I did the Goth "I am a tortured artist" thing a bit in ninth grade--I just kinda got bored with being tortured. Now I still wear a lot of black, but it's mostly because half of the clothes I own are used for working crew in theatre.
I did have a rather fun time at a Goth club I went to in Cambridge, MA, when I was visiting a friend up there. And Susan, a lot of the people in the Goth club scene here are only Goth on the weekends. They do it for fun or fashion or entertainment and then go back to their regular lives the rest of the time. There are also a lot of people who always live in their Goth persona--some of them are really cool interesting people who have chosen Goth as their way of life, and some of them are pretentious "tortured artists" who need to grow up.