I have become something of a generational archetype. I am beset by the usual afflictions: Though I grew up working class in a classically Marxist sense, I am nevertheless déclassé in that, unlike my parents, I will probably never be able to afford a house. I enrolled in and dropped out of grad school, where I went partly to find respite from years of low wages and high rents in New York. I’m overeducated, underpaid, and indebted. I thrift all my clothes, have tattoos and piercings and a perpetually messy room. My love life has been a string of weeks-long situationships and one-night stands. And to top it all off, I live in the McKibbin Lofts.
Everyone in Brooklyn of a certain age seems to have a story about the Lofts, a former factory turned multistory party house in an industrial section of Bushwick that sometime in the 2000s got rebranded as East Williamsburg. An older friend of mine, a fellow homosexual, recently shared his memories of the place: parties with inflatable pools on the roof, floppy-haired exes with spotty income who played in bands, lax safety codes, friends and roommates illegally cramming into single-occupancy units. Now, when I tell people I live there, I get raised eyebrows and friendly teasing. I mean, of course, a mustachioed part-time barista and part-time waiter, a bookish hipster—where did that word go?—like me would end up in the ground zero of Bushwick’s 21st-century transformation from impoverished barrio to nightlife capital. Youthville. Bratburg.
There are still parties on the roof at the Lofts, which sometimes keep me up late into the night—and rock shows, birthday parties, art exhibits, and DJ sets. There’s even a gallery downstairs. Since the wild years, the Lofts have become more legit, but the grit remains. There are cockroach carcasses on the sagging wood floors; the people are the classic New York mix of stylish eccentrics and charming weirdos.1 A 2021 “oral history” of the Lofts in New York magazine dated its founding to 1997, when some “recent college grads” moved into the building, in what was then a neighborhood of “fabricators, manufacturers, and clothing producers along with working-class Latino families.” Before long the high-ceilinged lofts grew “packed with Vice-reading, American Apparel–clad DJs, skaters, and filmmakers.”
This is the story of lofts throughout the city. As the “urban crisis” took hold in the 1960s and 1970s, the factories of downtown Manhattan were abandoned by business and reoccupied by artists, punks, queers, and other misfits. Yet the postindustrial factory-to-loft transition has come to look like a Trojan horse for gentrification. The same New York piece notes that Bushwick, once best known as an epicenter of looting during the 1979 blackout, now has “million-dollar luxury condos” and “restaurants selling $23 bowls of squid-ink pasta.”
But Bushwick also has gay clubs and dive bars, indie bookstores and freelancer cafés, and, yes, a mostly white though comparatively diverse mix of transplanted skateboarders, artists, writers, queers, and “creatives,” all living cheek by jowl with a majority population of working-class Dominicans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Ecuadorans, and other Latinos. In this overwhelmingly renter-heavy neighborhood, newcomers, native New Yorkers, and immigrants alike are afflicted by greedy landlords and developers. At the end of the day, gentrification is a social process led by real estate capital, not blue-haired baristas saddled with student loan debt and merely in search of affordable and vibrant places to live. In a neighborhood full of college-educated bohemians and first-generation Hispanic immigrants, it’s no wonder Zohran Mamdani put up such crazy numbers. Go to Maria Hernandez Park on a summer afternoon and you can see punks doing a Gaza benefit, t-girls sunbathing and braiding each other’s hair, a house music party out on the plaza, and crowds of darker-skinned Latino immigrants speaking Spanish and Indigenous languages. As in any gentrifying neighborhood, what makes Bushwick beautiful also attracts the gentrifying sorceries of the landlord lobby that imperil it. And few things have put Bushwick on the map like its nightlife.
The wave began not long after the McKibbin Lofts attracted its first so-called gentrifiers. Market Hotel, a grungy, beloved nightspot perched just feet away from the elevated J/M/Z subway tracks, opened in 2007. Bossa Nova Civic Club started up a few blocks away in 2012. From there the list grew and grew: My favorite dive, the humble Happyfun Hideaway, opened in 2013, and Mood Ring in 2017. By then I was 22 and living in Crown Heights—impoverished, gay, finally on Truvada, and armed with a useless humanities degree from Rutgers. My gay circles at the time were centered on friends from college who had also made the move across the Hudson, or gays I met in the queer caucus of the citywide DSA chapter that had swelled with the first Bernie campaign. Back then—and this was eras ago, in nightlife time—our favored clubbing destination was the late Dreamhouse, home to the Spectrum parties. I even managed to charm my way into the also since-closed Output, in Williamsburg, for a Horse Meat Disco party. But I didn’t go out dancing back then the way I would later, after the worst of the pandemic, when the city reopened in the spring of 2021. I got that Pfizer, opened up my relationship, and got to work.
