Sissies of Mercy: the Fun, Queer Future of Goth

WORDS: Bernarda Basualdo

PICTURES: Connor Elmore

Sitting in front of me on a worn leather couch, both halves of Sissies of Mercy are dressed in elaborate black outfits and impressive makeup. I’m admittedly intimidated; unlike them, it’s my first time at a goth night, - you can tell by my orange corduroy skirt and nervous apologizing as I fumble pulling out my questions. As soon as I introduce myself, though, they speak easily and kindly. Fruitbat and Vileblood, the DJs behind the goth techno dance party, quickly put me at ease. It’s an hour before their show at Market Hotel, where Sissies of Mercy have become a regular headliner.

Sissies of Mercy can’t be found on Spotify. Their sets are exclusive to these shows, where they craft a blend of traditional goth music and more recent crowd pleasers - like Mareux’s The Perfect Girl, which received a cheer from the crowd when it was later spliced into one of the sets.

The duo hails from Boston but has made a name for themselves in the city. They’re particularly popular with younger queer people, and they aim to be. As they proclaim in their Instagram bio, this is not just your typical goth night; SoM is a “party for queers and creatures of the night”. As we sit in the green room, the artists behind the party tell me about goth queerness, Sexyy Red, and the new horizon of techno.

[Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.]

OK, so right off the bat. Sissies of Mercy. Obviously, legendary group Sisters of Mercy, but why “sissies”?

Vileblood: [giggles]

Fruitbat: Because we are trans people and it’s kind of just a play on the word sisters, sissies, kinda queerifies it a little bit.

VB: It’s also just silly.

FB: Yeah, it’s just stupid. We just wanted something stupid and not serious.

What prompted the creation of Sissies of Mercy as a party as opposed to just being individual DJs who do gigs?

FB: To begin with, we kind of felt that there was really nothing else happening like that in the city. A lot of other goth nights only really focus on referencing the past and a lot of what we like to listen to isn’t referenced as much. A lot of the harder, newer, industrial stuff. Other parties can just be based off of nostalgia, which isn’t a bad thing, but we like to bring in a lot of new artists that I feel like even our crowd hasn’t really heard before. We just needed a space that queer people could dance to this music, because a lot of the time those regular, standard, goth parties are very much just cishet and a lot older crowd. There’s not a lot of younger DJs or younger people that are going for a newer style of music. We just try to find a sweet spot where we’re referencing old and bringing in new. The main focus of the party is literally to make a space where we could have fun as not cishet people, because that’s what dominates the majority of nights that have darker music styles.

Speaking of bringing queerness into the goth community, Sissies of Mercy lives in the overlap between goth and queerness. How do those identities relate for you? How does that intersection relate to queerness as a whole?

FB: I think that goth is always rooted in queerness. It’s pretty much a subculture that is rooted in androgyny. It’s rooted in messing around with gender.

VB: There’s just part of it that we were both really drawn to before we ever started doing this together that was just the drama and the camp of it, in a way, where people were dressing up in these things that looked kind of God-awful, but it’s the intention and comedy within that that feels so important. I think so much of being “goth” or interacting with that gothness as queer people or as trans people, there’s so much of it about looking a specific way that feels inaccessible otherwise. Within the normal techno scene it’s hard to just feel like we can be our entire selves comfortably in those spaces. So I think the intersection for us in a lot of ways is finding places where we can enjoy the process of being ourselves and letting other people experience that with us.

Absolutely. There seems to be a distinct difference between what the outsider perspective of goth being dark and angsty is and what you guys offer: a space for queer joy and a space for people to explore. Do you think Sissies of Mercy is a deviation from traditional goth, or how do you think it interacts with that label?

FB: It’s creating a future for it. A present day for it instead of just staying rooted in nostalgia. When you think of people going out to goth nights or even the TikTok-ification of goth I would say… when you see people post about, like, “oh, these are the goth artists you should be listening to,” it’s always the same, old-school, very specific “trad-goth” like Siouxsie and the Banshees, stuff like that. But the way that we deviate away from it is we focus more on newer artists but then throw in a classic or two. Whenever we DJ or we work on our sets we try to make things that people have never heard of before that they would want to find more about. There’s so much more out there I feel like people don’t really know and people need a space to find that rather than just: “This is what goth is” and have these same old artists. It’s boring, to be honest. It’s kind of tired.

