Where the eastern goths are

A strange scene is unfolding in a small dark room adjacent to a
downtown Chinese buffet: Fortune tellers, clowns, scantily clad zombie
girls, mimes and the devil himself dance happily together and swig
cheap beer. Fluorescent lights reflect off skin wrapped in tight latex
and leather, while eardrums absorb trance, EBM, goth-rock and
industrial music. A woman with pink hair and black lips twirls and
twists violently to the music, oblivious to everyone else. Another
woman with a pentagon stamped on her forehead shouts a manifesto of
death-metal culture. Others cling to the shadows: one man in a dramatic
Elizabethan-era mask stands by the bar, quietly observing the
action.

Suddenly, a dispute erupts—a lone fiddler and the devil, armed
with an electric guitar, enter a musical duel for possession of the
souls of two “maidens.” The women emerge, bedecked in horns, feathers,
garters and red gauze. One woman has bright red hair and is wearing
five-inch heels. The other has shiny black hair, scarlet-coloured lips
and a long feather tail. Am I having a hallucinogenic trip of some
sort? No, I’m just at Club 1668 enjoying MasQ, a monthly costume
ball.

Halloween every month

SandE Jordan and her boyfriend Pete Green are the masterminds behind
MasQ, which has been attracting solid crowds since May 2008. In the
past, goth nights, such as Shadowplay at the Marquee, occurred on
Sundays. The duo worked to secure Saturday nights at Club 1668 for
MasQ, which is big news for the goth community and anyone else who has
to work Monday morning.

MasQ has a different theme each month. Past themes have included
dark fairytales, mobsters and dames, and steampunk. When I meet Jordan
and Green at July’s carnival-noir-themed MasQ, Jordan is dressed as a
fortune-teller, wearing several choker necklaces and a red scarf around
her head.

“MasQ gives people a chance to dress how they want,” says Green, who
doesn’t dress in costume himself and wears only black. “You know,
there’s a bunch of girls wearing thigh-highs with garters and bat wings
and then you have guys that can walk around without a shirt on.”

“And there’s no sexual harassment at all, ever, which is terrific,”
interjects Jordan. “These girls couldn’t dress like this and go to one
of the bars downtown without being grabbed and harassed by jocks.”

“They’re not even let in,” says Green. “The Palace won’t let you in
with ripped jeans, yet they have wet t-shirt concerts. How does that
work?”

MasQ has its own dress code, which is the antithesis to a typical
nightclub dress-code. There is a strict no jeans and no ball caps
policy. Instead, leather, fetish/kink, punk, uniforms and gothic attire
are encouraged. The dress code is enforced to ensure meatheads who just
want to gawk at women in fetish gear don’t crash the party.

Jordan originally started the event with Chris Capstick. Green and
Jordan decline to speak about Capstick on record, and Capstick calls
the relationship a “touchy subject.” When Capstick pulled out of MasQ
last year, he took Green and Jordan to court, laying claim to around
$1,000 in funds he had invested in MasQ.

“SandE and her boyfriend Pete were my best friends, but business and
friends,” he says, sighing. Despite everything, Capstick says: “I would
still go to MasQ if they’d let me, but clearly that’s not going to
happen.”

Now Capstick runs his own masquerade, Cameo, which has had three
official events to date. Capstick admits that Cameo is “very
competitive,” with MasQ, though he says his event is less about
celebrating the gothic or fetish lifestyle and more about having a sexy
party with house music pumping.

On the surface, MasQ and Cameo appear uncannily similar: Almost
identical dress codes, rules and themes pop up on the websites for
both. There are differences, though, which are obvious in the way both
groups approach the same Back to School theme. Capstick encourages
patrons to dress as sexy school boys and girls, or teachers, while
Green and Jordan put a different spin on the familiar theme.

September’s MasQ will be a “Rock ‘N’ Roll High School” party, where
bar-goers dress as the rebels, punks and outcasts. It’s happening after
the Marilyn Manson concert (Friday, September 25) and Jordan promises
$3 drinks, $3 covers and a healthy dose of Manson tunes.

The performers

If you head to the next MasQ, you’re bound to be wowed and
entertained by a motley cast of characters. At one event there was even
a “pulling demonstration,” where two people pierced their flesh
together and leaned back, somehow without ripping their skin to
shreds.

The dark-haired “maiden” whose soul was up for grabs earlier goes by
Careotica Lovicious. When Lovicious went to high school in Windsor, she
was Carrie Sanford, a bright teen with social anxiety disorder.

“I dropped out of school three times,” she says. “People find it
funny that I like performing because I grew up with social anxiety, but
when I’m on stage it’s completely different…I just feel at home. I
feel comfortable.”

The 20-year-old works a back-shift cleaning job to pay the bills,
but is passionate about expressing her creativity through fashion,
fetish modelling, special effects makeup and film production, which
she’s in the process of learning. She resists labels, describing her
dark-fashion sense as “a bunch of subcultures thrown together.”