During the lockdown Bushwick’s bars and dancefloors might have shuttered, but by 2024 Bloomberg reported that the area’s “nighttime foot traffic . . . [had] more than doubled since 2017 and tripled since 2020 lows, surpassing that of popular nightlife neighborhoods Greenpoint, South Williamsburg, and Dimes Square.” There are plenty of places to choose from that weathered the Covid years, such as Nowadays, where I worked as a server and cashier one summer before the pandemic. Or there’s the House of Yes, which is basically a zoo for bridge-and-tunnel straight people to ogle “cool” city folks, with our zany clothes and loose morals. Besides that, and generally off the Jefferson Street L train stop (home to “the highest proportion of post-midnight and pre-dawn ridership in Brooklyn,” per Bloomberg) there are mega-venues like Avant Gardner and Elsewhere, or the sprawling, ecumenical Knockdown Center, whose downstairs houses Basement, an edgier, more exclusive techno and house club. Post-lockdown clubs like the enclosed and sauna-like Signal or the cavernous Refuge, both in East Williamsburg, have become new hotspots. Others, like Earthly Delights in Ridgewood, opened after the pandemic and swiftly went bust. Paragon, on Broadway in between Bed-Stuy and Bushwick, almost died, only to be revived by a communal effort. Ever-threatened by rising commercial rents, Brooklyn clubland is a real estate wild west. (As for Manhattan, you will only catch me at one of the twin disco parties, Wet Noise or Hot for You, at the Parkside Lounge on the eastern extremity of Houston Street. But respectfully, if you’re gay and tasteful, you stick to Brooklyn in general, and to the L, M, or J lines in particular.)
Mindlessly hedonistic, snobbishly insular, and punishingly cliquish though it might seem (and is), the booming Bushwick club scene has lately drawn the attention of “serious” writers and thinkers. Staff writers at prestigious magazines and tenured faculty at elite schools are openly talking about going to illegal warehouse raves and taking illegal drugs—but doing so deeply, politically, radically. An early instance was a 2021 essay in Artforum by Hannah Baer, “Dance Until the World Ends.” Baer starts off with a reminiscence of an unpermitted protest march during the summer 2020 uprisings, comparing its culture of concealment and mutual aid to rave culture. “Party spaces aren’t intrinsically revolutionary spaces,” she concedes, “but some parties are like revolutionary spaces.” On the dancefloor, “alienation cracks open and people are confronted with one another,” Baer writes. And while the stamina-straining “doggedness” of an all-night rave “is not the same as commitment to revolutionary movements . . . it’s not unrelated either.”
But there is also, she says, a “dystopian” element to nightlife:
People wait . . . in long lines to get into crowded nightclubs where the price of admission is often more than the price of a cheap meal for several people, spending wages they made using their bodies, bodies that they will then effectively disable with drugs to help them make meaning out of meaninglessness—and avoid sleep—and also to just move around all night toward a supposed catharsis.
Nightclubs are businesses, and real estate is expensive, and so many of the enterprising souls that turn deindustrialized wastes into cultural capital are, well, cishet white guys with trust funds or business partners, who crave underground cachet. They profit from the labor of DJs, janitors, the sound and light techs, and, of course, the dancers themselves. Bartenders, barbacks, and bouncers get stiffed. Some clubs even hire bathroom attendants who dutifully hand out napkins and candies to G’ed-out creative directors and project managers. Dance and rave culture in New York, which can feel so liberatory, ebbs and surges with capital flows and politico-legal headwinds, Baer writes: “the pull of utopia pulsing underneath the hiss of dystopia.”
Bear’s essay was soon followed by a clutch of likeminded books: McKenzie Wark’s Raving, from 2023, and Simon Wu’s Dancing on My Own and Emily Witt’s Health and Safety, from 2024. All are first-person diaries or memoirs, interspersed with quotations from more “objective” sources. Wark’s is a kind of auto-theoretical auto-ethnography, anonymizing participants with single letters, like a drama of subway lines. You have to follow what Z says to C who is dating F and who is E’s ketamine dealer, and so forth. (There’s even a G!) The scenery, too, is the same across these books: what Wark, taking a term from Rem Koolhaas, calls the deindustrialized “junkspace zone” of Bushwick, East Williamsburg, and Ridgewood, a stone’s throw from the Superfund site that is Newtown Creek separating Brooklyn from Queens, “the kind of place modernity went to die.”
Here, amid the husks of old factories and vacant warehouses, Wark rolls and grooves and dissociates. She taxonomizes partygoers. There are the normie “punishers,” who interact with the rave only as voyeuristic spectators. Related to the punishers are what Wark’s friend calls “coworkers: people who just want a night out so they can talk about it around the office on Monday.” There’s a solipsism to Wark’s writing that I found more than a little conceited. I recognize all these types and trends, but I would hope I have the humility not to proclaim diary entries and gossip as “theory,” or to pass off snide commentary about people I find annoying as ethnography. Then again, I guess one privilege of having tenure in a dying academic system is the freedom to take your own shit talk so seriously.