VB: Something we talk about with that is how this “gothness” is more like a headspace. So that angst and that darkness is something that we pull in as a vehicle to create queer joy or whatever that terminology we use is. In a lot of ways, we are people who go through a lot in our day to day, so we can take that angstyness and that darkness and use that as a form of exorcism. I think that’s been how I’ve been forming a lot of the things that I’ve been listening to and sharing is this idea of -

FB: It’s literally an outlet.

VB: - release. Yeah. And giving people that chance to use all of the energy in their bodies that is angsty or dark in a way that feels productive and feels positive afterwards rather than just feeling so down on the self, which is a feeling I know we all kind of share in a lot of ways.

You spoke about the “tiktokification” of goth music. [to FB] You have a following on tiktok where you promote your work. At the same time, social media faces a lot of backlash on how it affects youth. Do you think social media can be a positive outlet for young artists, especially queer youth that might not feel accepted in their physical environment? Or how do you think that contributes?

FB: I grew up posting on tumblr and that’s how I found my community of other random goth people online. But it can be a good and bad thing. Bad as in people kind of getting lost in what they think a specific thing should be, versus the party that we have wouldn’t be where it’s at without social media. It’s definitely helped people find their own outlet and be able to grow with us. So there’s positives and negatives but having that following… we use Instagram a lot for it. That’s mainly where people can find us and see what we’re up to and follow the party.

I really used to hate social media and I really didn’t want to be on it for the first few parties that we had. I didn’t even put my DJ name on there or anything, I just wanted to post the flier and see if people came for us. As we get more and more into and care more for the party I’ve found that it matters when we show that we are a part of it and -

VB: It’s helped us spread out larger and connect with more people who are shy like us. For a lot of people coming to terms with your self-identity through the internet is a thing that a lot of people who are in the age range of us and people that come through the parties have experienced. So I think the, one good thing that we do with social media -

FB: Visibility matters.

VB: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We can show and share these spaces where people are having a lot of fun that other people might feel comforted by seeing have fun because they don’t usually get to see people that look like them having fun. In that way it’s really nice to be able to spread like that.

Speaking of how much you share on social media, you both reveal fairly little about your personal lives on social media. You’ve said that’s a conscious choice. How do you navigate, as artists and just as people in general, how much you share with the world?

VB: It’s changed a lot as we’ve grown up. Being aware that people are looking at us has definitely been a thing that makes us navigate the internet in a certain way.

FB: We both are very shy and don’t like being perceived, really. But, I don’t know, seeing how people react to us and having the party and people who come up to us and are like “You helped me to come to terms with who I am,” makes me want to be out there more and show people that you can be a certain identity and be comfortable. You can be a part of this subculture and there’s people that do look like you, people that like other stuff you do, too. Neither of us really post on our personal accounts that much but when it comes to posting about the party, first things first we tell everyone how much we care about them. This would not be what it is without the people that come here.

VB: At the same time though, we do confront this thing where people don’t totally know us as people outside of Sissies so we’re always trying to figure out what that balance is between being a person and a thing for a lot of people. Looking forward, for both of us, we’re trying to find places to connect with people on a more individual level because I think that’s a growing point for us as incredibly shy people.

You spoke about how people have reacted to it and shared that they felt more comfortable because of your guys’ presence. What have some notable reactions been; how have people reacted to the community you’ve built?

VB: People finding long term romantic partners.

FB: People moving in with each other as partners.

VB: People exploring their queerness and whatever that means.

From your shows?

FB: Yeah! From just seeing us do what we do. People who have started transitioning because coming out to the parties made them realize “Oh, there’s a bunch of other trans people who are doing what I want to do!” That is the most special, important thing to us. Cuz we never really get to talk to people, but when people tell us and send us messages or we know mutual people that tell our friends that and we’re like, Oh my God, someone started transitioning because of us. Or someone met their partner or friends. Like, it is building community. Not just for us but all these other people who are seeking that out. It’s so important to find. That’s really special and still blows our minds.

Sissies celebrated its two year anniversary this summer. Before that, when did you guys get into DJing and the scene as a whole?

FB: I originally started the party. I was trying to start it before quarantine, but two weeks before we were supposed to have the first one, quarantine happened. So we started it in July of 2021. I had been DJing just in my bedroom, just in my bedroom making mixes for like a year or two before that. [Vileblood] has always been there and a part of the party but didn’t start DJing until a year-ish ago.