She also finds inspiration in Bettie Page. “She made fetish fun. She
made it innocent. It wasn’t this dirty, filthy thing, where people were
like ‘Eww! Weirdoes!’ It was an innocent thing.”

Lovicious’s boyfriend Jorahkai Wood, who goes by Kai, spins as DJ
Freedom Danish. The 30-year-old had an It’s All Gone Pete Tong moment when he was in his 20s, losing 95 percent of his hearing for
four months due to a severe cold and small Eustachian tubes. When his
hearing returned, his passion for music came back in full force.

He has an eclectic musical palette, spinning street bass, dubstep,
glitch hop, industrial, dark wave, rockabilly, psychobilly and more.
Aside from playing sets at MasQ, Kai frequently plays with The Root
Sellers, who play a fusion of hip-hop, dub and electronica.

“I’ve never heard him spin a bad set,” says MasQ belly dancer Angela
Allain. “He’s not just sitting there and spinning records. He’s very
into it and gets the crowd going.”

On Halloween last year, Allain, with two zombie helpers, carried the
DJ’s body onstage in a straightjacket. The demonic women sacrificed him
on stage and used his blood to raise ghouls, one of which was played by
Lovicious. The performers planted packs of fake blood on strategic
necks in the crowd, so it looked like many audience members were
bleeding at the jugular.

Aside from taking part in bizarre sets, Kai has a fixation with food
politics. For example, the name “Freedom Danish” is an amalgamation of
two events: the official American renaming of French fries to “Freedom
fries” during the Iraq War and the Iranian renaming of the Danish
pastry to “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad” during the
Jyllands-Posten cartoons controversy.

The name is “an ultimate fuck-you to anybody that wants to use food
propaganda to control people’s minds,” explains Kai.

The DJ has also written a book of poetry, inspired by food and time
spent at a grocery store, staring at lobsters. “Lobsters are a lot like
people,” he explains. “Most of them are crazy and most of them are
trapped.”

The crowd

MasQ regulars aren’t quite what many would expect from a group of
people decked out in combat boots, corsets, chains, safety pins and
leather.

“No one’s puking in the bathroom, no one’s breaking anything and no
one’s starting a fight,” says Jordan.

In fact, “most people bring their empty bottles back to the bar,”
says Green.

People who go to MasQ are part of several fringe subcultures in
Halifax. Many are goths—though Wiccans, metalheads, people into
healing arts, punks and people who just like to dress up go to MasQ as
well. Many feel like they can be themselves at the events.

“Most people don’t look down their nose at you when you come in
wearing the bra on the outside of your clothes or whatever,” says
Annalise Mcmullen, a MasQ regular who’s also dressed as a fortune
teller. “I like that it’s not cookie-cutter people all the time.”

Cynda Bellefontaine, a 20-year-old with fuschia hair who’s been
going to MasQ for a year, says she likes the event because she gets to
dress up and not feel completely out of place.

“It’s probably one of the few bars I can go to and not have people
look down on me,” she says.

Bellefontaine brought her mother to MasQ’s Carnival Noir for her
44th birthday.

“There are very few places I can hang out with my daughter,” says
MaryAnne Bellefontaine. “We come here all the time together. It’s
something we really both enjoy.”

Another frequent MasQgoer, Jennifer Landry, says she enjoys the
event because “It’s a diverse culture. You can be talking to lawyers,
accountants, people who are 20, people who are 60, but they all like
the same thing.”

MasQ is definitely diverse. When I venture to the event, clad in
leather pants for the first time in my life, I am immediately struck by
the wide range in partiers’ ages. People have an eclectic assortment of
professions: I run into an elevator technician, a call-centre agent, a
vegan who scoops ice cream for a living, a security guard, a former
member of the armed forces, and fetish models for Suicide Girls.

Sun signs

Local astrologer Christine Davison has been a permanent fixture on
Halifax’s goth scene since the early ’90s. When I meet her—a Gemini
with Scorpio rising—outside of Steve-O-Reno’s on a sunny afternoon,
she’s dressed to the nines—a black parasol, a long, flowing black
skirt, fishnet stockings and bright pink lipstick.

To Davison, the reason why many love MasQ is in the stars. She tells
me that in her experience, many goths, including herself, “tend to have
their suns in their eighth house. The eighth house is ruled by Scorpio.
It’s a house that involves sex, death, magic, secrecy.”

And what exactly makes a person gothic?

For Davison, it’s partly an ability to see the beauty that’s “hidden
behind the mainstream facade,” and to “expand upon it and make it even
more beautiful, no matter how dark or forbidden whatever they discover
might be.”

When I go home and Google my natal chart, I discover that my sun is
in the eighth house. I guess that means I’m heading back to MasQ.

I just might have to borrow those leather pants again.

This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2009.