Meanwhile, reading Health and Safety, I would underline, dogear, or scribble in the margins to mark every mention of places that I and my kith and kin frequent. And I do mean “kin.” One night I was out with a friend, a fellow homosexual, at the aforementioned Paragon, where I ran into my older brother and his wife, who had come over from Harlem, along with two friends of theirs, whom I’ve known since I was a kid. Another time, I was with a gaggle of homosexuals at the Good Room in Greenpoint, site of many gay parties (such as Dick Appointment for black gays, or the Carry Nation, which is for “everyone,” so the crowd ends up fairly Caucasian). Anyway, whatever party it was, I soon ran into my younger, very heterosexual brother, while I was shirtless, amid my also-shirtless crew of friends. My brother’s presence notwithstanding, it was definitely one of those parties that became gayer, muskier, and more erotic after around midnight, as the vibes of the later DJ sets continued into sunrise.
And it’s just a fact that gays are generally more pleasure-seeking, salacious, nocturnal beings than straights. In the essay “Nightlife as Form,” the scholar and DJ Madison Moore describes the attraction of nightlife for “social outcasts who often find acceptance and freedom from the constraints of life and under the cloak of darkness,” freed from the surveillance of daylight, with its intrusive neighbors, leering queer-bashers, and security cameras. In New York—and, I’d bet, most other big cities—queer people in general and gay men in particular are the pillars of nightlife. We spin the tracks, sling the drinks, handle the lights, and much more. Above all, we show up and show out. I’ve been to nights at, say, a Nowadays or a H0L0 without many gays therein, and the vibes are either too fraternity rush or too stony-faced European for my tastes. Both groups tend to have wooden hips.
Health and Safety narrates a double life. By day, Witt is a distinguished staff writer for the New Yorker (she has also written for n+1). By night she is snorting and raving away at many of the same spots that I’ve also haunted for most of the last decade. I smirked in recognition when Witt mentioned the way Myrtle Avenue “slashes” through Broadway, and the “squealing roar” of the J and M lines above. This is the heart of the grittier side of Bushwick nightlife, the intersection my friends call the Myrtle-Broadway Autonomous Zone, one of the most potholed and cacophonous crossroads in Kings County. A frenetic space of distilled chaos and disarray, alive long after midnight with late-shift workers, fast-food patrons, barflies, and club rats.2 Witt also names Mominette on Knickerbocker, where I always order the escargot or the duck confit if I happen to have the money to treat myself. Witt recounts dates in Maria Hernandez Park, nights at the Knockdown Center, and, probably my favorite bar in the entire five boroughs (besides the Exley), the aforementioned Happyfun Hideaway, or HH.
These days, the Exley and its newest sibling, Animal, draw a few too many fairer-skinned Plain Janes from tonier sections of Manhattan to suit me. I have often been the only one shaking ass to Animal’s top-tier DJs, surrounded shoulder to shoulder by six-foot Justins, Matts, and Tylers. Yet I keep coming back, thanks to a critical mass of Judies, rump-rattling beats, and—a commonplace at gay watering holes of yore, but today endangered—a darkroom.3 Meanwhile, the look at HH is more dive than club. The rough, unpolished wood of the walls, chairs, and tables is even more rudimentary than at the similarly wood-heavy Metropolitan in Williamsburg, though HH thankfully lacks Metropolitan’s distinctive bleach-and-BO scent. Dancing at the Rosemont—on Montrose Avenue, get it?—feels ergonomically impossible on account of its minuscule dancefloor, which is a little bigger than my bedroom and full of pretty but vapid twenty-two-year old twinks. And I do not consider Macri Park; it never occurs to me.
Anyway. While the drama of Witt’s memoir follows the rise and collapse of a convulsive romance, Wu’s book begins with familial memories and maternal ambivalences that weave in and out of the narrative. Wu is keenly aware of the trope of Asian writers’ preoccupation with filial pieties and the Sisyphean psychodrama of trying to live up to the sacrifices of the immigrant strivers who raised you. “I don’t find myself exempt from this yearning,” Wu admits, a confession that extends to societally conditioned desires among gay men of color: upward mobility, a toned and thus marketable body, or a status-enhancing rotation of white boys. Yet he manages to maneuver among all these clichés with critical sensitivity.
