The presence of goth youth in fandom has created a generational schism so profound that old-line fans in the '90s have found themselves in a strange state of publicly declared denial. I wondered, though, how the young raised to traditional science fiction culture viewed the incursion, so I asked longtime informant and second generation fan JB, who did not sport goth display, but who knew many of the players on both sides of the divide, what he thought about the newcomers. Yes, the goth community is what they're usually called around here. So they are not really alien to this place. They smoke a lot.
Hotels always present some difficulty for science fiction conventions.
The goths of science fiction, sometimes called cyberpunks, travel in groups and settle in the bar or lobby, where their style of dress is variously read as violent and destructive in the sense of motorcycle gangs, or sexually deviant in the sense of sadomasochism. Valerie Steele, in her study on fetish clothing, points briefly to the goths, punks, and cyberpunks as fashion cultures that borrow the clothing of the fetishist as fashion. The use of fetish clothing as fashion does not necessarily indicate a fetishistic attachment to that fashion, but the use of fetish clothing by Goths and cyberpunks is ambiguously threatening to traditional science fiction fans and to the personnel in the hotels that serve the convention circuits. When I first saw the goths appear in numbers at conventions, they scared me as much as they scared everyone else. They would land somewhere in the lobby, mix little, greet tentative approaches with suspicion, and generally spread a smoke-sharp pall of the apocalypse on the event.