Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making

NOTES

NOTES Introduction (pp. 1-15) 1. For two excellent discussions of this, see Michael Warner's introduction to Warner 1993 and Steven Seidman's essay in the same volume, "Identity and Politics in a 'Postmodern' Gay Culture: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes." (In Warner 1993, 105-142). 2. In Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis ofthe Bourgeois and Proletanan Public Sphere, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge's critique of Habermas stems from his assumption of a single, central public sphere (1993). 3. As described by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, heteronormativity "consists less of norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in contradictory manifestations—often unconscious —immanent to practice or to institutions" (Berlant and Warner 1998, 548). It refers to the institutions and structures of understanding that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent, but also privileged. It aspires to reproduce an illusion of status quo, insisting upon casting the heterosexual relationship in patriarchal forms with "couples" as the social atom for erotic articulations and ethical priority given to the dichotomies of monogamous/ promiscuous and private/public. Materially, it is implicated in a hierarchy of property and propriety and of bearing oneself in the world. It is contingent, sometimes taking contradictory forms. 4. I include the city's definition of an "adult establishment" and its proscribed uses in Appendix D. 5. See Appendix E for a description of the processes of obtaining liquor and cabaret licenses. 6. For a full description of my method, see Appendix A. Chapter 1 (pp. 16-35) 1. Here, I use Michael de Certeau's distinction between strategies and tactics: "strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces [. . . ] whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces." (1984, 30). 2. Lisa Duggan's theory of homonormativity in The Incredible Shrinking Public Sphere, exposes the ways in which conservative and assimilationist gays and lesbians contribute to the privatization of mass culture by subscribing to heteronormative thinking and politics such as the reification of marriage. I work this in the following example to include the impulse to establish dominant linear history, rather than memory in the forms of (dominant) culturally sanctioned places of memory such as plaques and performances or routes such as the Gay Pride parade. However, I do not wish to naturalize these places and practices , as gays and lesbians have had to fight for the right to put up plaques and to have parades or dance clubs. However, what gets placed where or who gets 201 202 «< Notes to walk in whose name can still be read as exclusionary of queer practices or populations, as is evidenced for example in local controversies about changing the title of Lesbian and Gay Pride parades to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Pride. 3. The redevelopment of Times Square from a site of "sleaze" to a Disneyfied shopping and recreation park is a precursor to the process in which the piers are embroiled. Queer activist groups such as Sex Panic! have protested against this loss of queer space. 4. East 5th Street. Open from 1980 to 1988. Chapter 2 (pp. 36-64) 1. A "house" is a gay male fraternity or alternative kinship group. Each is headed by a "mother." 2. Often, a promoter was somebody known in the club world who proposed a party event at a club and helped organize it, and/ or went to other clubs, selecting people to put on the guest list for a party. The promoter also had a contact book of fabulous clubbers and called or sent them invitations offering free or reduced entry at their event. Promoters sometimes also hired people to stand outside clubs and hand out flyers advertising events. 3. For a "full disclosure" of the Studio 54 experience, see Anthony Haden-Guest (1997). Studio 54's heyday was 1977 to 1980, and then it reopened from 1982 to 1986. Celebrities who gave the New York nightlife its cachet "would let loose all night in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate sybaritic whirl" (Foderaro 1994). 4. These incidents occurred at Vinyl inJanuary 1997. One was a freak accident. As there were also several drug-related arrests and a citation for selling alcohol to a minor, the club has its beer and wine license revoked pending a hearing. 5. Victor Turner characterizes liminality as "necessarily ambiguous." Liminal entities are neither here nor there: they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention , and ceremonial. [. . .] Their [neophytes] behavior is normally passive or humble. [. . . ] It is [as] though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life. Among themselves, neophytes tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism. (in Turner 1994, 94) 6. From "Clubs" listing. Time Out October 18-25, 1 995: 33 7. From "Gay and Lesbian" listing. Time Out October 18-25, 1 995: 5l 8. A call-out was a moment when typically the DJ, or maybe an MC, asked the crowd to shout out in appreciation of the DJ or the performer. Sometimes, the crowd was also cued to call out in allegiance to their local or regional point of origin. For instance, "Brooklyn in the house, shout out!" Chapter 3 (pp. 65-85) 1. Opened by DJ Nicky Siano and his brother in a loft on 22nd Street, it later moved to 172 Mercer after a series of Fire Department raids that closed several dance spots. Notes «< 203 2. Anthony Thomas presents a useful mapping of the development of house music in black gay clubs in Chicago in his essay "The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music" (1995). This essay is particularly helpful in charting the "Africanness" of house music, and how its rhythmic qualities encourage dance. See also John Miller Chernoff s classic ethnomusicological analysis of these aspects in African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1979). 