Wu’s chapter on New York nightlife, entitled “Party Politics,” begins with his recollection of an event I had blissfully forgotten, Electric Zoo, a dance megafestival on Randalls Island, first held in 2009. When many Americans think of electronic music, they think of the graceless, sub-Skrillex robotic slop that blares in any budget gym chain. And that, it seems, is what Electric Zoo was all about: Wu describes “metallic wop wop sounds” and “blistering, wobbling dubstep.” “Why did it feel like so many Asian Americans were into EDM?” a dismayed Wu wonders, looking around him. Yet he eventually finds the perfect crossover in the form of Bubble_T, a party thrown for and by queer Asians, hosted at various north Brooklyn venues since 2017. Wu sees clusters of partygoers wearing tongue-in-cheek “self-orientalizing” get-ups: “Qipaos over jockstraps, a Sailor Moon with a necktie.” Bubble_T is part of a wave of what Wu calls “race-forward or identity-forward” parties, which are probably one of the defining trends of Gotham nightlife since the 2010s. These days, there’s Maricón and Papi Juice for Latinx queers, Laylit and Disco Tehran for Arabic and Persian dance hits, and Bodyhack for transgender and nonbinary folks. These queer parties tend to wander from one Brooklyn bar or warehouse to another, chased by punishingly high rents. Some have sought out alternative spaces: One of my most memorable post-lockdown outings in the city was an “electro-cumbia” night at Mi Sabor Café, right off Myrtle-Broadway, a Dominican buffet by day turned club by night.
These party scenes are thus both enabled and imperiled by the forces of gentrification—a fact that haunts Wark, Witt, Wu, and other rave writers, all of whom acknowledge their fraught positionalities as participant-observers, with varying degrees of self-flagellation. Wark, ever the academic, is self-reflexive, pointing out that while underground nightlife spaces are often heavily trans and queer, they remain mostly white, in a famously majority-minority metropolis. Witt, reporting from within the insurrectionary fervor of summer 2020, even quotes the Afropessimist theorist Frank Wilderson III at length. Wu likewise pleads guilty to taking part in an explicitly politicized party culture, centered in working-class neighborhoods, that is ironically set up to “primarily cater to upwardly mobile urban professionals.”
Confessing one’s advantages and privileges may be a tiresome performance nowadays, but the disparities are real. North Williamsburg, along the waterfront and above Grand Street, was long ago lost to Tribeca-style bullshit, and the same process threatens to immiserate and uproot working-class folks—Latino immigrants and college-educated baristas alike—in Bushwick and East Williamsburg. I don’t see any of the indigenous and mestizo Ecuadorans and Mexicans whom I pass along Knickerbocker Avenue clamoring to get into Mood Ring; nor do I see the Puerto Rican and Dominican folks who hang around Graham Avenue (renamed Avenue of Puerto Rico in 1982) lining up to dance at Basement. As venues raise drink and door prices to keep up with climbing rents, the very people that give these parties life—particularly the most vulnerable queers, like immigrant sex workers and black trans and femme people—risk being priced out of their apartments, let alone their parties. More conscientious partygoers and promoters acknowledge these contradictions. Wu notes that many parties offer discounted or free entry for, say, dolls of color, yet “the optics can still be uncomfortable, sitting uneasily with a rhetoric of inclusion and acceptance.” One late 2010s party, called Gush, had a “donation-based cover,” with $10 suggested “for anyone who identifies as lesbian, female, trans, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, intersex, or asexual, $15 for cis gay men, and $75 for cis straight men”—a kind of gender-based progressive taxation.
One current inheritor of this tradition, which has generated much word-of-mouth buzz and catty tweeting, is Zero Chill, a techno rave held in a massive warehouse (or maybe it’s a garage) in Brownsville, Brooklyn’s poorest, least gentrified, and most dangerous neighborhood. ZC enforces a door policy of admirable clarity if dubious legality, requiring attendees to either “be a woman” or “bring a woman.” Along with its sister party Faggots Are Women, ZC is the underground offspring of the same collective that organized the legendary Unter parties, which Witt recalls as playful, stridently anti-capitalist, and sometimes punishing. (She describes one of them, thrown in a vacant office building in Greenpoint, as feeling like a “video game . . . of the zombie-themed postapocalyptic genre.”) I didn’t go to many Unter parties until after the city reopened in 2021; people were practically fucking in the streets that summer. But I did make it to an Unter party sometime in 2019, at the Sugar Hill Club in Bed-Stuy. My memories of that night are fragmentary: the miasma of heat and sweat that enveloped you upon entry, the darkness, the staggering BPMs, the disorienting thrill of it all. The Dimes Square-to-Bushwick-pipeline it-girl Linux describes “a door policy [at Unter] so strict that it could (and does!) make the baddest bitch weep”—a means of “ensuring that only the most cunt are inside.”4
I, hip and beloved by at least three genders and a subscriber to a QPOC newsletter for discounted tickets—to join, you have to know someone or else fork over your socials, to prevent Dolezal-ing—have consistently brought along the key demographic. (If you’re one of my non-cis friends and I’ve ever texted you, “hi diva! got plans this weekend? :)” I apologize for the transactionalism.) Once I got past the days of planning and month of saving up for a ticket, and after an hourlong disco nap and protein bars, I found that inside ZC, the vibes were immaculate, with a pretty admirable mix of gender identities, and enough black folks for me to feel comfortable. The darkroom and many other nooks and crannies were full of people, likewise of many gender identities, sucking and fucking in pairs or threes. In the darkroom, a twink who topped me in a singlet spilled poppers on my mustache, which would produce a pounding headache sometime after sunrise. I remember a man groaning in delight while being fisted, and a six-foot trans woman thrusting vigorously into a cis dude, while techno filled the air.
