Goth Girls and Femme Lesbians Should Kiss On The Lips
Written by Leah (Bunny) Overstreet
I love to sink my teeth into spooky season— watching nostalgic Halloween movies, planning costumes, and doing cute ass fall shit. This time of year also gives me the perfect excuse to pay homage to my darker, alternative roots (nearly a decade before I ever came out to my dad as queer, I sat him down in a Waffle House and came out as emo). Despite once being fully committed to a uniform of black skinny jeans, combat boots, and Hot Topic slogan tees, ironically, October is now the only time I can be regularly spotted wearing black. My music taste has remained largely in favor of punk rock, gothabilly, and gothic/alternative metal but my clothing has veered pinkalicious, albeit just as alternative. My love for traditionally goth girls has never waned and my everyday makeup -– massive, hairline-scraping eyeliner that nearly meets in the middle of my nose, white eyeshadow up to my recently thinned eyebrows, dark lip liner, and bloodred lipstick— was plucked straight off the faces of my favorite alternative baddies. I love the exaggeration, the grandeur, the occasion-less drag.
As a child, I was drawn to the scene, emo, and goth divas because they were playing with femininity in ways that thrilled little me. Elvira, Ember McLain from Danny Phantom, Jennifer Tilly in The Bride of Chucky, The Hex Girls, and Draculaura— they all left a black-lipstick kiss on my heart. I didn’t know you could DO that with femme. I didn’t know that femme could be sharp, bizarre, ferocious, and self-serving. While there are, of course, plenty of alternative straight girls— as a grown up lezzie— I still feel a kinship between my femme and theirs. They too redefine femininity outside of the societally expected lens. Even though they are subsequently fetishized (as are lesbians), at the core, their femininity is one that exists to please itself. Alternative dress, like Femme lesbianism, can be a sort of drag.
“ The Femme is a queer body in feminine drag. Many lesbian scholars will argue that Femmes are more related to drag queens than they are to heterosexual women in that they are both constructing their own version of femininity outside of predetermined patriarchal roles”: this line originating from Lisa Oritz’s“ Dresses For My Round Brown Body,” is quoted in an episode of “ Queer Collective Podcast” and has found a third life as a TikTok sound leaving its mark on my FYP. It is the backing track of Femmes all over the world wide web that are twirling and showing off the drags of Femme-lesbianism. It makes my frilly little heart sing.
Even before discovering my own lesbianism, my eccentric clothing and makeup have been lovingly referred to as my“ drag” by my friends. I’ve endlessly essayed and think-pieced about my femininity as this overbearing, all-consuming thing that was too saccharine for the consumption of mere men. Needless to say, this idea of the“ queer body in feminine drag” punched me in the tit. Hard. This idea of redefining femininity on your own terms, I feel, resonates for dykes and goths alike. Both the Femme lesbian and the goth dress for the pure joy of aesthetics but also with inextricable political context. Conservatism is antithetical to the goth subculture just as it is to lesbianism.“ The father of goth — punk — is fueled by anti-establishmentarianism, anti-consumerism, anti-capitalism and anti-racism,” (Lain Patton). Of course there will still be people who try to claim both, but those people just look really fucking stupid.
I believe that so many fems, like me, are drawn to alternative fashion subcultures because in the same ways that lesbian expression is often playing with extremes in a way that is distasteful to the male gaze, alternative clothing is often accomplishing the same thing. The alt gal often plays with vintage silhouettes or fetish wear in the everyday, her makeup is dark or even macabre, her hair can be wild in color or cut into extreme shapes. Much like the lesbian, she may be willing to forsake the admiration of someone outside her community in order to be all the more beautiful to those within it.
“Much like the lesbian, she may be willing to forsake the admiration of someone outside her community in order to be all the more beautiful to those within it.”
Similarly, much of my own experience with being Femme has been about pushing my femininity beyond what is appealing to the everyday man (alas some still don’t know when something is NOT for them) and intended specifically to catch the attention of other lesbians. In my case, over-the-top femininity goes hand-in-hand with my more alternative tastes in ways that both compliment and strengthen the intensity of each other. More aptly put: the alt girl in me and the Femme lesbian in me are sitting at the intersection of this baddie venn diagram K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
