No matter who you are, you're going to be a poseur at some point. No one is born knowing all the intimate details of any subculture and until you finally bring your posing ass into the fold, you're never going to learn.

Just make sure that if you really are interested, you do your research and you ask questions. That's where the poseurs get sorted from the chaff.

~spidey

Just a little reminder, people, that this is not the place to bitch about *other people* who are poseurs or shops that make you mad. And if we just can't find it in our black-clad little brains to keep it that way, I'm more than happy to close it.

Snake Mary, I love your little quote profile thing. Very amusing. But I am currently sort of "working" on rehabilitating poseurs so they're fit for the semi-goth world.

I went through a huge stage where i didn't know who i was and was trying to find a place to fit in. I tried punk for a while, then gave up and tried goth. During the beginning i only wore black, no colors whatsoever. I had a shirt with a tiny bit of blue on it and i wore it inside out. I would only listen to music described as goth. If i liked it and it was metal not goth, i wouldn't listen to it. Hot Topic soon became my favorite store. In about a year, i finally realized who i really was and what goth was. Now, i listen to whatever i want, a combiniation of goth and metal, wear all kinds of colors, and almost never shop at Hot Topic.

Methinks I'm pretty much still in my poseur stage, but hell I think I've come a long way since about a year or 2 ago. I hardly did anything other than just wear dark/alternative clothes, I never really have classed myself as goth. School certainly left me bitter, and for my last year there, I 'conformed' as such, before realising that I'm much more comfortable in my darker attire. I still don't listen to THAT much in the range of gothic music, I'm still more into metal and rock, but I feel that I'm certainly less of a poseur now as I know what's goth music and whats not!

Kitty

My "Le Poseur" stage is described in the old Things you did when you were a more naive "Goth" thread, on page 10. There's not much to add to that, really. Dang, I'd nearly forgotten most of that list!

Or yes - I never took off my armwarmers, not even when I went to work (I was a dishwasher in a pita bar at the time). But that one is boring compared to the aforementioned list.

Goth to me, has always really been a natural thing generally. Not to sound like an arsehat, but I can't really say I've ever been a "poseur" mainly because I didn't discovered the music of the goth subculture until awhile when I discovered it within me.

With music, since it is a large aspect of it other than appreciation toward darkness and that shunned, I first listened to the Cure, then Bauhaus, nine inch nails I never really considered goth but I listened to them at the side of my other favourites such as Christian Death and the Sisters of Mercy.

Captain Nevarre grabs this thread by the scruff of the neck and drags it out of it's darkened, faux-spooky, smelling-of-what-had-sure-better-be-incense, room. Black dye keeps rubbing off on my hand and spiky dog collar bites my plam as the little bastard struggles. Klunky boots flail, tearing jewel-tone posters of lame (but depressing and angry!) bands off the walls and finally we're out the door.

I take said thread out behind the woodshed and finish off what the poseur never had the balls to do for real.

After seven months in its grave, don't you think we can let a little poseur thread go quietly, rather than bringing it back for such public shaming?

Captain Nevarre