreams. But for now, I will do whatever feels good, whether that be dressing up or deciding that it's an Adam-Sandler-in-a-metal-band-tee type of day.

It's not a phase, Mom—it's my identity. And I'll do what I want with my own damn hair.

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About the Author:

Kaitlyn Winston is a graduate student who loves all things strange, unusual, and downright weird. When she isn't writing or studying, Kaitlyn can usually be found watching horror movies, listening to metal music, and spending quality time with her many cats.

View her website