Unter and ZC’s strict adherence to curating cuntiness, and especially ZC’s men-to-the-back door policy, have caused much consternation among New York’s cis gay Muscle Maries. Was this woke gone wild? Was “be a woman/bring a woman” any different from a frat party where you had to bring two or three women for every dude? And what about race? With ticket prices reaching fifty dollars or more, and cocktails inside hitting almost twenty, wouldn’t mostly white, well-to-do or well-connected dolls and femmes predominate? Would black or brown folks of all gender identities also be treated preferentially? ZC’s controversial solution to the problem of creating a space where people of like-minded politics, taste, and vibes can feel safe to party and let the music and drugs and sex take them away into ecstasy is an imperfect one for an imperfect scene, caught in systemic contradictions of class and identity.
Much recent rave writing is the work of older or established white writers with good jobs and stellar educations, who find new selves on sweaty dancefloors and in cauldron-like backrooms. For them, an aura of transcendence and transgression surrounds the rave, the disco, the club. For me, however, house and other electronic music was just cookout music, way back in the day. Disco, house, techno—if you’re black from Jersey, Harlem, Bed-Stuy, Chicago, or Detroit, this is the stuff that your cousin, or your neighbor, or your neighbor’s coworker, the one who DJs all the neighborhood events, would play from a laptop. Hell, maybe he got a CD from the oldhead or the wino at the barbershop who’s always pawning them.
This stuff that would prove to be so popular in the 2010s and 2020s was background noise to me growing up. My family is from Newark, homeland of the so-called Jersey Sound, which had its headquarters at the legendary Club Zanzibar on Broad Street. Church benefits would feature Kenny Bobien’s 1999 gospel house remix of the old Negro spiritual “I Shall Not Be Moved,” or Aly-Us’s 1992 hit “Follow Me.” Nothing fancy. When I was a teenager, my Harlem-dwelling older half-brother would convince my parents to walk my little brother and me to the bus stop three blocks from our place in Jersey; once we arrived at Port Authority, he’d whisk us to the Coney Island boardwalk to witness house music events with a distinctly proletarian vibrancy, where oldheads and youngbloods alike, mostly black and Puerto Rican, busted moves to Louie Vega tracks and Barbara Tucker belts. Nothing fancy. I didn’t think I had chanced upon something spectacularly new.
The latest compilation of rave writing is the straightforwardly titled Writing on Raving, an anthology edited by Wark, Zoë Beery, and Geoffrey Mak, with contributions by more than two dozen authors, including Wark and Wu. The book is a collective inquiry, the editors write, into “different notions of what a rave is, what raving is.” They note that “New York rave culture is having a moment,” which is clearly true. But when the editors go on to say that the prevailing “music, mostly, is techno, certain flavors of which became the soundtrack to a dancefloor culture that is queer in a different way to house music–centered gay nightlife,” I wince a little, with kneejerk defensiveness. Sometimes I get the impression that because the outer reaches of techno border on undanceable noise, it’s perceived as a more “serious” music than house, or British garage, or, say, South African amapiano or Brazilian baile funk. The austere, thoughtful avant-gardists versus the frivolous, muscle-bound gays. Yet once you see the rhythmless thrashing and headbanging that prevails at Basement, and compare it to the graceful and grounded gyrations next door at Studio, then you won’t mind the characterization.
So I was all the more drawn to Brooklyn-based artist Destiny Brundige’s essay “We Can All Live in This House,” a meditation on Soul Summit, a “very, very Black” party that’s near and dear to my heart. Soul Summit was started by DJs Sadiq Bellamy, Tabu, and Jeff Mendoza in the aughts as a party in Fort Greene Park, though these days it travels to various venues, from random rooftop bars to Nowadays. Unlike many parties that I frequent, Soul Summit is a majority-black function, featuring people who are actually there to dance, and dance well. Brundige describes people “really moving all limbs,” with “advanced footwork, spinning, and jumping,” unlike the graceless monotony on other dancefloors. Here the controlled yet improvised polyrhythms of black music parallel the asymmetrical moves of black dance—thus, with knees bent and hips loosened, you might snap your fingers and move your arms and torso in a steadied beat, yet at different angularities compared to your hips and feet. As Brundige attests, Soul Summits in the park almost have the atmosphere of a huge family reunion, with black elders and youths sitting in lawn chairs, selling trinkets, grilling jerk chicken, and passing around nutcrackers. Hell, years ago at one Soul Summit I even met up with my mom and her friends.
