Changing Scene

My friend Cylene has recently moved far away from London, so she won't be at leading Goth club Slimelight any time soon. But lately on LiberFaciorum she highlighted the complaint of another clubgoer at her treatment by the security guards one night in October:

As the saying goes, 'opinion is divided on this matter'. Cylene was outraged, while others suggested this was only what the club has to do to keep its licence.

I wasn't sure exactly what was being complained of, and the complainant's account doesn't make it completely clear. What does she mean by a 'full body search'? (I'm not going to Google 'under the bra' to work out what that phrase might entail). Even as far as the police are concerned, any search which might expose 'intimate areas of the body' can only take place in a police station, so if that was what happened that night at Slimelight it was plainly illegal; but the victim only specifically mentions that she was asked to take her shoes off.

Assuming that nothing positively illegal took place, it seems as though the security personnel were within their rights. According to the guidelines I found, they're permitted to ask to search a patron at an event or premises; the patron can refuse, but then the security personnel have an equal right to expel them from said event or premises, so the ultimatum they gave the complainant in this case was proper. The victim here complains that no explanation was given her, but of course it wasn't: the security personnel don't know the background to any report of illegal behaviour, and it's not their business to investigate it, and so they have to protect the reporting person against possible repercussions. Security do have to call the police if they want someone arrested, but not just to see them off the premises. There doesn't seem to have been any improper behaviour here, although as it turned out to be a case of mistaken identity you could argue the security personnel could have been more alert to that possibility, and the possibility, too, of someone reporting illegal behaviour maliciously. 

The most suggestive aspect of this is the complainant's insistence on her longstanding membership of Slimelight and that it was wrong to behave in this way 'especially towards a regular': in the end she was rescued by a security guard who recognised her. 'The atmosphere in there has completely changed ... We've lost our basic freedom which is what most of us went there for in the first place.' The trouble with this is that it's hardly reasonable to expect security personnel at an event to be familiar with who is and who isn't trustworthy, or indeed 'a regular'. Slimelight is a big venture to which people gravitate from a hundred miles away and more on a Saturday night, and is a commercial event - by which I don't mean it exists to make money, as it clearly doesn't, but that it's subject to the same rules and pressures as are events that do. It's anonymous. Whatever may have been the case once upon a time, it isn't a night out in the pub with your mates.

But that's what Goths often want it to feel like. The belief in subcultural community creates an expectation that a communal ethos will characterise the events where Goths gather. It reminds me of the things that were said at the time Reptile was expelled from its former home at the Minories off Tower Hill which expressed a sense that a Goth club night ought to have different rules applied to it from any other gathering, rules that recognised its significance as a sort of community event rather than a commercial one. But I don't think an event as big as Slimelight can work like that.