Club @ might seem to be the kind of place that the people of Eagle Mountain would hate. To get to Club @ you drive down 300 West in Salt Lake City, past chain link and warehouses. You come to an old LDS church — the 5th Ward Chapel — a red brick church built in 1910, in the days when this was a neighborhood full of homes. In recent years, the old church has been home to rave parties and is now the site of Club @, which features, on Saturdays, "Salt Lake's only under-age gay club" and on Sundays "the surreal, Gothic and macabre." The weekend starts with Fetish Friday.

It turns out, on closer inspection, that "Fetish Friday" was named mostly for the alliteration. On a recent summer Friday night there are no chains or spikes in sight. Also, no alcohol, because it turns out that this is an alcohol-free club. There are a few people dressed in black, in the Victorian-hip manner of Goths.

"It's not a matter of wanting to be Goth," says Madelyn Boudreaux, trying to explain her predilection for the subculture known as Gothic. Boudreaux, who is a deejay at Club @, believes some things are unavoidable, practically ordained. When she was 4 and watching Sesame Street, her favorite muppet was The Count. When she was 5 and visited Disneyland, the only souvenir she wanted was a stuffed Eyeore. Flamboyant gloom was Boudreaux's style from the beginning, long before 1996, when she moved to Utah from New Orleans.

Boudreaux is 31 now, on the far end of Gothdom's typical age demographic. On this warm June night she is wearing an age-defying ensemble, black on black. In the fading light her purple lipstick looks black, too. Boudreaux began dressing in all black when she was 14. Before she was a Goth she was into a neon pink phase, followed by a transitional all-gray phase. She was an A-student in high school, then went on to get a master's degree in English and folklore.

She comes at her Gothness both as a devotee and a keen observer. And what she's figured out, she says, is that in a place like New Orleans, the "underground" counterculture is so far aboveground that you can see it everywhere. But in Salt Lake City, where the surface of the culture is so smooth as to appear uniform, you can also find an underground, she says. "You just have to work harder to find it."

So, you go inside the club, across the dance floor that used to be filled with pews but now is waiting for something to happen, the air all fogged, the pink and green strobe lights pulsating in time to the music. You walk downstairs, to the basement, where a deejay named Jacob Bogedahl is spinning a song called "Isolation" by the band Bamboo Crisis.