The combat boots, scuffed and tarnished with age and use, stomped on the cement club floor in tune with the industrial beat. Tucked into those boots was a tight pair of black business slacks, torn and repaired to fit with the scene, mixed with a sleeveless white shirt and loose, skinny black tie. When Ryan Donovan first arrived that night, his hair had been spiked stiff with glue and gel; but soon he’d worked up a sweat and the hair hung over his eyes in thick, wet ropes. His movements were slow, his dancing endlessly casual. Standing next to him, I felt hopelessly out of place.

It was like a scene from The Matrix: supple leather bondage gear and black latex dominated in the darkened club atmosphere, where people of all ages and sexual persuasions mingled, talking along the back walls and filling the dance floor. Putting the scene set before me into the most basic and understandable of words, the crowd seemed to be a mix of two different types of people: exhibitionists and voyeurs. On the dance floor were the exhibitionists, where the ladies, who moved effortlessly to the forlorn music, outnumbered the men by a healthy margin. Surrounding them, leaning against walls and pillars, were the voyeurs, those who for one reason or another were content to simply watch. That wasn’t a problem, though – the people out on the dance floor came to be seen. Some seemed to have spent very little on their clothes, wearing a mix-match of fake leather and cheap Hot Topic apparel. Others looked like they’d spent thousands on their clothes, with handmade leather corsets and vintage lace gloves.

Recently, the industrial-goth scene has thinned out, growing anemic under the ever changing tastes of the San Diego crowd. But even as the fashionable herd of clubs catering to the goth scene have diminished, clubs like Therapy have managed to endure. In the past, Therapy was hosted at The Flame in Hillcrest and at Club Rio in Mission Valley. It moved to Shooterz in North Park this year, where it seems to have settled.

After a half hour or so of dancing, Ryan moved on to the bar, used a paper towel to wipe the sweat (and in the process, smearing a fair amount of eyeliner) from his face, and explained to me his time with the club: “I’ve been attending for years, back when they were at the Rio. Back then it was pretty hit or miss. Sometimes you’d have a great crowd and awesome music; sometimes there’d be four or five people.” With a sigh, he popped the top of a Red Bull and complained at the excessive amount the club charged for it. “Here it’s a lot better,” he said. “It’s North Park, which is a lot easier to get to for people in this crowd. The club’s easier to find and a lot more spacious.”

The conversation lulled for a moment, and we both agreed to step outside to escape the fetid club air. At that time of night, the streets are mostly empty, save a few roaming vagrants and the occasional drunken misfit from the lesbian bar up the street. In the foggy night air, the crowd lingering outside may have seemed odd, but nobody paid them much attention. As the conversation began again, I learned more about Ryan’s past. During high school he dressed almost exactly as he does tonight. “A product,” he explained, “of a less than average public education.” After high school he attended a few semesters of college, then dropped out and joined the Navy, working briefly as a recruiter in Las Vegas. Now he spends his time going to clubs and raves like these, hanging out at the local cafés, and spending as much time as possible reading about religion.

“When I went to school, I was reading all kinds of stuff, like Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible,” he recalled. “The idea of Satan worship never worked for me because it was still connected to Christianity, even though you’re looking at it from the other side. Now I’m reading up on Wicca, which is so far removed from everything else I’ve ever studied.”

Many in the mainstream make the mistake of associating Wicca, paganism and satanic worship with the goth community, but all three practices are as distinct from goth as they are from each other.

Around Ryan’s neck hung an upside-down pentacle, a cheap silver and black thing half-hidden by his shirt and tie. When pressed, he said he hasn’t decided whether or not to identify himself as a Wiccan, and that he wears the necklace more for the shock value. “Some people,” he went on, “are so uncomfortable around it, it lets me keep control of the conversation.”

The music started to get louder, and the crowd outside started to filter back in, moving past the bouncer toward the bar. Some in the crowd looked painfully young – younger than the age limit imposed by upper management – but then that could just have been a combination of their make-up and the depressed yellow lighting. That night the crowd was healthy and excited to be there enjoying the company of those around them.

Elsewhere in the world, the goth scene isn’t so lucky. In the city of Las Vegas, a place that celebrity impersonators and lounge lizards happily call home, the scene isn’t simply anemic – it’s nearly in a coma.

On any given night in a certain Las Vegas goth nightclub, it’s all about the black – a supple, all-embracing acceptance of that shade of noir that seems to be the one unifying, uniform element of the clientele, regardless of political, sexual or social distinctions. Blue jeans and T-shirts, no matter what label or cut, are strictly gouache in this sweltering club. The air outside is often dry and bitterly cold, but inside there’s usually a fog machine and an unruly mob of bodies that somehow manage to bring the humidity levels up to par with any South American rain forest. Everyone dances to some nameless, forlorn mix of ’80s rock, and their bodies start to glisten with perspiration even as they grind against one another. On the night I’m there, I wonder how sanitary the place is.

