Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making

2 THE CURRENCY OF FABULOUSNESS Fashioning the Self, Fashioning the Lifeworld

«<2 THE CURRENCY OF FABULOUSNESS Fashioning the Self, Fashioning the Lifeworld Nobody ever saw anything like that in this part of town. When you came out of the Saint— eight in the morning, nine o'clock, every single one of us brought sunglasses, because, girl, when you came out you were so high that you never thought the night would end. This was the emerald city, this was fantasyland, and this was the dream of every gay man. Every weekend, there was something new to amuse you. I remember there were a lot of crazy things before the Saint, and the Saint had to top that. Once at 12 West, they got a hugepig—about four hundred pounds—and they gave thepig acid and they threw him into the crowd, and you have this huge monsterpig going wild through the crowd. Now, you have to top that in the Saint. You're dancing and there was this pig, this cute thing, can you imagine? (Tito) These are people [going to dance clubs] who don't march, who go to these fabulous, wonderful spaces and expect to see this elsewhere, and it's a different gay movement, stodgy, politicized in some way that is narrow, and they forget the fun part. It's meetings. It's disappointing. I want that other really powerful thing. I go back to my disco dancing. I get my gayness. I get my empowerment, once a week, for the week. And I can look at anybody in the face in myjob and my family, and I know for a fact, it's good to be gay, it's fabulous, and sometimes, it's better than you. (Stephen, age 33) ^ DANCE CLUBS —MOST ESPECIALLY queer dance clubs—were spaces to be fabulous. In these spaces, participants felt encouraged to fashion themselves and to realize their imaginative possibilities through dress, bearing, social interactions, and dance. Why queer dance clubs especially ? Because in a queer lifeworld, being fabulous was hard currency. It 36 The Currency of Fabulousness <« 37 was exchanged for belonging to a peer group, for being loved and desired , and for self-esteem. It was—in the words of Stephen, an AfricanAmerican queer man who has lived and danced in New York City since 1991 —a way to "get my empowerment," both within his queer lifeworld and outside it. This fun aspect of his life was anything but trivial. It was in fact more empowering for him than going to a march or political meeting for gay and lesbian rights. A space in which to be fabulous produced him as a gay subject: "I get my gayness." It also produced the meaning of "gayness" for him through the pleasure of the grind on the dance floor, rather than the grind of going to meetings and talking about oppression . This identification was based on pleasure and self-knowledge rather than queer resistance, but the spaces he chose to go to and the way he spoke about them and the practices within indicate that the gayness he got was not a one size fits all model. He sought out particular spaces and particular relations and rejected others. He chose the public sphere of embodied relations rather than discursive ones. The pleasure he made for himself dancing in these spaces produced self-knowledge: "I know for a fact it's good to be gay." Making pleasure worked. Being fabulous worked. But what were the forms, structures, and systems of practices that produced, sustained, and acted as forums for the operation, circulation, and exchange of being fabulous? As Stephen suggested, the spaces in which he made pleasure—queer clubs—were also "wonderful, fabulous spaces." That fabulousness was a process of storytelling—a fabrication, a place where many different stories were performed through self-fashioning and celebrated for the richness of their diversity and the power of their commonalities. These spaces were fabulous in themselves and simultaneously through his participation enabled him to be fabulous. The space produced him and he produced the space. He was aware that he was one of the elements in a club that made it fabulous—not least because he was a fine dancer with that combination of playfulness, confidence, and enjoyment of his body that made him "fierce." In queer clubspeak, this term was the highest compliment anyone could give another. It was a social legitimation, a mark of high regard . But how did people prepare themselves to move into the third body of recreation—the self that could tell its story publicly and be fierce? In this chapter, I lead you through the preparation for going to a club, arriving at it, and journeying through it to the dance floor. By going through these stages, I am identifying stages of queer world-making. I want to look at the club space itself to understand the practices that enabled a space, a group of people, and an individual to be fabulous. 38 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE Many queers are worldless, cut off in many instances from family, church, and other institutions of community-building. They have to fashion their worlds from their own bodies out. Stephen "gets his gayness" from dancing in a queer club. It was a space of self-fashioning. This fashioning started before people arrived at the club: in deciding what to wear, calling friends, listening to music, perhaps even dancing around your own or a friend's room, and packing your "accessories," as I witnessed on several occasions at the homes of participants, all part of a queer lifeworld . In many cases I have experienced, people gathered together at one person's home to get ready and preparation became an integral part of the whole social event. Tito lived around the corner from where in the 1980s the Saint dance club was located in the East Village. Therefore during that period, his small apartment was the meeting place for his friends before they went to the club: "It was a ritual. Everybody would come over, and we'd all watch Saturday Night Live, and get ready." This was a typical scene as clubbers prepared for their night out with implications of queer world-making. As participants prepared themselves, they prepared for show—for publicly performing queerness and for dancing. Clothes were thrown on the floor in disgust and whether the reasons for rejection were practical or aesthetic, they were always detailed-oriented: "When I get hot it sticks to me in all the wrong places and stinks"; "Wore it last week"; "It makes my shoulders look round"; "These pants have no pockets. Where am I going to put my cash and my gum? Could you keep them for me?" Alex called it "pulling a look": taking care over appearance, putting a unique outfit together, which for some clubgoers meant not in a designer package, but rather by acts of bricolage—putting things together to form more than the sum of their parts, sometimes working in striking juxtapositions , and preferably for as little cash as possible. For some, this style of dressing was queer. A smart designer outfit was sometimes mocked as too straight. Stephen also testified to the process of pulling a look and the queer pleasure it generated for both participant and audience: I loved the way people dressed. And that was also part of the space. They'd wear their T-shirts, but honey, they'd also wear fabulous shit. Looking cute. They weren't designers, graphic designers, they werejust artistic types, and they'd still work it out. It wasn't about labels. It was about looking good for the fun of it (Stephen). Generally, fabulous clubgoers fell into two categories: those pulling a look—trying to look individual, unique, and special, and those dressing The Currency of Fabulousness <« 39 for "serious" dancing in clothes that caused as little restriction as possible . These categories overlapped. In both categories, participants also dressed to display their bodies: whether in high bondage heels, tight jeans, or a tight white muscle T-shirt ("muscle-T") to show off the results of all those hours in the gym, for instance. This use of costuming was inherently theatrical. It aimed to produce a glorious character and to attract the attention of an appreciative audience. It also produced status, which in a queer club was broadly bifurcated between those who made the scene and those who came to admire them. Barrel, a white Jewish gay man in his early thirties, recalled the moment several years earlier, when he realized the role his self-fashioning played in other people's responses to him and his status in the club on arrival at Love Machine, an early 1990s gay club on Union Square: It was the most dressed up I ever got. Big boots up to my knees, tight leather shorts with a big buckle and a cowboy hat. And a teeny weenie Tshirt and a vest. And leather wrist cuffs. And I remember walking in and people were taking my picture. Daniel Harris emphasizes the role self-fashioning plays in a queer lifeworld in his recent portrayal of contemporary North American urban gay culture, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. He suggests that sexual minorities differ from other minorities because they have neither a geographical place of origin (along with the shared cultural traditions that a common national heritage produces) nor physical characteristics: Because we are the only invisible minority, we must invent from scratch those missing physical