I’ve made several attempts to write a response to the Trump Administration’s attempts to internationally disenfranchise transgender people and find I am too angry, too intellectually swamped, and emotionally overextended. I’m concerned not only about myself but also my partner. If I’m honest I’m more concerned about her because I have Starkian self-destructive tendencies but that’s something for another day.

Since I simply cannot engage with the topic in a collected manner that won’t provoke the sort of people who would wish me harm (and I have little patience for handling them at the moment) I felt an old-fashioned “here are some things I like” article would help me generate content and not stare bleakly into the void.

Without further ado, a list of things I’ve enjoyed over the past few weeks.

Lawrence Rothman’s everything

Dreamy, genderless, pastel milk vampires are very much on my approved list at the moment. Lawrence Rothman is gender-fluid and loves playing with their appearance from album to album. I first heard their song “H” but did not have any idea who it was by. You’ve probably heard that track if you watched the show Lucifer (which I actually haven’t despite it being thematically appropriate).

“Decade” is a hauntingly smooth track that invokes a sense of timelessness as Rothman poses distantly around a mid-century house in the desert. Deserts, retro design, and a general sense of age and decay proliferates their work making them a big hit with my current need to find connections to decadent studies all around me. Plus they’re lovely, that always helps.

I enjoy Rothman’s disregard for comfort and heteronormative themes throughout their videos, many of which verge on outright gothic despair in tone. It helps that for the truly spooky songs they’ve worked with the phenomenal Floria Sigismondi. Sigismondi has a similar eye to a young Dario Argento but with a more musically inclined fluidity. She’s previously worked with Marilyn Manson for “Beautiful People” and several times with David Bowie. She’s spot on and clearly enjoys working with Lawrence Rothman as she’s directed at least 12 so far, including “Decade.”

Now if Floria Sigismondi ever starts making Giallo films, I demand she cast Rothman somewhere and frequently. That is my current aesthetic ideal.

I recommend “Oz vs Eden” as well, another Sigismondi piece:

Blackcraft Cult’s Variety of Goods and Services

Blackcraft Cult is nearly a one-stop shop for anyone more satanically inclined, if you’re interested in black clothing, whiskey, ornate black furniture, and the devil’s wrestling that is. I’m in favor of all of these things, typically.

I first heard about Blackcraft through their newly founded promotion, strangely enough. The clothing brand has been around for years, offering a variety of gothy, witchy, and downright confrontationally atheistic attire and accessories. I took notice when the wrestler Jimmy Havoc announced he’d be in the main event of the company’s first iPPV Burning Bridges.

If you’re familiar with wrestling lore at all, imagine an entire promotion based around the Undertaker’s druid army from the late ‘90s — only rather than a lumbering zombie leading them it is Doug Bradley. Bradley is the original Pinhead in Hellraiser (and a majority of the sequels) and in Blackcraft plays himself but also as the godless Preacher that pits wrestlers against one another for the privilege of joining the cult.

It’s all a bit hammy but Bradley is imposing as he sits just to the side of the entrance ramp overseeing the ring from his Blackcraft Furniture-brand throne of darkness. Blackcraft has the frantic energy of a young promotion finding its rhythm but considering big names like Seth Rollins, Chris Jericho, Marty Scurll, and Aleister Black (Tommy End) have all worked with the brand either directly or through a collaborative clothing line, Blackcraft has room to grow. And sort out a few technical difficulties they struggled with during Burning Bridges.

I’ve added a few Blackcraft pieces to my wardrobe. I’ve been in a mood to be a bit more directly confrontational when I am dressing down. Pentagrams and spooky imagery definitely do the trick.

I now have a complete set of workout clothes emblazoned with Blackcraft and a soothingly ghoulish duffle bag to carry it all in. Perhaps in the future I’ll track down a bottle of their ghost pepper-infused whiskey and replace my beleaguered wingback chair with one of the company’s sinister creations.

Blackcraft Wrestling’s next iPPV is in December. You can find the on demand version of Burning Bridges on their website, as well as the collaborative show pitting Seth Rollins’ wrestling academy Black and Brave against the cultists.

Decadence

Thematically connecting items one and two on this list in ways I’ll eventually write about, I’m also quite fond of studying cultural and literary decadence. I realized I’ve always had an interest in decadence but none of the language to describe why a multitude of my historical, literary, and personal styling tastes aligned.

I stumbled across decadence as an interdisciplinary study by way of gender studies. Before I settled on journalism in college, I studied history. Dissatisfied with the constraints of both in terms of what I was interested in (read: that gay shit) I left school. I was already working as a journalist and determined I could finagle my way into research should I require texts and articles gatekept behind student/employee access. I was mostly correct other than that I should have tried working within my university’s programs to make something new.

Having a mind for research but no immediate access to curriculum to focus it, I dove headlong into researching historical instances and perspectives on sexuality and gender expression. I grew up with a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray in my pocket at all times (from around the age of 15 or so) but had used it as a connection to a sense of trapped otherness. Oscar Wilde was different, was forbidden according to the various school drama departments I pestered about the Importance of Being Earnest, and for a long time I didn’t stop to look into it further.

There was Baudelaire, Swinburne, Beardsley, then connecting bizarrely into Wodehouse, Waugh and a deep sense that every woe of my gender, society, and concept of cultural decline had happened before. I could see the earlier connections, like Baudelaire’s love of Poe, I could tell there was something that tied these similar but seemingly scattered concepts together but I just didn’t have it.

It’s funny how one throwaway line about “decadents” finally being described as such triggered a ravenous pursuit of knowledge. Almost overnight I was scouring the Internet and libraries for as much information on decadence as I could find. If only I’d found these books sooner, I shouted as every single random interest I had that felt “too weird” to matter suddenly fit into a nebulous area of research.

All that otherness I’d carried around for so long, fueled by a nomadic childhood, lead into a vast sea of knowledge. I’ve also described myself as a living aesthetic so embracing the part of my tendencies to prefer artifice to nature wasn’t a stretch.

I feel understanding cultural decadence gives us a good hold on what’s happening in the world at large. It is what unites the fall of the British empire with the last days of the Weimar republic and many other hard shifts in the political tone of nations. In many of these scenarios the “degenerate” the homosexual, queer, gender non-conforming elements were viewed as part of the decline, if not the direct cause. As far back as our earliest (and overly simplistic) evaluations of the Roman empire’s collapse these same themes applied.

Somehow throughout the bulk of human history we shy away from progression as some form of manipulative conservative thought takes hold and thoroughly otherizes easily targeted parts of the population as the definitive cause of moral decay.

Through studying decadence we can see that the triggers of social decline are the mad grabs for power by the conservative and outmoded when confronted with humanity’s inborn desire to self identify and explore. Part of what I intend this website to be is a lifestyle blog couched in decadence, an argument for all the pleasures of life as a sustaining and vital part of life even if some of us take it a bit too far.

It really doesn’t help that my ideal existence is wasting away inside a meticulously curated library. The further we allow political opponents of self expression and interpersonal freedom to reign the more I feel I may make that my end game. Certainly not the message anyone should take from A Rebours but it ironically is a fantasy keeping me sane.