3. DJ headphones only have one earpiece so that DJs can simultaneously hear the record being played through the club and the crowd responding and the track on the turntable being cued up. 4. For an excellent analysis of house music produced and mixed by club DJs, see Kai Fikentscher, 'You Better Work!": Underground Dance Music of New York City (2000). 5. The back beats are the second and fourth beats in a four-beat measure. Emphasis on the back beat intensifies its pull away from the strong beats and therefore provides an important target point for improvisers who want to play with the beat. For a musicological elaboration of this, see Berliner 1994, 6. Paul Connerton suggests that what is important to a group or an individual is committed to the body and performed as habit: Our bodies [. . .] keep the past in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions. We may not remember how or when we first learned to swim, but we can keep on swimming successfully—remembering how to do it—without any representational activity on our part at all [. . .]. Many forms of habitual skilled remembering illustrate a keeping of the past in mind that, without ever adverting to its historical origin, nevertheless re-enacts the past in our present conduct. In habitual memory, the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body. (Connerton 1989: 72) Chapter 4 (pp. 86-110) 1. The context of "postmodern dance" in which much of this work took place is described in Sally Banes' classic text, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1980). Cynthia Novack also investigates contact improvisation and its political resonances of personal freedom from the restraints of formal choreography , emphasizing the creative autonomy of the dancer, and by association, of disco dancing as its freedom from the restraints of formal gender-determined partnering in her essay "Looking at Movement as Culture: Contact Improvisation to Disco" (1988). 2. For a history of opposition to dancing in Western society, see Ann Louise Wagner's Adversaries ofDance:from thePwritans to the Present ( 1997). 3. For example, Jack Newfield's columns in the New York Post throughout !997-994 . In "Pedro Zamora's Real World of Counterpublicity: Performing an Ethics of the Self,"José Esteban Munoz considers the minoritarian ethics of the self as a care of the self. "To work on oneself is to veer away from models of the self that correlate with socially prescribed identity narratives. The rejection of these notions of the self is not simply an individualistic rebellion: resisting dominant modes of subjection entails not only contesting dominant modalities 204 «< Notes of governmental and state power but also opening up a space for new social formations." In Sasha Torres, ed., Living Color: Race and Television in the United States (Durham and London: Duke University Press: 198). Here, I assert we can see the possibility for an ethics of sociality in new social formations that grow out of an ethics of the self—that by rejecting dominant modalities people simultaneously embrace others who also reject them and who want to work out new ways of being together that may not be the norm. Chapter 5 (pp. 111-127) 1. See Appendix D: How the City Defines an "Adult Establishment." Chapter 6 (pp. 128-158) 1. Source: Audience Research and Analysis for the New York Nighdife Association . 2. Owen 1997: 34-37. 3. Reported in Bastone 1997. 4. See Appendix D: How the City Planning Commission of the City of New York Defines "Adult Establishment." 5. Licenses for dancing and cabaret were initiated in New York City in 1926 in order to restore a measure of control over the city's huge prohibition-era nightclubs. In Chauncey 1994: 352. 6. Source: Audience Research and Analysis for the NewYork Nighdife Association. 7. From 1996 - 97, the New York Anti-Violence Project reports a 40% increase in charges of public lewdness against men seeking men. Men have been arrested by the New York Police Department, Port Authority police, parks police , Metro North, and Long Island Railroad police. 8. In comparison to New York, in Miami's South Beach, the city and the police realize that nightlife is a big part of the reason why a formerly dilapidated resort town is now thriving. A collective policy of cooperation has been actively developed. In New York City in 1997, Andrew Rasiej of Irving Plaza co-founded The New York Nightlife Association—an organization of club owners—to replace the current discord between clubs and communities with dialogue. 