features that enable us to spot our imperceptible compatriots , who would remain unseen and anonymous if they did not prominently display on their bodies, in their sibilant voices and shuffling gaits, their immaculate grooming and debonair style of deportment, the caste mark that constitutes the essence of the gay sensibility. (Harris 1997,35) Participants dressed "queer" to create themselves and to be read by a target audience of other queers, which, in a gay, lesbian, or queer club, can be exploited to the utmost. No longer a secret code on the street, in a club people wore and carried themselves without censorship—external or internal. As I sat around a table in the East Village with a few other clubbers, Jermaine conjured up a terrific image of his younger self as he dressed 40 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE to express and impress in a club in the 1980s in a truly fabulous piece of storytelling in which all of us present participated. The permission to be outrageous explicit in some clubs offered him power not available in other spaces. The awkward, chubby black kid from Queens transformed himself into a glorious creature of the queer demimonde. I wasn't attractive, so I made up for it by being outrageous. This was the time when African hair was back in. So you saw a lot of flat-tops. I had one that went up and slanted to one side—oh my God, what must I have looked like! I had a snake skin suit from the Salvation Army, 'cos that's where you could find stuff that was cheap. And it was OK. But it wasn't enough. So remember those gladiator sandals Capezio did? [Much groaning and laughing .] Well . . . I put those on too. So I have the slant top [he mimes hair with movement of hands], the snake skin suit [he runs hands down body as if showing off the suit] with the gladiator sandals [his fingers pick at straps, cueing us to visualize them.] But it wasn't enough. After all it was the '80s, all about excess right? Well, this was also the time of those backless shirts for men. Now who did those? ["Gaultier!" someone cries.] Well, I got a cheap copy and it had blue paisley amoebas on the chest. [Howls of laughter.] So I've got the slant top, the snake skin suit, the gladiator sandals , the blue backless shirt [he repeats his mime and some of usjoin in]. But, I'm still thinking . . .["It's not enoughll" we scream.] Exactly. So I get some body glitter . . . and [we scream with mirth as we all spontaneously complete his story by miming throwing it down our own backs]. So now I'm thinking, I'm ready. DANNY: Oh yes, y'all ready for the R train now, baby! KEVIN: You sure you didn't need a belt, honey? The joy we shared at hearing this story was an integral part of its performance . We became its fellow participants, chorus, and audience, supporting and commenting on it. One story became the opportunity for sharing many more stories of going to clubs, often opened with "Do you remember this club, or that period, or that song, or that feeling," calling upon all of us present to participate in the theater of memory. The particularities of Jermaine's story revealed two important truths about "being fabulous." One, it could be a form of compensation. In this case, Jermaine did not feel himself to be attractive within the queer lifeworld and so compensated by fashioning himself into a fabulous creature. Stephen's story also revealed how being fabulous compensated for homophobic responses and the dullness of hetero-orthodoxy or homo- The Currency of Fabulousness <« 41 orthodoxy outside of his queer community. Also, being fabulous was something about a unique style, often pivoting—in the realm of dressing up, at least—around excess: "It wasn't enough" Excess worked both ways, not only extending out from the body, but clinging to it as tightly as a second skin. Clubgoers executed this self-fashioning for potentially critical (queer) audiences, one of which had a very practical role to play as gatekeeper of the club itself. Door people did not only have to monitor the ages of the patrons (the legal drinking age in New York State was twenty-one), but they also selected the type of people they wanted in a club. The way people dressed was one way of deciding this. As a doorman at Foxy, a queer party at an East Village bar called Velvet (Avenue A and 10th Street) that ran from 1996 to 1998, Alex paid attention to how people dressed when he decided who got in: "If you're going to wear a T-shirt, it'd better be really tight, your jeans better be really tight. And you better not have underwear on." He expressed disdain at what he saw as the asexual sartorial style of frat-boy grunge (baggy flannel shirts and jeans) and designer label clones. On several occasions, I stood with him at the door while he did his job. I watched him shine his Maglite onto the shoes of people in the line: "You can tell a lot about people from their shoes," he informed me. If a person was not "pulling a look" or looking "fabulous" he or she was sometimes met with a comment like, "You know it's queer night?" As I was wearing unremarkable boots one time, I asked him if he would let me in if he didn't know me. He smiled. "Combat boots with laminated hipster drainpipes and a fake fox-fur jacket?" I took this as a positive response. The items of clothing themselves may not have been fabulous, but unusual or anti-fashion-clone combinations were. As well as deciding what to wear, participants also took care to decide what to take. One clubgoer, Catherine, referred to this as packing your "club survival kit." In a clubgoer's apartment at 2:30 A.M., after the outfit was finished, the participants assembled and checklisted their kits like Navy Seals readying for a mission. Everything we loaded into pockets and minibackpacks had to be portable, useful, and able to be carried without causing unsightly bulges in clothing. Barrel recalled his kit checklist, relating each item to its usability: Gum and candy for the sugar, sunglasses for when I leave the club in the morning, breath spray—I had this thing for breath spray, in case I got lucky at the end of the night. Cigarettes, lighter, money, bankcard. I figured out I 42 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE would need twenty-eight dollars 'cos I would always drink the same number of drinks, always the same thing. Some participants considered gum essential for anyone taking club drugs, such as ecstasy ( T or "X") and ketamine ("Special K"), most especially as they produced a tenseness in thejaw that chewing alleviated. These drugs also left the inside of the mouth feeling somewhat coated. Chewing gum relieved this as well as acting as a breath-freshener and as an immediate source of dietary energy in the form of sugar. Often clubs were so loud and busy that it was difficult at times to have a conversation. Gum literally occupied the mouth. It was also a medium of friendship, along with water and cigarettes, as it was often offered and passed between people. When it was offered to someone outside of the circle of friends, it was a social icebreaker , which was also used in cruising. Clubgoers rarely put water in their kit, although every seasoned clubgoer knew how important it was to drink water when dancing for hours. Most clubs (Vinyl, Twilo, and Tunnel among them) did not allow people to take in their own bottled water as it could have contained drugs and because the bars charged around four dollars for a small bottle, thus increasing profits. At some doors there was a garbage can full of confiscated bottles of water. Preparing the body for the party also took other forms, as Barrel recalled: It would start with plans a few days before and that would include when are you taking your disco nap. I was going to school so if it was a school night I would get home from class around six or eight and sleep until twelve—and that was the disco nap. Then I'd get up and eat something, so I had something in my stomach. Barrel knew how important care of his body was in his preparation for going to a club. In one of his early forays into the demimonde he ended up passing out due to the rapidity with which his empty digestive system absorbed the drugs and alcohol he imbibed and the exhaustion he suffered from dancing on empty. He learned his lesson. His comments show how he consciously made sleeping and eating forms of self-care and preparation. The ritual of drug taking had both a social and a personal importance . The ways drugs were taken cemented social relations. Several storytellers , like Ariel, below, recalled meeting with people before going to a club to take drugs as part of a "ritual." The Currency of Fabulousness <« 43 When I went out before, it was with friends, and it was a whole ritualistic process. You'd start as early as six and we wouldn't even go to the club until about midnight. Our dressing up, our cocaine habits . . . it's an elaborate thing. Some participants discussed what drugs they would be taking and shared them with each other, passing around ajoint, or a small paper or plastic sachet of white powder or pills. In preparing the body, the clubber began to enter "club time": that temporal space with no clocks, measured by and through the body. It began with looking forward and planning (unless going out was a