Oh My Goth

The mortals of Blue Springs put forth a decree that their children are in peril, threatened by a black plague that calls itself goth. In the distant capital, a parliamentarian takes pity on the melancholic young people of Blue Springs. He sends forth a fortune "to identify Goth culture leaders that are preying on our kids."

The word spreads across the land and the Internet.

Wrath and mirth ensue.

Tax slayers make argument. Mordant midnight jesters swarm, like bats to a belfry. The Daily Show mocks the Kansas City province.

And the goths themselves?

At the darkest hour of a Monday night, they arrive at Davey's, a rustic rock and roll club in midtown Kansas City fifteen miles west of Blue Springs. About forty people dance and mingle. A DJ named Annabel Evil spins music as a female performer sets her tongue on fire, then ignites a piece of paper with it. Goths clap.

In the basement, leaders convene. They speak of Blue Springs' intentions. A barkeep named Mokie tells them that Blue Springs authorities called months ago and asked to take photos of the Monday night events for their goth research. They are aghast. They wear black.

Shawn Catlin also wears a pair of old aviator goggles around his head. It's anyone's guess why. He has a tattoo on his belly representing a band called My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult. Thrill. Kill. Kult.

Unnatural spelling.

Most unsettling, the alleged predators talk like geeks. "Shawn's the anomaly, because he can't put a Web page together to save his life," says Phil Johnston, Catlin's partner in this evening's event. Phil grins. Shawn retorts. They snicker.

They smile!

The beats of Annabel Evil emanating from a floor above can barely be heard in this underground lair, but somehow Republican U.S. Rep. Sam Graves' sentiment echoes loud: Leaders that are preying on our children. Leaders that are preying on our children.

Here's Graves' $273,000 question: who are these scary people? Catlin, the guy with the goggles and the tattoo, slaves by day as a manager at the second-busiest McDonald's in town, slinging about $10,000 worth of burgers and fries each shift.

Catlin grew up in tiny Anthony, Kansas. Around the time he entered middle school, he started dressing in black and listening to heavy metal acts such as Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer. He quickly became an outcast for these tendencies.

He got his ass kicked daily. At least, until he hit a growth spurt that left him 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighing 230 pounds. With size came duty in his small school. So he dressed in battle armor and struggled with 21 other young men for possession of an oblong leather bladder for the glory of team and school. "I could have been considered a jock," he says, but even shoulder pads and a helmet couldn't protect him against a more likely tag: freak.

After high school, he got the hell out of Anthony. He went to Coffeyville Community College in southeast Kansas. Then, in 1993, he experienced the goth epiphany at a club in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he discovered people who communicated and dressed as he did and shared his taste in music, which had by then veered deep into the industrial genre. (Imagine a musical backdrop for fast and furious robot sex.)

Two years later, he moved to Denver, where denizens of the goth scene numbered in the hundreds. He met a woman. They moved to Kansas City and, along with Johnston, began hosting Monday-night goth events at Davey's in January.

The woman, Valerie, is at Davey's, too. While Catlin sits downstairs, Valerie is upstairs in the main room, being wrapped from head to toe in cellophane by a woman wearing a black eye patch.

Which brings up a point. Although Catlin and Valerie landed in the same scene and found common ground, their interests aren't identical. She has a sensory-deprivation fetish; he listens to noisy music.

That's the story of the whole small Kansas City scene, where everyone must accept these differences for goth to survive. It's why the music on Monday nights constantly switches from goth to industrial to techno. It's why devotees dressed in elaborate corsets or ruffled shirts and pointy boots socialize with others who throw on black T-shirts and jeans. It's why even those without a fetish for bondage will pay admission to support a goth fetish show. In a place such as Kansas City, the alternatives are limited.

So these goth leaders have created a scene that happily welcomes newcomers. "Everyone here is friendly and nice, and when we see someone new, we go up and embrace them," says DJ Annabel Evil, a cheery thirty-year-old native of Eureka, Kansas, who habitually wears her blond hair in thick pigtails.

"You can make a friend pretty easy in the gothic culture, even if you're not wearing black," says old-school goth Alexavier Strangerz.

A lonely kid makes a few friends. Why would Sam Graves oppose that?

Probably because Strangerz, thirty, looks the part of a PTA nightmare: long black hair, fingernails grown out like miniature daggers, a thin beard that creeps around his face like a serpent and meets at his chin in a bushy explosion. In 1992, while living in San Francisco, the Kansas City native "progressed into" the man he is today -- an artistic, heavy-thinking, musically obsessed, goth-inclined fellow whose conversion was so complete that he legally changed his name -- albeit from Alexandre Strangegroth, itself a revision of Alexandre Strange.