9. At the height of his career, Peter Gatien operated four of the largest nightclubs in New York City: The Tunnel, the Palladium, Limelight, and Club USA. On May 15 1996, he was roused from his bed by four Drug Enforcement agents and held on $1 million bail, accused of turning his clubs into "drug supermarkets." In addition, the Manhattan district attorney's office conducted a full-scale audit of his finances looking for tax evasion (Studio 54's owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schräger were brought down this way). All charges were subsequently dropped or dismissed. At the time of writing, Michael Alig, Gatien's front man, club kid, and promoter of notorious parties such as Disco 2000 at Limelight, is awaiting trial for the grisly murder of Angel Melendez, another fixture on the club scene. 1o. In particular, the columnist has written polemics against nightclub owner Peter Gatien, in the cause of protecting kids from drugs. Newfield claims he allegedly profiteered from the sale of drugs to kids at his clubs: "What does it take in this town for the SLA to do itsjob and revoke a liquor license? A liquor license Notes «< 205 is not a constitutional right, like free speech or freedom of religion. It's a privilege , conditioned on obeying the law, being a good neighbor, not seducing kids into drug use, and not ruining the quality of life for a community." 11. Citations include: Limelight, August 1996: closed by police on four narcoticsrelated disorderly premises charges; reopened Spring 1998. Pyramid, April 1996-April 1997: Community Board 3 hears complaints. Charges pending for sales to minors and overcrowding. Rome, March 1997: citation for unlicensed dancing (go-go boys) and assorted noise complaints. Crowbar, March 1997: citations for unlicensed dancing, closed. Vinyl, January 1997: two charges for assault, one for a controlled substance, and one for sale to a minor. Beer and wine license revoked. Many of these citations were subsequently dismissed. Sources: club managers, Community Board Records, State Liquor Authority. 12. Gays and lesbians had dance parties in these locations for many years previous to gay liberation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, as George Chauncey writes in his excellent history of gay nightlife in New York City from 1890-1940, a new wave of policing in the 1930s sought to contain homosexuality by prohibiting its presence in the public sphere where authorities feared it threatened to disrupt public order and the reproduction of "normal " gender and sexual arrangements (Chauncey 1994: 9). 13. In a 1993 essay in the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan calls on gays to abandon "the notion of sexuality as cultural subversion" which, he says, alienates "the vast majority of gay people who not only accept the natural origin of their sexual orientation, but wish to be integrated into society as it is." For these people , a 'queer' identity is precisely what they want to avoid," and a responsible gay politics should be about helping. Quoted in Mendelsohn 1996: 30. 14. GHB or gamma-hydroxybutrate is a synthetic hormone affecting the central nervous system. It is used by some clubgoers to break down inhibitions. 15. D'Emilio stresses that the new forms of gay identity and patterns of group life for which capitalism created the material conditions reflected the differentiation of people according to gender, race, and class. For instance, women were more likely to remain economically dependent on men. The Kinsey studies of the 1940s and 1950s showed a positive correlation between years of schooling and lesbian activity. College-educated women, far more able than their working class sisters to support themselves, could survive more easily without intimate relationships with men (Kinsey 1948; Kinsey et al. 1953). 16. Cited in Mendelsohn 1996, 29. Chapter 7 (pp. 159-183) 1. Within Body Positive's roster of peer workshops and outreach programs, several targeted HIV-positive people of color. Stand Up Harlem, a support organization based on West 130th Street in uptown Manhattan, is dedicated to support people with HIV in its predominantly African-American neighborhood, although it also attracts African-Americans with HIV from other parts of the city. Stand Up Harlem attempts to appeal to the black HIV+ communities that have been disenfranchised from some central posts of black community structure , particularly church and family, due to drug use, incarceration, homosexuality , and/or their seropositive status. 2. In his 1996 essay, "Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories ," José Esteban Munoz suggests that queer memory is always political as 206 <« Notes "queer memories of Utopia and the longing that structures them [...] help us carve out a space for actual, living sexual citizenship." (356.) Munoz focuses on what he calls the ritualized tellings of remembrances through film, video, performance, writing, and visual culture. To this list, I include improvised social dancing in queer clubs as a particular way to recall not only Utopias, but the dystopic stories of separation, illness, and death. The utopie imagination is both critique and conjuration of an absent and longed for reality. In this instance , it is also a conjuration of absent friends and lovers. Appendix A (pp. 185-191) 1. Dolbeare and Schuman, Analysis, education and everyday life. Lexington, MA: Heath, 1982. 2. I. E. Seidman, Interviewing as Qualitative Research (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1991 ) : 45. ...