spontaneous event). This anticipation might reach its zenith waiting to get into the club itself. Participants used drugs to enable them to stay awake during the antisocial hours of the club (usually midnight to as late as midday and beyond , although many participants felt it was more hip to arrive between the hours of three and five A.M) . The effects of club drugs such as E and Special K further separated the body of the home and the workplace from the club body. The former narcotic made the body feel looser and more fluid as if warm water was gently pumping through the muscles and central nervous system, as well as producing increased sociability, a warm feeling toward fellow clubbers, and an increase in touch. The latter produced what one informant described as the sensation of walking on platform shoes made of marshmallows and a looser body sense. Unlike E, Special K had to be more frequently ingested—usually snorted as a white powder—as its effects were shorter in duration. Drugs enabled participants to stay awake and dance for long periods of time, and to achieve a separation from an everyday state of mind. Drugs distorted time: it seemed to slow down and suspend or speed up. There were no clocks or windows in a club, nothing to indicate the passing of time. Time was measured instead in the body. Many people testified that in clubs they felt more "real"—more true to themselves than at other times in other places. The practices of play were recreational and separate from mundane self-maintenance and working and were played out within certain limits of time and space. The club time frame was usually out of the nine to five period; in fact, its peak hours of one A.M. to as late as midday the following day marked it as antisocial in the normative sense. It was a separate time period from that in which the rest of the world operated. Clubs offered a separate reality for many participants. As a third space, the club world did not only offer different physical experiences from home and work, for which participants 44 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE fashioned themselves sartorially, psychologically, and psychopharmacologically —the club world was sometimes also socially separate from the other lifeworlds of participants. This was demonstrated in a poignant narrative that a now forty-year-old ex-clubgoer told me. In the period in the 1980s when Iain had been a regular clubber, he had attended the funeral of a friend he had known for several years, although he had only seen him in clubs. However, in the church, the separation between this queer club lifeworld and other spheres of his life was strikingly apparent: There were two separate sides of the church and we were shocked, we thought everyone would know him as we did. But he had a wife, and children and straight work colleagues and they all sat on one side and all the flaming queens sat on the other and we all just kind of stared at each other. As this story indicated, clubbers sometimes separated their social worlds of play, home, and work. This may seem unremarkable except in the light that many queers already had a heightened sense of living separate realities. A club was a separate space in which several informants expressed that they could be themselves, fully able to articulate their sexualities and their desires. After preparing and dressing, the queer clubgoer could attract a great deal of attention traveling to his or her destination on the street or on public transportation. While such visibility could be a proud proclamation of queerness, it could also attract unwelcome attention. Members of Harris' "invisible minority" marked themselves with dress and traveled through potentially dangerous territory before arriving at their destination . As clubs were rarely in residential neighborhoods, clubgoers often had to consider their safety when they traveled to them. Even in gay areas such as the West Village and Chelsea, the Anti-Violence Project reported a 100% increase in attacks on gay men and lesbians in 1997. Marginal spaces in the city, the location of many clubs, were often badly lit and had few places of refuge for a person under attack—no stores and few bars. Participants going to clubs at late hours of the night often budgeted for a taxi, rather than risk walking alone. Typically, they met at a safe space like someone's apartment or a queer bar and traveled together to a club, often splitting a cab fare. Others decided to walk together . They avoided particular bus or subway routes they identified as potentially hazardous. People sometimes concealed their club outfits or gay signs with a zipped up jacket or coat for fear of being read as "gay" The Currency of Fabulousness ¥1 45 and verbally or physically attacked. Even the routes to the clubs were fashioned by a consciousness of queerness that shaped participants' psychogeographies of the city. Many New York City clubs were located in nonresidential areas, such as in the industrial zone near the West Side Highway in Manhattan where megaclubs Twilo (530 West 27th Street) and Tunnel (12th Avenue and 27th Street) were located at the time of writing. Clubs were often converted from industrial spaces such as warehouses and garages. However, sometimes they were in residential areas, such as the East Village and Chelsea in Manhattan, although these tended to be smaller because less space was available. One exception was the Saint, a huge multilevel , planetarium-domed dance club on Fifth Street between Second and Third Avenues in the East Village. The Saint was converted from the old Commodore, a one-time movie house that was reincarnated as the legendary rock concert hall the Fillmore East (1968 to 1971). Its spectacular refurbishment cost four million dollars. Tito spoke about how, at the time it opened in September 1980, the East Village was mainly a patchwork of East European and Latino neighborhoods: Oh, at that time the white people didn't pass First Avenue. They could get stones thrown at their cars by locals along St. Marks by the Electric Circus [a black and Latino dance club]. The area was very Spanish, very traditional , Polish, Ukrainian. And to the people in the East Village, gay was like hustling in Christopher Street, we were all prostitutes. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday you used to go with your lover to Christopher Street and the piers and everybody saw everybody, and that was the way to meet people until the Saint opened. When the Saint opened, all that crowd moved to this neighborhood. The East Village was not a known gay part of town in the 1980s—that honor went to Christopher Street in the West Village, nor was it then the nightlife mecca it has since become for clubbers. When a participant arrived at a club, he or she often had to wait in a line while security checked each person entering, unless he or she was on the guest list. Several informants told stories that illustrated how, in such moments outside the club, the lifeworlds of the clubber and the local resident collided: Now at one point, the church opposite the Saint started exerting pressure because all these parishioners were attending mass while all these people 46 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE were leaving the Saint with no shirts, wearing jockstraps, and grabbing taxis while wearing leather chaps with a slave hanging off their arm by a collar. All these Polish ladies were saying, "What the heck is going on?" These people never saw anything like that. I remember being in line and people eating pierogis were watching us through the glass of Kiev's like, '"Whoa, where am I? Another planet?" We don't care, we don't give a shit, 'cos this was our land, this was the only time that we had something for us. Although queers may have courted danger by traveling to a club, Tito's story, above, suggested that the line outside gave participants confidence . Another informant, Catherine, alluded to this. When she first tested the waters of a queer sexuality, she experienced a profound moment when she saw the line outside of the first dance event she went to soon after she arrived in the city: I was still in the cab and we drove past, 'cos I wasn't sure of the address. And through the window, I remember seeing all these people. The cab was still moving, so I was tracking along this line, and I couldn't believe how many people there were. It just went on around the block. I felt exhilarated and terrified, and . . . turned on. 