Brundige started going to Soul Summit in the middle of the 2010s, as Brooklyn nightclubs went from featuring more “amorphous” genres “that sampled elements from a vast sonic range, from jersey to juke to ballroom, pop, industrial noise, and vocal snippets” to being “tak[en] over” by techno. Now, I can’t say with confidence whether this is an accurate periodization, but it is at least admirably provocative. Brundige also takes umbrage at the increasing whiteness of, well, Brooklyn, and even Soul Summit itself. At one edition of the party, high on shrooms, she becomes “psychedelically incensed by a human chain of white gays, creating a fleshy, impassable block right at the center dancefloor,” which struck me as a touch grouchy. (Besides, I dunno about you, but if I’m dancing on my feet for six hours straight under the July sun, I’m taking off my shirt, the sensibilities of aforementioned elders be damned. I would rather suffer a scowl than a stroke.) Brundige implores white ravers, particularly in black spaces like Soul Summit, to take up less space, be less egotistical, be more respectful, and so on—which is all well and good, though it feels like a very personalist solution to the greater ills of gentrification as a social process.
For me, the other notable piece in the collection is a series of recollections and reflections by one of the more recognizable figures in gay nightlife, the veteran doorman Shawn Dickerson. Like so many queer refugees from the American hinterland, Dickerson writes of escaping the South for the glitter and buzz of the city. Somewhat less universally, he also remembers meeting Madonna at Paradise Garage, hanging out with Keith Haring at Danceteria, and other tales of a time when the city was seedier and, debatably, ten times as interesting. In the 1980s, Dickerson began working the door for clubs and parties, finely honing a taste and a curatorial sensibility. The general principle? “If people don’t get in, it’s usually based on entitlement. If you’re too much with us, then we’re going to get into it,” he says. In practice, I think this means: Don’t be a dweeb, an ass, a bigot, or a square. And please look stylish. Or at least slutty. Don’t give us nothing.
The bigger or busier the venue, the more snap and discriminating the judgments become.5 This is the case, Dickerson says, when he works the door at Basement, which has a reputation for turning away clueless normies who don’t know anything about the music or who’s playing that night—people who couldn’t tell garage from amapiano, or Jersey club from New Orleans bounce. The Reddit posts and TikToks of embittered Basement rejects make for some schadenfreude. I take a, yes, sadistic pleasure in watching people who enjoy all the fruits of affluent conformity by day become the abject of the city’s nightworld: Duke grads with six-figure email jobs in Murray Hill or North Williamsburg, who drone about “deliverables” and “Q4,” whose lives are sustained by armies of gig slaves, dog walkers, food servers, and domestic laborers. So no, I don’t want people who resemble the most heinous characters on White Lotus to be at Basement while I’m snorting coke in a jockstrap and getting railed and bred against a wall. Unearned advantage is the sine qua non of their lives, excluding people like me, my friends, and my communities—so why should we have to make them feel welcome in our spaces?
The new wave of rave writing has been largely limited to personal essays and memoirs. We’re still waiting on the great rave novel. But a template, at least, might be the German writer Rainald Goetz’s Rave—first published in 1998 but not translated into English until 2020—in which an autofictional Goetz rambles, rants, and, yes, raves, alongside a coterie of friends and colleagues. Formally, the book is chaotic and almost contemptuous of chronology, full of narrative diversions and chopped-and-screwed sentences. Its characters are more apparitions than people. Goetz’s project is seemingly less to tell a story than to explore an extended metaphor of the sensory onslaught and temporal haze of being at a rave while on a cocktail of narcotics. Two pages into the second part of this mercifully short book, in a section cheekily titled “SUN BOOBS HAMMER,” Goetz writes:
Where are we headed then?
Fugo.
Or Fortuna.
Labor.
Oberpframmern.
Already?
To see Tommy, Kerstin, Mate, Bill.
To see Angela, or Roberto, nah: to the hotel.
When’s it gonna be dark again?
Maybe nice to sit down first.
Good idea.
See what I mean? In evoking the cacophonous delirium of the rave, Goetz is successful—perhaps more successful than Wark, Witt, and Wu, who, even when detailing their own experiences snorting and ingesting all manner of substances, rarely take much risk with narrative, let alone grammatical convention.
Yet Goetz’s Euro-visions leave me cold. Maybe my problem is that I’m envious of the daring of certain regular users of narcotics at the parties I frequent, and of the steady streams of income that fund their habits. These days, baggies of powdered drugs go for upwards of a hundred dollars, depending on how many grams you’re getting. Personally, I’ve done most of the usual suspects. I stay clear of psychedelics, though. Accidentally double-tabbing on acid several summers ago in Montauk was the most intense afternoon of my life, and I do not want to revisit that space again. And ketamine’s dissociative effects—and the sheer terror that my vodka soda might collide with a fat bump, landing me in a debilitating k-hole—spook me away. And besides, if I’m going to be busting moves for at least five hours, I’m going to need uppers. There’s only so much money I can spend on Red Bull cocktails (sugar-free, of course). I am trying out keto.
