The End of the Emo Era Is Breaking My Teenage Heart

Shannon Keating, writing for Buzzfeed:

As a 15-year-old, if I had been approached by the lead singer of a band I believed had saved my life, there’s no telling what I would have done for him, had he asked. He and other punk-rock icons stared out at me from my bedroom walls every day, where I’d obscured my pathetically girly cloud-swirled blue wallpaper with posters and photo spreads from the Alternative Press. Lacey was my hero. I have a feeling I would have given him anything he wanted.

Like Garey, like every teenager, I was a know-it-all who thought I was a grown-up, so I wouldn’t have recognized that kind of behavior for what it was. But I also believed, at 15, that emo boys — and men — were different from “regular” guys. Emo guys were, yes, “emotional,” and introspective, and artistic, and they imbued everything with the kind of emotional weight I did as a shitty-poetry-writing teen