'Cos all these people were gay, or wanted to be in a queer space. I knew there were lots of queers, but I'd never seen them before in these numbers. What a trip. Even now, I get a little of that excitement when I see a big line. If I don't. . . well, I guess I get a bit anxious and hope I've come to the right place. Stephen recalled that at Crowbar ( 1 oth Street between Avenues A and B), a small East Village dance club that ran from the early 1990s to 1997, the scene outside the door was a good place for a participant to surmise what might be happening inside and if he or she wanted to be a part of it: There was always a door person, but not like a doorman like some of these other spaces where they were intimidating. Just some young little kid, someone who went to Crowbar, just somebody at the door to say hello. We'd go upstairs outside to have a cigarette, rest, and chat. We'd get people from the outside to come in, 'cos they'd see people there, and you could always go to the door and hear and feel critical mass inside. When he saw the line of cabs in front of the Saint, Tito connected this site to a local and global constellation of gay pleasure palaces, which he describes in terms other than secular: The Currency of Fabulousness <« 47 From Sixth Street, at least to Seventeenth Street, lines and lines, bumper to bumper of taxis, we never fucking saw anything like that in New York. This is when we realized that this club was the fucking club of the world. Saint Marks Baths, the Saint next to us, and then Heaven in London. That was the trilogy, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We had everything , but we never realized it was so big until we saw the lines. For all these storytellers, the sight of the line had the force of revelation from which they constructed themselves as queer subjects connected to a larger queer lifeworld than previously experienced. Queer world-making often started with an informant's attraction to connecting with other queers, not only in the same space, but also through imagining a wider connection through a global, national, regional, or local constellation of spaces. This established what Benedict Anderson calls an "imagined community": community as an imagined, but affective reality in which "members of even the smallest nation will never know their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each they carry the image of communion" (Anderson 1983, 15). While participants may not have physically seen all of their peer clubbers in the club, the city, or across the nation and beyond, they imaginatively experienced and shared a vision of being a part of a larger lifeworld. Although the realities of community within a club were occasionally dystopic, this articulated vision expressed a desire for community and the celebration of belonging. The door of a club was a theater of anxiety around belonging. Informants often expressed a desire for community that was sometimes vague and fuzzily Utopian, but in the field, I experienced several instances in which that desired-for community was very sharply delimited. My observations seem to support a view, occasionally articulated by more reflective informants, that the door of a club was less a gateway to a Utopian community, than an entrance into a particular market economy that might not be so alternative to other public economies based on who you know, what you look like, and ultimately, if you can afford the fee. Queerness itself did not always guarantee status or even belonging. My fieldnotes of a gay Pride party, Clubzilla, at the Limelight (Sixth Avenue and 20th Street), which I attended with a group of regular club attendees on June 28th, 1998, demonstrated how the anxieties of belonging, which I assert were anxieties about community, manifested one night. The line stretched around the block and the drag queens at the door informed us that despite being on the promoter's guest list, we still had 48 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE to stand in line. The regulars were incensed. During Gay Pride weekend a lot of "out-of-towners" and straights come to gay spaces. Regulars called them "tourists." Some I overheard said that they only bothered coming out this evening because they were on the guest list and thought they wouldn't have to stand in line with "everyone else." Regulars felt humiliated and annoyed at the failure of the door people to recognize queer or fabulous status as superseding straight, in addition to their failure to reward their loyalty to the club. They pointed out well-known figures on the scene, one of whom was the mother of a gay house, expressing shock and shame that she would have to stand in a line with a bunch of curious straights from "out-of-town."1 As a group of straight-looking folk (identified by informants by their dress and demeanor) were let in by their straight-looking doorman friend, consternation rumbled among those waiting. "Excuse me," grumbled one, "is anyone here tonight actually gay?" People were pissed that Gay Pride offered an opportunity for straights to play "tourist" in a gay territory. It was not that different from usual, but tonight was extrasensitive, especially as queers on the guest list were being asked to wait. Eventually, someone got word to promoter Kevin Aviance that his friends were waiting outside and needed help getting into the club. Resplendently fabulous in a green spandex body suit, six-inch platforms, shaved head, and glamorous make-up that made him into a cross between Patti LaBelle and Godzilla, he came out of the club and pulled us in. He led my companion David and me through the crowd by the hand. We proceeded in a little train through the labyrinthine passageways packed with people. Several times we were almost separated by the sheer force of people pushing against us. It was slow going as Kevin was stopped and greeted every two steps. "Kevin, come and talk with me," implored one clubber. "Not now honey, I'm running a party," he snapped back gently and kept moving. Clubs had to be self-policing, queer clubs even more so as they were more contested spaces than straight clubs. This tension was not just driven by those who sought to control clubs and close them down, but by those who wanted to get into them. Promoters and door people needed to preserve a critical mass of queer bodies to attract queer partygoers.2 The presence of too many straights could rupture the safety or dilute the fabulousness and queerness of the club. Door people decide who they don't want in a club and decide who they do want. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, at clubs like Studio 54, door people became local late-night celebrities with a notorious penchant for picking and choosing people The Currency of Fabulousness <« 49 from a huge throng of would-be party-people eager to mix with celebrities .3 As a young hip clubgoer in the 1980s with a "look," who was therefore often admitted free by doorpeople with whom he was on a firstname basis, Alex remembered those times and offered suggestions as to why they seem to have passed: ALEX: You always wanted young, cute people in a club. It's always good to be a part of that crowd, to be around cute people. And I got for a while to be one of those kids, just because I went out all the time and I worked in the Boy Bar and some of these people would come in there and I was eighteen years old and looked a little funky, a little trendy. So you could go to these places for free and got VIP passes and hung out in the back. 'Cos you made your own outfits and hats and looked hip, and sometimes you wore make-up. You want kids like that at a party, it makes it fun. Area opened around '84/ 85. For me, it was the last of the really great clubs—places that created a scene. It was the first place I saw A-list celebrities, Nicholson, Cher, Andy Warhol, with Debbie Harry. It was hot, like Studio 54 hot. And the door [people] could pick and choose, and now they can't because there aren't that many people who go out anymore. Back then, you'd have a full club and three thousand people waiting outside to get in, crying, "Pick me, I'm on an invite, look at how I'm dressed." And now, what club opens up and there are three thousand people waiting outside? So everyone gets let in. FB: Why do you think it's changed? A: A lot of people died. AIDS really changed people's idea about going out, about their behavior. The Palladium (14th Street between Broadway and Sixth Avenue) was the last of those clubs that had a scene outside when it opened. The crowd rushed the door to get inside, and they had to bring down the gates. That was in 85/ 86. And I think New Yorkers got a little more jaded. Life opened recently on Bleecker and it wasn't even in the press. And there certainly weren't three thousand people outside. Promoters had guest lists of people they wanted inside the club. Someone on a guest list expected certain privileges, for instance, not having to wait in line with people not on the list, free or reduced admission , and access to the VIP room, if there was one. A bad door policy, such as evaluated by the regulars at Limelight that night, failed to fulfill these expectations. The dissatisfaction of participants betrayed the elitism inherent in the guest list system and in door policy as a whole. The door of a club was a theater of anxiety revolving around belonging and 50 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE status. At a gay club, these two issues were particularly sensitive. Generally , queer clubs admitted heterosexuals (although people's sexual orientation might not always be readable, door people read people as queer or straight through clothes, attitude, and behavior—through selffashioning ) and generally most queer patrons accepted them, "as long as they don't gawp and take photos like we're creatures in a zoo" (Tito). But all informants expected a reverse discrimination from everyday life situations that excluded or stigmatized queers. For most club patrons, a queer club was a safe space, free of the