Are emos gay

As I have argued, emo was not just about music and fashion: it also had a distinct ‘structure of feeling’ – a set of emotions and orientations that amounted to a kind of mindset or worldview. These are vague terms, I admit, but they recognize something that is arguably characteristic of all youth subcultures. It’s easy to reduce subcultures to a single aspect of this kind – the aggression of the skinheads, the euphoria of the hippies – and to mark this to particular psychological or socio-political causes. However, this doesn’t do justice to the clustering of such emotions, their diversity and their occasional contradictions. Punks, for example, were by turns aggressive and depressed; they could be apathetic, but they could also be politically engaged; they sought attention, but then they couldn’t concern less. And when we look at the detail, none of this structure of feeling can be straightforwardly attributed to working-class resistance, or alienation from consumer society, or even plain old teenage rebellion.

These emotional mind-sets are often seen to have chemical origins: the mods are frequently ‘explained’ by their preference for amphetamines, the hippies by mariju