More likely than not, the stickiness beneath my shoe was not chewing gum. During most of the week the club is a swingers’ joint, where people spend their time exchanging bodily fluids instead of telephone numbers. When the DJ and the crowd is gone, the club – situated just off one of the seedier corners of Charleston Boulevard near the Las Vegas Strip – caters to exhibitionists, leather daddies and habitual fornicators.

On the couch next to me, a voice called out, “This music’s starting to suck.” Up close, Barbara Leahy is a beautiful girl by any measure of the social yardstick. Earlier in the day she showed me some old photos of her: a bright roadflare of a blonde in a high school track outfit, smiling comfortably for the camera. But that night she’d taken on a personality seemingly departed from that old life: blonde hair died a purple-black, fishnet stockings and a shirt that failed to cover the pair of electrical-tape X’s stuck to her nipples; matched and paired to a skirt so short that I was tempted to call it a belt. Lounging at her feet was her girlfriend, Sam, a slight pixie of a girl with too much eye shadow and a thick leather dog collar with a leash extending from her throat to Barbara’s pencil-thin wrist. I started to ask if she’d like to go anywhere else, but for the goth community in Vegas there is no place else. Most of the other clubs, especially the under-21 clubs, have dried up or been closed down by the city. What few remain aren’t worth mentioning. If you’re goth, this is the place to be.

I agreed with Barbara: the music did suck. But then, I haven’t really immersed myself in the scene as she has. Most of the tracks reminded me of remixed versions of the opening theme from “Knight Rider.” Maybe it’s because I’m so used to writing about politics and human tragedy and spend most of my free time ignoring social scenes like this that I seemed so uncomfortable. It wasn’t the people or the subculture that bothered me, but the fact that I was trapped in a claustrophobic room, surrounded by a sea of human sweat and standing on a cold cement floor covered with a mix of questionable stains. The girl on the couch next to me grinned with a half-knowing sort of smile that managed to put me at ease and offered to take me out front for a cigarette.

The three of us were framed by the urine-colored streetlight in front of the club, and the unseasonable cold turned our breath to vapor in the night air. It was at that point that I asked Barbara about her childhood, and how she got involved with this unruly flotsam of black-washed humanity. It was an obvious question, so much so that I wondered if I couldn’t have phrased it better; after all, in that club filled with leather, latex and excesses of sex and music, one would think it would take a truly unique childhood to arrive there. If I hadn’t seen the photo, I might have expected Barbara’s childhood to mirror Wednesday Adams’. Instead, Barbara gives the usual WASP story: the private education (I could picture her in the schoolgirl outfit, though not in that particular context) the first year of college, the blonde mom and adoring dad. “When I was going to college, I was just completely cast-off,” she said. “My parents always said, ‘When you’re 18 you’re out of the house,’ and I never really took them seriously. But on my 18th birthday, they gave me a great party and then handed me a pair of tickets to Las Vegas and told me that’s where I was going to school. God knows why.”

Barbara’s distaste for Las Vegas mirrored my own, and in that I couldn’t help but smile. Vegas is the sort of place that anyone with a shred of taste would spend their entire life avoiding; it’s the kind of city that should have been walled off long ago and turned into some ersatz prison compound for the criminally rich and terminally old. Maybe the inmates could run the casinos. It’s also the kind of city that spends most of its energy stamping out culture: Take a look at the gay district, a trio of sad looking bars and an ailing GLBT book store saddled off behind the university, like a mutant child hidden in the basement. Compared to San Diego, the GLBT scene here is leprous, existing in a constant state of fashionable apathy.

That political lethargy extends to all slices of GLBT culture in Vegas, including those in the goth scene. Las Vegas and Nevada in general never really left the ’50s when it came to class distinctions and social orders. Since 2000, voters have twice passed resolutions against same-sex marriage, despite the fact that such laws were already on the books. The campaign for Proposition 2, which passed last year by an overwhelming margin, was designed to put the community in its place, a legal curbside kick to the teeth that effectively killed the political landscape for gays and lesbians. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but only if you’re straight. No wonder this state’s still called the “Mississippi of the West.”

When I asked Barbara if she ever got involved, she looked at me like I was pissing on her boots. “I don’t have time to get involved with all that,” she said. “It’s a lost cause.”

Sam leaned back as much as the leash allowed and grinned pleasantly, inhaling the black spike of tobacco as her girlfriend continued. “So there I was, stuck on this goddamned campus. I didn’t know anyone, with everything I owned still packed in my duffel bag. It was kind of a culture shock, compared to Philadelphia, you know?”

