#10 __ community

The opening scene of Blade is a rave classic. A quintessential bro gets lured into the back room of a slaughterhouse for a decadent rave, but then blood pours from the fire sprinklers and it’s revealed that everyone around him is a vampire. Cheesy and over-the-top as it might be, it speaks to something real in the scene of dance music. Swap out vampires for queer people, and it’s the story of some numbnut ignorantly waltzing into another community’s sanctuary. In the parlance of some clubbers, he would be called a normie.

The first time I heard someone use the term normie I thought it was a joke. It’s so on-the-nose. It’s practically bursting with elitism and condescension. Surely it wasn’t a real thing. But then I heard it again. And again. And then I heard it come out of my own mouth. Oh god.

I thought about this a lot after Bound, which was the best time I’ve ever had at Elsewhere. It wasn’t the best music or my best dancing — but the crowd was a total delight. It was full of people exploring queerness along every possible axis, finding creative forms of expression within the constructs of leather and latex. As happens very often now when I go out, I encountered dozens of familiar faces met with warm hugs and big smiles. The night was a rhythmic alternation between dancing and conversation with this group or that friend, backlit by a constant stream of beautiful weirdos walking to and fro. With this kind of saturation, the normies had no chance to ruin the vibe.

I have learned, over this last year, that there is no place I feel more at home than when surrounded by queer people. I used to think that I was an imposter, that I would only ever be a visitor to this glorious planet. Slowly but surely, however, it has become clear that I belong. A lovely article describing the essential Berghain experience, Really Techno, helped me understand this better.

Judith, now Jack Halberstam and others have argued that it is not our sex acts which constitute queerness, but rather what we do with our time. S/he suggests that we ‘try to think about queerness as an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules, and eccentric economic practices,’ so that we can ‘detach queerness from sexual identity and come closer to understanding Foucault’s comment in FRIENDSHIP AS A WAY OF LIFE that “homosexuality threatens people as a ‘way of life’ rather than as a way of having sex.”’

This is what the many — hilarious — websites which obsess about how to get into Berghain don’t get: this is primarily a queer club. And you can’t really pretend to be queer. Perhaps it’s something you can become, but mostly it’s something you just are.

But there’s more than just self-discovery, for me. This is the kind of community I began to crave deeply after the election in 2016, when the world suddenly began to feel like a much less hopeful place. I felt a strong need to be involved in my surroundings, to have meaningful relationships with more than just my friends and coworkers.

Music has a unique ability to create and foster community, and that property is hardly specific to techno. It’s just such a potent weapon of pleasure and insight, so intimately and cooperatively bound to all forms of creative expression, and so flexible in its ability to enjoyed by nearly anyone. In an age where our technology seems to drive us further into solitude, music seems uniquely capable of bringing us together.

Thank you so much for reading.

Friday, I’ll be reunited with my one true love, Unter — the beating heart and soul of techno in Brooklyn. That’s all I need for this weekend.

Previous issues

• dead parties
• energy
• the vibe
• how to enjoy dance music
• the derelict ship rave
• crowd dynamics
• the bass party
• more than just music
• art of the promo
• launch

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