"It's been dead for a while," said Jeff Murrell, a 44-year-old attorney and 1995 Marquette Law graduate who said he quit the scene four years ago.,”Halloween used to be the biggest day of the year on the goths' calendars. But today, the goth scene identified by its fashion, music and attitude is deader now than it ever was, according to one local former goth enthusiast.

"It's been dead for a while," said Jeff Murrell, a 44-year-old attorney and 1995 Marquette Law graduate who said he quit the scene four years ago. "I just never realized it when it did die."

The underground movement emerged and became somewhat mainstream when concert promoters and club DJs "hoarded out" goth music and diluted it with pre-recorded, technology-based music like techno and noise, Murrell said.

"I hate it, I just hate it," he said. "It hurts my ears."

Gatherings of goths from around the world are still held. The Whitby Gothic Weekend is held twice a year in England, and was held this past weekend according to the festival's Web site. In addition, Gothicfest, which its Web site heralds as "The Official Expo for the Gothic Subculture," was held earlier this month in Chicago.

But Murrell said goth is not a subculture. And it only existed between the early 1980s and late 1990s, he said.

"What turned me off were people who you can't discern them from anything else," Murrell said. "So many people were being non-conformists, they conformed. They conformed in their non-conformity and ran off the cliff."

In 1999, Murrell defended the owner of a south side goth club that had applied for a liquor license renewal. The now-defunct Club Sanctuary, 1753 S. Kinnickinnic Ave., was the center of controversy following a Mother's Day 1998 bondage performance attended by undercover police who issued citations, said club owner Todd Novasic.

When Novasic wanted to transfer the liquor license from Club Sanctuary to his current club, Club Anything, 807 S. Fifth St., he said he had to apply for a new one. But following the April 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colo., it got harder for the local goth club to get a new license as stereotypes about goth set in, Novasic said.

"Basically, the neighborhood didn't want the Trenchcoat Mafia coming in so close after the Columbine shootings," Novasic said.

After being denied a liquor license in contentious meetings of the city Utilities & Licenses Committee and Common Council during the course of 1999, a license was approved to Club Anything in June 2000, Murrell said.

In response to the city's refusal to approve a license for the club, Murrell and others created a spoof of the Milwaukee Common Council. They called it the Milwaukee Goth Council, which was always a joke, Murrell said.

"So many of the drama queens in the scene took it so seriously," Murrell said. "Then the scene took a dump, a real dump."

Murrell said Club Anything is nothing like Club Sanctuary, which was strictly goth/industrial. "That's when it was fun," he said.

Novasic said the goth clientele from Sanctuary's days are now married and have kids. While Anything features music of wider variety now, the club still offers a goth night the third Saturday of every month.

"The goth scene has changed dramatically," Novasic said. "And we're no longer the hub of the goth scene. I think it's more decentralized now."

Performer Brain Graupner, whose local band The Gothsicles has performed at goth festivals and clubs internationally, said goth can be dead if you want it to be.

"It's pretty easy to say anything is dead," Graupner said. "It's definitely different, but I'm not going to say it's dead."

Murrell said he doesn't think anyone today is really goth.

"They're almost the direct opposite of people who used to be goth," Murrell said. "It's a different generation, but maybe I'm just old."

“