I’ve made an interesting observation while surfing various “dark” sites. A variety of porn sites have all appeared advertising sexy gothic chicks showing it all like Gothic Sluts, Gothic Sex, The Glyph Net or Barely Evil. Various flavours and various stages of undress are presented – not of your typical porn girl, but your average gothic girl, piercings, tattooed, coloured hair and all. Even a gothic boy site is available, Sweetest Drop.

Is it erotica, or just downright pornographic? This is a very delicate line that may be crossed in some viewer’s minds. When I asked what folks within the scene thought about this Gothic Porn phenomenon, I was blasted with quite a mixture of opinions.

On one side, I had folks who believed that Goth Porn just promoted the idea that all goths are “easy”, “slutty”, or all into bondage and S&M. It’s tough when the general public have already formed ideas about what the scene is about – whether their point of reference comes from a cheesy talk show or a high-school shooting incident. With the introduction of this genre of porn, random guys on the street might assume that the local gothic girl dressed in black is a whip-wielding dominatrix.

On the other side, some folks welcomed the idea that a subculture had its own brand of erotica – or as one person put it, “it’s a refreshing change from all the bleach-blonde, tanned, big breasted women.”

Fetish is a whole different ball game; the mode of fetish dress so neatly blends into the gothic crowd, that you can sometimes see a mix of both scenes at goth and fetish nights. While visiting clubs in New York City, this seems to crossover quite a bit!

Then you have explicit fetish porn – is it a matter of who’s more hard core these days? Who’s got their fist further up their ass while bound a la Japanese rope bondage? Why erotica or porn? Is it sexy or shocking?

I decided one of the best ways to investigate was to speak to Forrest Black, one of the creators behind Blue Blood, Gothic Sluts, Barely Evil, and Sweetest Drop. Blue Blood is an erotic goth magazine that has been in existence for several years. Its focus is on real people in the scene, displaying their sexual tastes, as well as humor and fiction features. Both Blue Blood and the trinity of goth porn sites are related, at least culturally and aesthetically, but they each have their own vision and flavor, according to Forrest.

“For a long time, we just had a free site up on the now defunct Hallucinet server, alongside a bunch of other spooky folks like Gothic Preservation Society, Retail Slut, Cleopatra Records, and a bunch of others. But, over time we realized that people were stealing a lot of the pictures that we had put up there for free and they were putting them in their pay sites and charging people for them.” he explains. “That kinda got the ball rolling anyway, but there are a lot of motivations for doing GothicSluts.com and BarelyEvil.com and some of the other sites. Blue Blood Magazine was always about couples. All the photo layouts featured real couples together, doing what they like to do. We felt like we were documenting the beauty and love of real relationships between real counterculture people.”

A typical member of these sites is probably someone Forrest and Amelia know, and there is a lot of interaction between the members and creators. “We listen to their feedback very seriously. Many of them are super cool, and yes, many of them identify as being within the scene, either currently or at least at some period in their life. We get a lot of rockstars on the road, it gives them something to do on the long hours between shows and stuff. I know more than a few of our girls have had some fun adventures because the guys in touring bands were like ‘Wow, I’ve seen your pictures on GothicSluts.com, come with us...’ We’re not terribly exclusionary though, and I really enjoy being able to turn on people who don’t have a lot of visibility to our cultures on their own.”

In this dot-bomb world we now live in, the sites are doing all right, traffic and memberwise. “It’s easy to get caught up in a real pissing contest with other sites and stuff, but what does that get you? To me, the sites are accomplishing their goals, that’s the important part to me. In the old days, when print zines were king, you had to get your publication past some fatcat distributor in order to get it out to the people, that was often very difficult and amazingly irritating. They would tell you to change this and that, and then they would never pay you anyway, and they would destroy anything they claimed didn’t sell. I love publishing on the web because you get to skip a lot of that and get right out to the people who care.” We know even if times are rough online, the Internet certainly is here to stay!

Gothic Sluts presents us to a definition of “slut” on the home page, stating “What is a slut: 1. pleasure enthusiast; 2. a wanton individual; 3. a saucy girl.” The models that pose are motivated for different reasons, not to mention that Forrest and Amelia receive many accolades for their excellence. “Fortunately, a lot of people seem to like our work, so they trust us to create cool stuff.”

There is no typical model. The folks here are all sorts of shapes and sizes plenty of chutzpah. “I think star quality is the number one attribute we look for in our models. It’s important to us that they are aware of their wants and limits. I never want to push anyone to do anything they are not comfortable with, I think it shows in the pictures anyway.”

So where would Forrest draw line between erotica and porn? “You know, the more I think about that, the less it seems important to make any distinction. People act like there is a border between the two and proceed to argue about where that border is. Pornography can be art and art can be pornography. To me erotica loses it’s artistic nature when it does not express anything. With our work, we try to express the beauty and sensuality and individuality of our models. The pictures are about who they are as people and just how sexy they can sometimes be. So identity is important to me. I don’t like a zillion close-ups and all that, I want to know about the person. Different people have wildly different comfort levels and I think they call the things that make them uncomfortable ’pornography’ but it’s not my goal to make people uncomfortable with our pictures. Some people shoot freaks like they are going to the zoo, they try to make them all threatening and scary or pathetic and damaged. I don’t like that style at all. I’d rather show how amazing a lot of our friends and contemporaries can be.”

Personally, I am much too shy to undress in front of a camera, but the quality of the photography from Forrest and Amelia is excellent. Although it may not be for everyone, their work certainly deserves high praise from its fans.