external and internal restrictions and oppressions they lived under outside. Some clubs negotiated the need of queer clubgoers to have a space populated with queers and a queer club experience with their needs to turn a profit by having two doors—one for queers and one for everybody else—and spaces within the club earmarked for queers. This could only happen in large clubs like Tunnel and Limelight where there was the space to offer places such as the Kenny Scharf Room at Tunnel. Queer clubgoers invested door people with the responsibility of protecting their space. The club was fiercely territorialized. It was a special space, separated off, a "sanctuary." This need for a "safe space" was expressed even more strongly by women I interviewed. Some were very aware of men entering clubs and watching or interacting with them as desire-objects. Antidiscrimination legislation safeguarded the right of men to enter these spaces, but that did not mean that door people could not offer subversive tactics. Edie, in her midtwenties, was a door person at a women's bar and dance space, Meow Mix on East Houston and Suffolk , and chuckled as she recalled some of her special tricks to exclude undesirables: My favorite is we can't tell a guy he can't come in, so we say, you have to be on the guest list. But to do that you have to produce a guest list and you can't be charging money. So we pretend that the cash box is where we keep the guest list. We ask them their names and they make something up and they're fucking with us, and we're laughing our asses off 'cos we're fucking with them too. We get a big kick out of making them spell their namesfivetimes. Negotiating entry into a club was a rite of passage. At the time of writing , club security was even more stringent about asking for proof of age, under the watchful eye of the New York Police Department. When they raided a bar or club, police officers asked for everyone's identification. The Currency of Fabulousness <« 51 Alternatively, a young (under 21-years-old) officer acted as an undercover agent provocateur. If this person was served alcohol without being asked for identification, other undercover officers observing this infringement slapped the bar person or owners with a citation. Each violation resulted in a $1000-$2000 penalty and threatened the renewal of a liquor license. For smaller spaces with a low profit margin, too many of these fines sometimes resulted in closure. As spaces for women and queers of color were often small, profit margins were tighter, thus fines had a greater effect. Participants often expressed the sentiment that queer establishments and those for people of color were more frequently monitored and cited for violations than other spaces. My experience in the line outside Escuelita, a queer Latino club on 39th Street on the West Side, supported this sentiment, as well as demonstrating that door people occasionally ignored these tight regulations: A police wagon is parked outside this Latino gay club. "Haven't they got anything better to do?" grumbles someone in the line. 'Yeah, I bet they ain't hanging around outside straight, white clubs," intones another. At the door they are insisting on seeing ID. A moment of anxiety. I don't have any. "So what happens if you're murdered down stairs? Who we gonna know who to send the body back to?" quips the drag queen on the door. My friend explains I am foreign. "Huh!" says the drag queen, "You'rejust lucky this ain't communist Cuba, they'd throw your ass in jail for walking around without an ID. Now get your butt in there!" She laughs and we enter (Fieldnote: Escuelita 6/1/98). Once inside the door, the initiation continued. One regular clubgoer interviewed by Sally Sommer for her article on New York City's underground dance clubs, "Check Your Body At the Door," saw frisking as a rite of passage, as a way of saying, "I come in peace" (Brahms LaFortune in Sommer 1994/5, 7)· Although that night at Escuelita, door people played with the regulations, I have noticed that at black and Latino clubs, security tended to conduct searches more thoroughly than other clubs. At Flava at Club Farenheit on Leonard Street in Tribeca, security personnel waved a hand-held metal detector over me, looking for weapons or drugs paraphernalia. At Krash in Queens, the security person asked me to open my cigarette pack, shone a flashlight into its cardboard depths, and then frisked me thoroughly. At Escuelita I lingered a little too long as I stood being frisked by the security person, prompting his response , "Hey, that's it. Any more and I'll have to charge you." Security 52 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE people were aware that they were under close surveillance by the police department, especially at clubs for people of color. They had to be seen as thorough by a tough audience. During the period of research, there were incidents of weapons in clubs and two shootings in 1997 in a downtown Manhattan club known for its predominantly African-American clientele.4 Owners needed to reassure the police, neighborhood groups, and their patrons that their space was safe. Entering the Saint in the early 1980s was a very different experience. Clubbers had to be members, which entailed visiting Bruce Mailman's (the club owner's) offices and paying a fee in return for a much-prized membership card guaranteeing entry for the member and two guests. Door people excluded anyone without a card or without a companion with one. But in return, the club offered a VIP standard of care that its patrons eagerly anticipated: TITO: You walked in between the marble of this old theater [Fillmore East]. All the fixtures were there, they left the entrance the same way. The people who received you and took care of you were in tuxedos. One checked your card, a second person sent you to the box office to check your name and your guest's in a computer. This was something, because this was a time before computers were everywhere. They checked you like they check a credit card and then you get a receipt back. No clubs at that time were giving you a receipt. For taxes, or whatever. FB: Did they search you? T: NOOO, hello! Only three years after it opened did they begin to send police . It's funny because I had a girlfriend who was in the police department and she said two of the bouncers in the Saint were regular police officers, which I don't think is allowed. In the lifeworlds of queer clubs, the participant was special. He or she expected welcome and entry, compared with the exclusion queers felt in other spaces such as the family home or workplace. In a lifeworld, the queer was glad to be special; in other spaces, being special or different was potentially a dangerous and uncomfortable position. The role of one particular club as a node in a queer lifeworld was contingent and often fleeting. Queer lifeworlds were negotiated on this contingency and produced it. Door policies often changed over time, sometimes prompted by changes within the lifeworld and sometimes from pressure from external agencies. Sometimes when participants had been to a place several times, they expressed increasing dissatisfaction and The Currency of Fabulousness <{< 53 boredom. A club sometimes seemed to offer decreasing returns, especially if the space became too diluted with straights or failed to offer new excitements on repeated visits. A queer club as lifeworld required periodic infusions of novelty and new blood, in terms of both spaces and people. Alex suggested, "Clubs are like a show and like a Broadway show it has a good run and everybody's seen it, and it needs to close." When a club lost its usual crowd because they moved on to the next big thing, were scared of AIDS, died, suffered drug exhaustion, or because of repeated raids by the police or fire department; people who were previously excluded were let in to keep the club profitable, and the queer fabulousness of the club was diluted. At a certain point, regular queer clubgoers sensed that the party had passed its use-by date. Tito remembered the demise of gay clubs in these terms: By the end of '84, beginning of '85 you start seeing straight couples from Jersey. They were amused to see these faggots. It seemed like they had a good time, but they didn't understand what this place and these people meant. One night, the whole of Studio 54 was designed as if there was an airplane inside. Sylvester [the famous gay disco star] was singing dressed as Marilyn Monroe with this white dress on top of this plane. This couple was so amused, and said, "Excuse me, is that a real woman?" This kind of people were now going to the Saint. Honestly, it was like rape. This was our sanctuary and it's like someone without respect was walking in the tombs of your dear friends who died. And you see these kids rolling and crawling and going everywhere, and you think, my God, this was not like this before, something tragic's going on. And in 1987 I stopped going. It was not enough to be in the same space at the same time. Participants needed to demonstrate that they shared a sense of its importance, codes, conventions, and values. One of the ways they did this was through movement. Participants claimed the space as their own, proving that they knew its codes and