Building a black house in a colourful town

Finding Your People

So where to begin. Lets start by reaching out and seeing what locals we have to work with. Social media and the internet is a great way to do this. You may even find there is a scene locally already that you are unaware of.

Fairly recently on reddit we have had a couple of people ask about a scene in Sydney and Brisbane in Australia. For me being in sleepy ol' Adelaide it seemed rather odd as I know people in both scenes and I know they are pretty active. So I passed on information about where to find out what was going on in each city. If you don't ask, you don't get.

I have found people can be a bit lazy like that though. A simple search on Facebook or Google will find what they are looking for but they don't do it. Search for goth plus their city name will often find something. If not try goth plus nearest big city. If not try goth plus state. If not try goth plus country. If not just ask around where you can. You may need to throw a hail mary internationally and see what pops up. It worked for the Sydney/Brisbane people above.

So you search and search and search some more. Nothing. Maybe you should be the one putting up a flare and hoping they come to you.

The Flare

Make some noise on the internet somewhere. A group on Facebook is always a great base of operations. Make the thing you were searching for. I am one of those people whom if I think the internet should have something on it that I can't find, I'll create it if possible. Creating Facebook a group is easy and it gives people something to look for.

Make sure you tell people around the internet you are looking for local goths, maybe link to the group too. You may even want to tap into near by towns who have a similar issue with no scene. Instead of building a scene for a single town, why not build one for a region? At the very least you can make some friends with similar interests.

At first it may be best to be a bit flexible with how you define goth. You don't want people screaming "Poseur!", "Elitist!" and "Gatekeeper!" (again with that G word, Aytakk!) at each other yet. Preferrably not at all. Odds are you will see a lot of cross contact with other scenes who may or may not think they are goth too.

It may even be so dire that you are building an alternative scene instead as you are the only goth. But thats not so bad as you can all share what you all know and you might win some people over to the goth side with the music. I know plenty of people who don't identify as goth but like goth music and have similar aesthetics.