The author assesses his status as a dyed-in-the-wool geek,

 After countless years of torment, I’ve finally become comfortable with my geek status, embracing it like a cherished lover. This reassessment comes in the wake of a book I’ve recently perused, entitled Geek Chic. I ran across it at the Elliott Bay Bookstore—a wet dream of a book retailer if ever there was one—and picked it up in anticipation of laughing at the variegated manifestations of geekiness throughout American history. But, to my horror, I discovered that I’d actually liked and/or loved many of those hallmarks of geekhood without realizing that, indeed, I was (and am) a geek! Examples: 1) My first computer was a Mac II, followed by an Osborne and a Commodore Amiga—each the quintessential geek’s choice, 2) despite a predilection for punk rock, I was a huge fan of Depeche Mode, the Smiths, and the ever-angsty Cure—bands now universally recognized as gargantuan geeksters, 3) Blade Runner is the coolest movie ever made, Andy Kaufman was the world’s preeminent mind-fucker, and Neuromancer remains one of my most beloved novels—and if those choices don’t cry "Geekiness!", nothing does, 4) I’ve had a huge crush on Tina Fey for years, and an abiding passion for Vampire: The Masquerade, wherein I’m known as Vitaly della Malva, a cultured Ventrue originally turned by Grigory Raputin, the Mad Monk of Tsarist Russia, and 5) I wear glasses and boxer shorts, and I adore women who wear glasses and boxer shorts. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Back in the early Eighties, while Anastasia Solis and I were still married, we regarded ourselves the pinnacle of cool. After all, we’d rocked out to the Sex Pistols and Crass, spouted anarchist politics, and dressed like a pair of spree killers. But when we saw Gloria Mundi, Danse Macabre, and Bauhaus at London’s Batcave in 1981, we were suddenly confronted with something we’d never seen in America: Mohawks had given way to pale, high-contrast makeup, Doc Martens had faded to make room for black-and-purple Renaissance-era flourishes, and not a single kid was pogo-dancing—they were all "swirly-dancing," Ana observed, lyrically floating around with hands tracing patterns in the air. What the fuck? "Well," Ana said, "punk has been dead for over a year now, ever since Karl Lagerfeld produced a sack skirt with safety pins. Maybe this is the new thing. Anyway, the music is great, no?" So, in our continuing effort to reach new heights of hip, we bought a bunch of frilly blouses and Walter Raleigh thigh-boots in the King’s Road, took them back to Seattle, and proceeded to thoroughly scandalize the local rock scene. However, in time, other kids began to ape our style, and our beloved Vogue soon became indistinguishable from the Batcave. Naturally, we thought we were the last word in au courant—especially since my wife and I occupied seats at the apogee of our local scene—but we utterly failed to recognize that we’d simply crawled onto the biggest geek bandwagon in the history of western culture. Yes, goths are geeks, purely and simply, and there’s not a single observer who’d dispute the point.