conventions through their entrance and circulation before they even reached the dance floor. A queer club did not become fabulous, or even queer until it was claimed or activated. Most clubs in New York City that I visited were not purpose-built, but spaces converted from disused factories and warehouses . Very few were queer spaces every night. Many queer events took over a club for one night a week. Participants might not be able to explicitly perform their queerness throughout the week and across all spaces. Therefore it was even more important to look for examples of 54 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE how people used the space to claim it and themselves as queer. Movement transformed the space: by the circulation of people within it, from preparation, to entry, to walking, to dance. Both the subject and the environment were transformed through the act of walking through the club. In "Practices of Space," Michel de Certeau suggests that the walkers in a city write an urban text they cannot read: "These practitioners employ spaces that are not self-aware, their knowledge of them is as blind as that of one body for another, beloved, body" (Certeau 1985, 124). But by looking at how people posed themselves in front of others and at certain points in the club, how they deliberately did a circuit of the club, how they expressed desires to connect with people and a desire to see a mass of queer people, a vision began to emerge of the queer club and a queer body as a very self-aware space, one that practitioners both read and wrote. Participants read and wrote their own histories, presents, and possible futures and, as they did this through moving in a club, these texts held potential to resist and evade discipline and commodification. Queer world-making required laying claim to space and to one's own body as queer. In these ways, participants established not only a space and a body, but a way to communicate with each other through proximity (they experienced each other through sight, sound, touch, and the physical sensation of closeness), style, and such activities as entering, moving around, and dancing in the space. From my observations and experiences, patrons claimed the territory of the club space in a number of ways. At the Body Positive T-Dance at Webster Hall in the East Village, I observed how people re-territorialized the space from the time the club opened to its zenith of occupancy. First, on crossing through the doorway from the hall to the party area itself, people usually stood just on the inside of the lintel and surveyed the room from this vantage point. This was also a position from which to be observed by others in the club. Second, participants walked a circuit of the club in a variety of ways, but all, I suggest, with the same function of claiming the space. An individual or small group walked across to the bar to get a drink, or around the sides of the dance floor, pausing occasionally . Although in these pauses circulation of the individual in the space seemed to have stopped, in fact they were still very much in circulation as their eyes scanned the space and as they were scanned and picked up by the circulation and self-orientation of others. Third, people claimed a meeting place, usually by arranging a group of moveable chairs and a table, if available, in what Edward Hall calls a "sociopetal" arrangement of furniture which brings people together (Hall 1996, 101). One of the The Currency of Fabulousness <« 55 functions of moveable chairs in a social setting was to enlarge choice about where to sit, with whom and how close. Most people I noticed moved chairs around, drawing them together. But by moving the chairs, the would-be sitter also made a stake on the space of the chair as well as on the larger environment as the space was carved and shaped by the clustering together. Participants used the space's entrance features to make an impression . The clubgoer expected to be noticed and judged on his or her first entrance. Being special or fabulous was a way to enjoy the attention of peers. Entrance was the opening line of nonverbal communication. Walking into a club was the opening gambit of speaking queer; a way of expressing, "I'm here, I'm queer, I'm fabulous." It was world-making in two senses: the participant claimed the space and the self. The act of moving through and in a club was both appropriation and transformation . De Certeau compares the act of walking through the city to an act of speaking: The act of walking is to the urban system what enunciation (the speech act) is to language or to the system of available utterances. At the most elementary level it has a triple "enunciative" function: it is a process of appropnation of the topographical system by the pedestrian (in the same way that the speaker appropriates language for himself) ; it is a spatial realization of place (as the speech act is sonorous realization of language) ; and finally it implies certain relations between differentiated positions, that is certain pragmatic "contracts" in the form of movements (in the same way as verbal enunciation is an "allocation," a "positioning of the other" in relation to the speaker, and establishes a contract between speakers). Walking would therefore find its primary definition as a site of enunciation [. . .] Walking [. . .] creates a mobile organicity of the environment. (Certeau 1980, 180) The individual moving in a club appropnated the space that existed prior to entering the club. He or she realized it as a queer space, both by the presence of his or her queer body, and also by queer acts—kissing, touching, looking with desire, celebrating the presence of other queers, and expressing queerness openly and physically through self-carriage without fear of surveillance or reprisals. The participant enacted a contract that preserved his or her own and others' differences while at the same time affecting a collective within the space, by moving as he or she wished, but without obstructing others. Movement affected a "mobile 56 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE organicity of the environment" that determined the nature and form of the text—both as written and read. It was a text that could only be understood through movement. These practices were modes of experience that resisted the reduction of movement and gestures to the status of a sign. Participants generated and expressed meaning through their own bodies as they moved in a queer lifeworld, conscious of the performance of queerness of the self and the club. Presence and movement promoted queerness as a state of "fabulousness." Fabulousness was movement as self-fashioning. This context and contention reinvigorates what de Certeau reduces to a walk by concentrating on ways ofmoving. Certain ways of moving with performance consciousness enacted the appropriation , realization, and negotiation of interrelational contracts that constituted particular forms and models of queerness based on pleasurable play. As Stephen reaffirmed, these dance clubs were the places, these movements were the practices from which he "gets his gayness." This works outside of the club as well. His movement practices crossed supposed boundaries between the inside of the club and its outside and between improvised social dancing and social relations. In most clubs I visited, the door was usually not the place from which participants made their entrance either directly onto the dance floor or its surrounding area. After entering a club, I found that many were disorienting spaces within which participants had to orient themselves in order to recognize and make a lifeworld. Before they arrived at the dance floor, participants might have to navigate stairs (up in Limelight, down at Escuelita, Crowbar, and Flava), coat checks, and foyers (for instance in Twilo and the Palladium), bars, juice stops, and chill-out areas, as well as the throng of people circulating throughout them. Sometimes participants had to walk through a curtain or dividing door (as at Sound Factory Bar at 12 West 2 ist Street and the Clit Club). There was usually a place to pay inside the door. The entrances to these clubs were sometimes like a labyrinth, sometimes illuminated with sweeping, spiraling, and flashing lights that destabilized participants' visual grip on the world around them. Over all this was the soundscape, rich with layers of continuous sound, a pulse that made my internal organs vibrate, samples of noise, sirens , sonic booms, samples, and repetitions. Orientation had a double meaning in a queer club. Participants not only had to exert some kind of comprehensible map over the space with nodes they could locate and orient themselves around so they knew where they were and where they wanted to be, but they also had to orient themselves in a queer club, within a matrix of sexuality different from on the street or in the work- The Currency of Fabulousness <« 57 place. Catherine suggested that she had to struggle more to orient herself within the matrix of heterosexuality at work and in her family home. The matrix of queer sexuality in a club therefore felt less like a rupture. It felt, she asserted earnestly, "more real" to her, "more like my reality." Queer world-making