Liam Lambert

David Bowie was the first boy I ever loved. There. I said it. It feels good saying so. I know this doesn’t by any stretch make me special. There’s a generation of people who watched Labyrinth and felt... things. That codpiece made it all but impossible. But I came from a rock and roll household, you see. My parents had seen him several times before I was born, and once after. My mom brought home her shirt from the Sound and Vision ’90 tour, and I stole it almost immediately.

Ozzy Osbourne wrote songs about him. Jimmy Page lived in his house and supposedly practiced Satanic rituals there. He’s on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967) right next to Mae West and Lenny Bruce. He’s influenced writers such as Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore, to say nothing of bands like Black Sabbath, The Doors, and David Bowie. He’s also influenced movie directors like Rob Zombie and Kenneth Anger, and even showed up in a Batman spinoff.

Everybody has a Goth phase. Whether it’s a full cape-and-ankh, Bauhaus-loving, living like a vampire period, or just dabbling in Anne Rice and Wicca for a semester, everybody goes through some sort of period of time where darkness, creepy stuff, and eeee-vil, to quote Mermaid Man, appeals to them.