Now, unlike a lot if not all of these rave writers, I can’t say I’ve been to Ibiza or Berlin—or even, embarrassingly enough, left the New World. Not that I haven’t lived. I’ve taken to bed a line-snorting twink at a rave called Void in North Philly. I’ve been ate out by an OnlyFans star—famously a bottom, yet I have my talents of conversion—in a bathroom stall at a costume-filled, outer space–themed party in DC. I’ve given mediocre head (not my best work, I must say) to a longtime social media “moot” at a leather bar in Chicago’s Boystown. But low wages and bad credit fasten you to the earth, I guess, or at least this hemisphere. In rave circles, being able to say you’ve vacationed in Europe still signifies advantage and pedigree—even though techno and house are as American as apple pie and school shootings.
What Witt and I do have in common, however, is a knowledge of Portuguese and time spent in Brazil. Brazilian music has global reach, and even in the clubs of Bushwick, you’ll often hear a set with a funk carioca track, though most of those dancing presumably don’t understand the lyrics or know the genre. I just wish that these rave writers, mostly Brooklynites who snowbird in Condesa and summer in the Pines and Neukölln, had made more of a point of writing about nightlife outside of the North Atlantic Basement-to-Berghain circuit. To his credit, Geoffrey Mak has an entire piece in Writing on Raving about taking a trip to Mexico City to save a relationship on the rocks. But then again, it seems like every faggot off the L train snowbirds in CDMX these days. How about a couple thousand miles further south, to the world’s blackest country outside of Nigeria?
Meu Deus, do I miss Rio and São Paulo. A grad school fellowship allowed me to spend the winter of 2020–21 in Rio’s Botafogo. With pandemic restrictions still in place, I didn’t do much clubbing—but I did make it to a few concerts, a jazz one at a bar in São Paulo and Juçara Marçal at Circo Voador. I knew I had to go back. A couple years later, I won a grant to study at a language school in Copacabana. I was lucky enough to live with an elderly black woman, Senhora Dantas, whose high-rise apartment building was two blocks from the beach.
Somehow I found out about this party called V de Viadão. (The word is a variant of viado, basically slang for “faggot,” which Brazilian gays have reclaimed with the same camp and irreverence as us americanos.) It was late at night, and I took an Uber—one dollar was going for five réais—to the downtown section, Centro, eerily empty at night and surrounded by favelas. At the door were queers in their showy, flaming vestments. Inside it was mostly gay men in the standard outfits of all-black athleisure and loose-fitting clothing, for dancing and sweating through the summer night. And it was, at least to my ianque eyes, a very black and brown crowd as well. I remember mostly dancing by myself, just vibing out, as I usually end up doing at some point on club nights. While having a smoke outside, I befriended two black gays—one named, shall we say, Pedro, and another who, I would later learn, was Organzza, winner of the first season of Drag Race Brasil. (I would go on to hang out with Pedro, Organzza’s collaborator on many of her looks, throughout the summer; I even did karaoke with their friends.) Later that night, going out for another smoke, I was approached by a tall, tatted-up, brown-skinned man with sinewy limbs, curly brown hair, and big, dark eyes. Let us call him Carlos. We chatted away in broken Portuguese and English about his time studying dance, and soon I was grinding on him on the dancefloor. Then we made out in a bathroom stall. His mouth tasted of coke and spearmint.
One Friday, I skipped language classes to take a six-hour bus ride from Rio to São Paulo. Miles of fog-covered green mountains eventually gave way to São Paulo’s vast jungle of glass and concrete. I would be staying at a hostel in Pinheiros, one of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods, full of gated condos and Gucci-wearing, shih-tzu-owning brancas who shop in Miami and holiday in Europe every year. In Pinheiros, I met up with my friend and his husband, whom I will call Bradley and Fernando. Bradley and I had met in New York years earlier, when he was a year or two into dating Fernando, a native Paulista studying architecture in Manhattan. After years of long distance, Bradley had accomplished many people’s dreams: He bagged a handsome Brazilian man.
That evening we ate at a fancy Arab spot before heading to the gorgeous apartment of one of Fernando’s friends. All homosexuals and a few women. They were elegant, good-looking, well-dressed, and obsessed with divas like Ariana Grande (pronounced “Grahn-jee”). I half-understood what they were saying, their conversation full of quick-witted slang and references that a classroom can’t impart, but I still picked up on the fact that, well, gay people are the same everywhere. Or at least they are in upscale sections of the most globalized cities, imbibing the same shows, music, and cultural signifiers. Besides, these jet-setting homos in the Paulista version of the Upper East Side all spoke fluent English anyway.