could transform and rupture the force of heteronormativity . The spatial, sonic, and effects-oriented disorientation of a club produced an effect akin to the experience of liminality between a queer lifeworld and other realms of existence, both spaces and states of being.5 Shifts of spatial, temporal, and interpersonal orientation took you into the club experience. All-night clubs such as Tunnel, Arena, Limelight , or Twilo (approximately HP.M. to anywhere between 8 A.M. and midday or later) tended to have a mix of people until later, when it was overwhelmingly male and gay. "We party harder. That's what being queer was all about when I was younger. We'd laugh at the straights wr ho went home at three A.M. That's when we were thinking of going out!" said Mark, a clubgoer in his early forties who still could be found at some events such as Twilo after over twenty years on the scene in New York City. Temporal appropriations lead to some interesting spatial juxtapositions in the crossover period. At four A.M. in Arena, I stood watching the dance floor as smartly dressed college girls danced next to a group of gay leather men in body harnesses and chaps. They did not interact, but seeing them dancing in the same recreational space, even for a short while, was a striking juxtaposition. You could tell what time it was by reading the critical mass of types of bodies on the dance floor. At Arena at least, if there were too many straights, a queer participant knew he came too early. In the Time Out club listings of November 1995, Tunnel Saturdays (the gay night) was listed twice, once in the general club listings section and again in the Gay and Lesbian Club listings. The differences between these listings revealed both the temporal appropriations in these spaces—what to expect at different times—and the expectations of the pleasures of two audiences: Tunnel Saturdays Tunnel. 11 P.M., $20. It's officially the largest Saturday night party there is. Junior Vasquez spins for thousands of disciples from his elaborate DJ booth until late Sunday morning (the idea being that you can now stop by after mass). It's dance party music—basically, whatever Junior feels like playing during his twelve-hour stint. Hope you like big parties; Vasquez's first night brought in close to six thousand revelers. Stop by the fruit andjuice bar upstairs, where the music is pumped in softly, lest 58 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE you miss a beat. The big, comfy booths are up there too, so you can take a break if you're sleepy. And you probably will be, because the club doesn't get going until three or four A.M. Be sure to stop by Martin's Lounge, the VIP balcony lounge guarded by the lovely Connie Girl.6 Tunnel Saturdays Tunnel. IIP.M.—IOA.M.;$20 before3:30am, $15 after. This mixed mega-club, now boasting DJJunior Vasquez, gets gayer afterhours , as mind-altering substances begin to separate the men from the girls.7 The first listing employed the discourse of tourism—"stop by the juice bar [. . .] Be sure to stop by Martin's Lounge," marking the sites of interest in the club, and also marking the general reader as "tourist," as someone unfamiliar with the club. This was also implied in the length of the listing: more description in the first contrasted with the stripped down essentialism of the gay and lesbian entry, which implied familiarity. The tourists were also directed to "big, comfy booths" in which to sleep; the queers will not need to as "the mind-altering substances begin to separate the men from the girls." The gay listing suggested a later arrival time with lower entrance fee (after 3:30 A.M.), and indicated that their party started once the "girls" had gone home to bed. In short, the space was gayer later. The listing described this phenomenon as a form of social Darwinism assisted by drugs, and signified how status was marked generationally and in terms of gender: the men endured longer than the girls. The term "girls" did not only refer to biological females and did not only reveal the heavy gender-bias in the queer ownership of this space. In this context, it disparagingly referred to men who could not stay awake and party until the early hours. To enter the place or state of a queer lifeworld often seemed to enact a coming out. But even when I entered Tunnel at the gayer hour of 5:30 A.M., the experience felt too disorienting to be an affirmation of any orientation : as Mark, a long-time clubgoer commented, "I can no longer tell the difference between drag queens and girls from Jersey." There was no architectural, scopophilic, sexual, or aural center to the club. The main room extended almost the length of the space. I walked through a lounge area to an emptier space in the middle of which a large bar rose like an island complete with go-go boy and muscular male bar staff. The sound of hard-house music was so omnipresent that it offered few clues as to the direction of the dance floor. I found it at one end of the long main room, not surrounded by any higher levels from which observation could take place. The dance floor was long and narrow, and its boundary was The Currency of Fabulousness ffl 59 ill-defined. As a result, I found it difficult to get a sense of the mass of movement from the outside, because on the outer margins of the area, dancers were more diffuse in critical mass, density, and energy. People stood around in clusters, and preserved social space between their group and others. Some swayed or bobbed slightly to the beat. I wandered deeper onto the floor in search of dance. With few markers to orient my position, the club neutralized typical reference points. As a result of the initial deliberate disorientation effect produced by darkness, flashing lights, and pounding music, the circulation of bodies in the space became a prominent marker and shaper of not only orientation, but of the nature and energy of the populated club. It always took me a while to get oriented in a club. I used two strategies . First, I usually went on a reconnaissance mission. Clubs like Tunnel, a converted railway warehouse with a labyrinth of rooms and passages, and Limelight, a converted church, were tricky to orient myself in until I became familiar with the space. On my first visit to Limelight, I stood on a gangway above the dance floor at around seven A.M. pondering whether to leave. I wondered what was holding me there—until I realized that part of the problem lay in the fact that I had no notion of how to get out of the place. My second orientation strategy was to find a high place from which I could see over the dance floor. I was looking for indications of order to emerge from the initial chaos of disorientation. In his discussion of the city, de Certeau (1985, 124) acknowledges that a god's eye view "transforms the city's complexity into readability." From this vantage point I and other partygoers were able to read the energy level of the party, its hot spots, who was on the dance floor, and how fabulous they were. Many clubbers took up positions on gangways, bleachers , podiums, and stages in order to survey the crowd, sometimes in order to look for friends, sometimes to cruise, sometimes to get a sense of the whole event of which they were a part, and sometimes to take a rest from the bustle of the crowd. But this was only a temporary deification . The desire to descend and place oneself with one's peers lead to participation. The surveyor on the gangway or bleachers also circulated his or her gaze around the club, but it was the circulation of the body in that space that defined the next level of participation. A participant in this queer lifeworld transformed the complexity of the environment and the experienced self into a reading and writing of queerness without sacrificing contesting and chaotic elements. There were two possible other centers by which participants could orient themselves. In all clubs I visited, the DJ booth was separated from 60 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE the dance space and areas of public traffic, typically raised and sometimes protected by security. At some points, the crowd acknowledged Danny Tenaglia, the DJ at Clubzilla at Limelight, by turning and saluting him on a call-out.8 The player of the music was less central than the sound he or she produced. The speakers were positioned so as to form a saturated center of sound. That gave us a cue for where to head to dance. Within the club, I and other participants oriented ourselves in relation to the space itself, the movement, and the soundscape. In the following discussion, I explore how these three environments oriented participants. Tunnel, Limelight, Twilo, and other big clubs had more than one territory and more than one territory of queerness. They held variety in a way that problematized and resisted models based on community and a single identity. As big clubs tended to be converted warehouses or factories with different rooms or chambers, they offered contrasting experiences . For instance, in Limelight, in a smaller chapel used as an alternative dance space to the main dance floor, the scene was less crowded and garage and pop classics were played in contrast to the hard-house soundscape of the main dance floor. In the 