VB: The first year anniversary.

FB: We’ve been living together for five-ish years.

VB: Less than our roots with DJing and that culture, we met each other in art school. We were like, I don’t know, I think you were 20, I was 21 or something like that. We’ve lived together ever since. The beginning of our relationship was Sam telling me this one Christian death song that he thought of when he saw one of my performances in class and we just fell down this rabbit hole together of sharing similar interests with someone for the first time in a real life setting in a way that felt really good. Then we started going out together, we started experiencing techno through some of our friends we’d met in Boston, then we fell really deep into this love for all of these spaces that are created around us except for the fact that we don’t totally have one of our own.

FB: When we were going out in Boston, going to a lot of the DIY raves, we felt more comfortable going to the raves and underground techno music than a regular goth night because that’s where people our age were at and that’s where I personally discovered I wanted to make a space for people to feel comfortable. I wanted to play music that I wanted to hear and no one was doing that.

Going back, not to the tiktokification, but the commercialization of music in general, media is being constantly consumed at an extremely quick rate. Aesthetic expressions are a lot more available for people to see. Do you think this has affected subgroups that maybe weren’t as visible before social media negatively by being making subgroups commercially washed out or has it just allowed people to be brought in?

VB: I think some of both. I think there’s a thing that happens where fads happen really fast in terms of specific parts of subcultures getting this really big moment, having that moment for a little bit, and then fading back into, not obscurity, but back into larger scale social media. Things have these very quick moments, I guess. One of the most exciting things for the two of us is the staying power that we’ve gotten to experience over the last couple of years.

FB: One thing I think about a lot is when goth started being relevant in your regular, like, “goth girlfriend” fad, that brought a lot of attention to [goth]. But this subculture has been around for so, so long. That had people looking more at goth in the media. Something I want to bring up is people mixing that media with goth. For example, right now we have Sexyy Red’s goth version of Pound Town -

VB: [Laughs]

FB: - that is bringing a lot of attention to different forms of goth again that might not have been there before. Accessibility is really cool in that way. I feel like a lot of older people would look at that and be like “Oh my God, all these fake goths coming into the culture,” but, like, no. We were literally dancing and singing to it before we came here. It’s cool as fuck to see that integrated.

I was going to bring up the Sexyy Red thing because I saw you had used that audio—

FB: It’s so sick. We love it.

Do you think the new generation of goth people is more accepting of exploring and bringing in different genres within goth than the rigid traditionalism?

VB: I hope so.

FB: Yeah, I hope so. But in a way, I think so just because everything is gonna keep moving forward and if that’s something that’s clearly meshing with pop culture then that is moving forward in that way.

I’ll wrap it up since people are trying to get you guys on stage. How are you guys hoping to see the scene evolve as the party continues; as this subset of queer goth techno is more accessible, how are you guys hoping to see the scene evolve?

FB: I just want to keep seeing people come out and have fun. I don’t really care about the growth of the party for our own. As long as we’re having fun and people who are coming are having fun, that’s all I care about. Of course as things go on the future is going to keep progressing in the way it does. It seems like every single time we have a party it keeps growing more and more. I feel like we’re redefining a standard of what goth is to a lot of people.

VB: It’s like a new entrance point.

FB: We’re not trying to gatekeep. We just wanna have fun. This is the only place where we can have fun and we want other people to feel that way too. That’s kind of how we’re hoping for the future. Fun is the future. It doesn’t matter whatever version of “goth” ends up being in the future, the future is right now. As stupid as that shit is.

The partygoers agree. While in line for the bathroom - which, I must say, was impressively clean - I ask a trio of teenage goths what they think of Sissies of Mercy. All three have been to previous shows of theirs, and they tell me it feels like a safe space. “Goth is historically a very queer and gender expansive subculture and I’m thrilled that it still represents that,” one of the three tells me. “It’s wonderful.”

This seems to be the general consensus. Though the crowd’s “gothness” varies from liberty spikes and Victorian dresses to a black tank top, everyone I talk to seems comfortable and happy to be there. Pepper, another partygoer, explains why she likes the party very succinctly. “There’s a lot of f-ggots here,” she deadpans. Next to her, Pepper’s friend laughs and adds: “[Sissies of Mercy] feels like a safe space to be a freak. That’s cool.”