After this pitstop, we made our way to Mamba Negra, a rave held in an deindustrialized area called Barra Funda, quite similar to the wide-open warehouse blocks of, say, Johnson Avenue in East Williamsburg. (One of the rave’s organizers has said that in a socioeconomically fractured place like São Paulo, parties are compelled to seek out “empty and derelict buildings, usually factories, in the industrial neighborhoods . . . in São Paulo’s downtown,” in the same way that gentrification has shaped the party scenes of other globalized cities like London and Berlin.) We got out of an Uber to join a long, snaking line outside a complex of abandoned factories, garages, and warehouses. All around us were people in sunglasses dancing and bopping to, as one local newspaper described it, “som de house e techno misturados com batidas brasileiras.” One warehouse included a tattoo parlor; another had rave and kink gear for sale—harnesses, collars, and what have you. Onstage were DJs, drag queens, and queer and trans rappers. It was like Avant Gardner, but tropical, and so much cooler.
Back at the Viadão party in Rio, I remember hearing a sped-up remix of “Freak Like Me” by Adina Howard, and then, blaring throughout the club like a bloco of sambistas at Carnaval, the hit 1992 remix of Aretha Franklin’s “A Deeper Love,” by the duo Robert Clivillés and David Cole, with vocals by Deborah Cooper.6 This is a house track more than a techno one, closer to electronic dance music’s roots in disco, and suited for uplifted hands. Music that was meant to be danced and not thrashed to, as the body is coaxed into ever more rapid and intense gyrations of hips, arms, shoulders, and buttocks. Music to catch the Holy Ghost to, music to dance oneself into a trance so the orixás can take you. Can mount you. Elube Chango, elube Yemaya. It felt like being at church again with my Nanna down in rural Georgia. It felt like listening to my dad’s Tito Puente or Babatunde Olatunji records. It felt like being back at Soul Summit on a hot summer’s day in Fort Greene Park. All of the gorgeous men I would spend time with and get ghosted by in Brazil were around my complexion. Some a tint lighter, some a shade darker. The African diaspora is a big and beautiful thing, and its soundtrack, from jazz and samba to disco and techno, would make Rio feel like a home away from home. That said, I really hope they let me into Berghain.
Or at least on my floor. Once, in the elevator, a long-maned guy in a tee and Vans struck up a conversation with me. I initially entertained him chiefly because of his dimples, but we ended up chatting on the roof for at least an hour. (He was a Burner, and, unfortunately, straight—yet very personable, which always throws me off.) From there he brought me to a massive unit in another part of the building. It looked like a mix between a WeWork and one of those huge, chicly furnished apartments you see in the Times, with an LED-lit ceiling and a spiral staircase leading down to a yoga studio. ↩
And also with men, often older and mostly black and brown, who sit slumped against walls, their mouths agape and drooling, or else shuffle down the sidewalk, their torsos and limbs swaying like dogwoods in the breeze. The “fent fold,” as it’s known on TikTok. These are “zombies,” the most tragic sort of addicts, so possessed by narcotics as to seem barely alive. ↩
A Judy is like, when you’re a gay guy and your bestie is also a gay guy? That’s your Judy. ↩
What do “the most cunt” wear, or not wear, to gain admittance? At the Unter party, Witt observes “bare breasts and bare asses, leather harnesses, drag queens and dolls, ravers in sportswear or dressed all in black.” I always arrive at the club in my classic, no-frills, extremely practical rave getup: tank top, baseball cap, socks, and running shoes; a crossbody for my poppers and wallet; and gym shorts, with an inseam always under five inches. ↩
Dickerson sagely observes that a major difference between Berghain and Basement is that Germans just take a “no” at the door with stoic acceptance, in contrast to the narcissistic disbelief displayed by Americans. Dickerson, who to me is most recognizable from working the door at Carry Nation, reports that straight people on line at the Greenpoint club Good Room will ask, “well how bad is it?” when they find out that anything Carry-affiliated is gonna be 85 percent homosexuals, 10 percent dolls, and 5 percent fag hags. Curious straight people on their “safari nights” will pile into Ubers and pay $40 per head to stay for an hour at most, gawk at dudes in pup masks, and then leave. Bitch, just go to Union Pool! Or Le Bain, if you dare. ↩
What I noticed throughout Rio and elsewhere was the deep reverence that Brazilians, especially negro or pardo Brazilians, had for African American culture. For them, American cultural hegemony was essentially black American cultural hegemony. Senhora Dantas, Mario, and many others kept asking me if I had watched Everybody Hates Chris (Todo O Mundo Odeia O Chris—a Carioca would say “kreesh”), which was a huge hit in Brazil, if only because for a long time the white-dominated and colorist corporate media—such as the right-wing, anti-Lula Globo network—would not produce original shows with Afro-Brazilian characters. Or if they did, they would be depicted as one-dimensional stereotypes: struggling, drug-dealing favelados, sinister narcotraficantes, or gangbanging swindlers, malandros. Thus black and brown Brazilians expanded their palate, looking to black American sitcoms, dramas, and Hollywood heavyweights. ↩
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