1980s, participants at Danceteria could sample rock music, live bands, disco, and house music on four floors, as well as the different pleasures of other rooms in which they could eat and relax. There were always places to explore and things to do, as Alex described: It was our playground. It wasn'tjust one type of music, it was all kinds of music. And on the third floor there would be a gay party and a "Straight to Hell" party upstairs for this fanzine. And on the fourth floor was the VIP lounge called Congo Bill and it would be really different and really trendy, with Boy George and people like that. And it would all filter down on top of each other, and you could go in between these parties. So you could go upstairs to the gay party and run downstairs and see the band and "oh, I like the music here" and run down to another party, let's go chase this boy up the stairs and see where he's going, and look at him, and look at her hair. Participants could turn a static, fixed space into an infinite number of combinations and possible experiences by their movement. By choosing to follow one environment with another, participants could make the club more than a sum of its zones: they made it a space of play. The space attained a repertoire when activated by movement. Not just the zones themselves, but the movement between them shaped experience. The Currency of Fabulousness «< 61 The lifeworld produced by movement was not fixed, but fluidly determined by the moving participant. The participant actively created the club and the experience, rather than being its passive consumer. U+Me, Octagon's Friday night event for African-American and Latino gay men on West 33rd Street, which started in 1997 and closed 1999, took over two floors: one large space at ground level with house music and a first floor attic with mainly rhythm and blues (r'n'b) and hip-hop music. Colin, an African-American informant of thirty-one who went there twice a month on average, noticed that some folks stayed in one space, rather than moving between the two. Some participants still needed to orient themselves primarily around more stable concepts of identity and community reflected in music, movement, and style. Colin expressed this: "Sometimes I'll move between the two. I enjoy the movement . You feel like you're in a different club actually. Some people never go upstairs and then there are those of us who go between the two." He compared the difference in movement styles between the two floors at Octagon with Suspect, another party for African-American gay men on Sunday nights at a smaller space at Nowbar on Seventh Avenue South in the West Village with one dance floor: It has some elements of Octagon, but because the space is smaller, there's more a need to front, [he mimes a posture], more a need to be hard core. It's difficult to distinguish between the posturing and the moving. There's a shift in personas. I think what happens in a smaller space is there's a need to be more hard core, whereas in Octagon you can go to the house level and be more arms in the air. But you'd never do that upstairs. Participants produced themselves through their style of movement. Colin associated a hard-core, masculine-styled movement with upstairs at Octagon, and a more playful, freer movement with downstairs. He noticed that the upstairs movement style seemed more contained, as participants typically danced with shoulders low, and arms crossing and uncrossing to the beat close and slow in front of their bodies. The mainly black and Latino men in attendance held their energy within their bodies . Their heads nodded to the beat, shoulders hunched, chests downward , knees and weight flexed low and scooped down toward the floor. Colin commented that the dancing style seemed less expansive than in evidence downstairs: few jumps, or arms raised in the air, as if, he noted, that excess was too queen-like. As if, he continued, they were expressing, "We aren't them (meaning straights), but we're not those (meaning 62 «< IMPOSSIBLE DANCE queens)." The movement seemed similar to moves in hip-hop music videos on MTV and Black Entertainment Television. It appeared to be a gayness firmly rooted in hip-hop masculinity. Downstairs, dancers moved with gracefully arched spines, twirling and jumping, or raising their arms in the air, with reaching and twisting hand movements. Colin further interpreted this bifurcation: Upstairs there's lots more b'boys and posturing. I think the postures people adopt depends on the music. If you're hearing Biggie [Smalls] or Mase whatever they're saying and even the sound of the music, maybe it's a cue, a clue for adopting a certain posture. Downstairs you're like [he waves hands in the air] "can-you-feel-it! " [he laughs.] And the lights are going . . . 'cos that's also part of it too. Upstairs doesn't have that. It's a room. And I think that's very important that it'sjust a room. It's darkly lit, and the beats are slower. It's harder to dance downstairs when the beat is faster thump thump thump. It's hard just to be and relax. Both the movement of others and the musical environment offered cues for distinct body attitudes and movement styles, which were inappropriate in other environments. Colin was right. You'd never j u m p up and down, waving your hands in the air upstairs. In movement styles both upstairs and downstairs at Octagon, a person and a crowd's self-fashioning within a dance space may be based on sameness and on difference: on what you want to be and on what you don't want to be. All clubs were stage-managed to some degree by promoters and DJs. A club was a produced event, not only spatially but also temporally. It was a theater prepared for us before we entered, as Alex acknowledged: You produce a club. So there are things that need to be performed inside the club. There are people behind the scenes saying we need to have this person doing this inside the club. There's some sort of production going on. On the night there's a lot of stage management. You can manipulate the crowd. T need you to play this record at this moment, 'cos this is what it's going to do to the room. Or I need this act to go on, 'cos this is what it's going to do to the room. And I need this person to go on, 'cos I want to clear the room." You can change the mood of the room, and a DJ has a lot of power like that and you can change a room of people by one record. You have this idea that works for a while, and then you need to come up with a new idea to change the show a little bit. The Currency of Fabulousness <« 63 As a queer lifeworld, a dance club could produce security and familiarity, but had to balance this with novelty and fantasy. For instance, in the 1980s, the popular dance club Area in Tribeca (1983-87) had a different theme on different nights, sometimes designed by stars of the downtown New York art world such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and NamJune Paik. The club itself contained installations and was an installation itself in which people fashioned themselves through costume and movement into pieces of temporary site-specific performance art, as Alex described: It had these display cases in the front and they would have live people in them doing things. One month it would be home. And you'd walk inside and the whole club would be like a living room. Or the future. The whole place would be painted silver and they would have gone out and bought all these futuristic furniture pieces. The theme of the event offered cues to orient participants, from suggesting what to wear to playing certain roles. The Saint was famous for its theme parties. One such party, recalled by Tito, reproduced the mise-en-scène of The Wizard ofOz: "I never saw such a production. You walked in and saw the sign, 'Beware of the witch,' the fields of corn, the yellow brick road." For the fantasy to work, a theme party could not be permanent. It had to be a special event, even for a club. Themed parties drew attention to the fact that going to any club was a special staged event in which clubgoers were invited to cast themselves, whether as futuristic cyberslut, s/ m leather boy, Judy Garland on mescaline, or any simply fabulous dramatis personae of the demimonde. This invitation to be fabulous, this acting out of fantasy might have been more "real" than the quotidian reality of everyday life for its participants. They told the story of their experience and their imagination. I have led you through the streets of New York City, into the apartments of participants as they prepared themselves for the coming night's party. We traveled vicariously to the club, stood in line, were frisked by security, moved through the club, standing on gangways to sense the energy of the crowd, and moved through its zones of décor and movement. Now we stand at the edge of the dance floor. Participants fashioned their worlds from their own bodies out in preparing and 64 <« IMPOSSIBLE DANCE moving through a club. This was the experience of world-making through which queer participants moved themselves from a state of worldlessness. They used the practices and the space to produce themselves and their meaning of queer. It was empowering and pleasurable. It was truly fabulous. But these are only parts of the story. ...