Barbara tugged the leash and pulled her docile girl close enough to steal the smoldering remains of the cigarette. There was a kind of backhanded dominance to her character, a trait completely at odds with her “Leave It To Beaver” childhood. “So one day I visit the coffee house across the street from the dorms,” she said, talking about Café Copioh, a hole-in-the-wall establishment that went out of business several years ago when a disgruntled customer set it ablaze, “and it’s goth night, which isn’t saying much because back then, every night was goth night. Pretty soon, I’m spending every night there, which scared the shit out of my mom when I first told her about it. I think she expected human sacrifices and bareback orgies. I just liked it because it was everything Philadelphia wasn’t… or at least the Phillie I was exposed to. It seemed like nobody really gave a damn what anyone else thought; they all said what they wanted to. I think it was just the shock value of it all that appealed to me. God knows, nothing else here did. I mean really,” she held out her arms, exposing herself to me and anyone else who might have looked in our direction, “can you see me shucking it up at Studio 54 or Lure?” She held the pose for another moment then broke out giggling. I watched the exchange and wondered how the taller of the two managed not to shiver – it was 60 degrees out and she was wearing nothing but fishnets and a few inches of electrical tape. I was wearing a 30-pound vintage Navy bridgecoat and still feeling the cold.

“When Copioh burned down, I started going to Café Roma, kind of an upscale version of my old haunt,” Barbara continued. “Everyone from Copioh started going there… and that’s where I met Sam.”

I turned to the other girl and looked her over openly. Between the two of them, I could write a book – or at the very least, a TV script. Sam is smaller than Barbara, and looks like a watered down, gothed-out version of Winona Ryder, circa 1996. Her white make-up was conservative by the standards of that evening, but still they managed to give her a heroin-addict look. While male homosexuality still remains an oddity in the local goth scene, lesbianism seems the norm; bisexuality amongst the girls is almost expected. One wouldn’t see two guys dancing on the cold concrete floor of the club that night; more likely than not you’d see two girls going at it, surrounded by a few sets of envious male eyes. The double standard threatened to set me off, but Barbara simply shrugged. “You live with it,” she said.

But Barbara wasn’t talking about the double standard that bothered me so much, that still-fashionable acceptance of two women over a pair of men, she was talking about the eyes: the way people do double-takes when she walks by them on the street; the way old people scowl; the way nice families cross the street to avoid her. When I saw that odd glint in her eye, that sense of unabashed narcissism that so aptly defines the goth community, I could tell she just eats the attention up. When she danced with her girl – a laconic sort of waltz, leash gripped firmly in hand, used to keep the other girl in step – I could tell she didn’t mind the jealous eyes on her. It was dark inside the club that night, and with the strobe lights and blinding wash of artificial fog, people couldn’t ever really see who was watching them. But, like stray cats in a dark alley, dancers just know they’re there. Even that night, out in the cold, a pair of polyester-clad swingers on their way to the club next door stopped to look Barbara and Sam over, their eyes full of disapproval. There was something monstrously funny about a pair of aging swingers looking down their noses at the two girls, but I decide not to say anything. Barbara and Sam seemed to eat it up anyway, and flipped the swingers the bird, making obscene gestures with their tongues.

Despite the various sexual and social connections, the mainstream gay community and goth scene mixes like oil and water. At any given protest or rally, there’s likely to be a token goth here or there, who’s more likely attending for the aforementioned shock value than because of any real political involvement. It’s less likely that a goth will be spotted at any of the given mainstream clubs – the mass of brightly colored clothing, as Barbara put it, acts like Kryptonite to a gothed-out, leather-clad Supergirl. The other side of that well-worn coin is that it’s even more unlikely to see any of the latest Abercrombie fashion on display at the goth club.

Back at the club, the girl in the fishnets looked up at me, that ever present smile still curling at the corners of her lips as she finished the last of the stolen cigarette and used the leash to tug her girl closer. She was doing it for me, I think; trying to shock me, or maybe to just get my attention. I had come home from New Orleans a few weeks prior; not much shocks me these days. From the reaction on her face I sensed a bit of disappointment. Maybe the reason she, like so many others within her social circle, seemed to enjoy the attention, no matter how discriminating, is that she’s making up for the attention she lost when she was sent here to Las Vegas.

Barbara’s story seems familiar, somehow. Back in San Diego or New York, or even in Las Vegas, those who associate with the goth scene generally come from healthy families. The argument that upbringing, schooling or even listening to the wrong music is what sends this crowd spinning away from normal doesn’t seem to apply. Talking almost at random to some of those in the crowd that night, one general theme prevailed: It’s attention they’re after. They’re tired of being the nameless face in the crowd, sick of the nine-to-five living where they’re only identifiable by their corporate nametag. They want to stand out. They want attention, even if they have to shock or frighten in order to get it.