Partying As Praxis (JOKE!) (Unless...)
Re: Losers Are Popular Now. all the it girls have nasal drip. tuesday is the new wednesday is the new friday and none of us ever own up to our actions.
in my first taste of substack virality (32 likes on a note), i said this about The Mainstreaming Of Loserdom’s observed phenomena of People Who Make Hating Partying / Partiers A Personality Trait:
it’s very much the ‘I’m Not Like Other Girls I Don’t Drink Or Smoke Or Fuck Or Party I Read I Listen To Nirvana I Was Born In The Wrong Generation’ moral superiority gone even more online to the point where we’re demonizing social interaction. we’re cooked. should i write a joke piece about partying as a form of praxis or will i get canceled as ableist and classist1
i wrote a pretty earnest thesis on joy as praxis in the ballroom scene in the face of the AIDS epidemic. ball culture — joy, dancing, rowdiness — was all inherently political because it was community building for a community under constant threat of systemic and moralized destruction. and it was political because it was a celebration of life for people who the public refused to mourn or protect. but what about the partying that has no political roots. the partying that doesn’t seem to be celebrating anything except our access to people with trust funds and list spots.
this is about getting trashy wasted in classy locations. this is about bumps in the bathroom. drugs from the businessmen who pay for tables like schmucks (test whatever they give you). this is about hangovers that require gatorade. shamefully paying the $150 uber clean up charge. vomit on fur coats. bags that perpetually smell like poppers. wiping off your card before paying for a deli breakfast after watching the sun come up from the smoking section. dance floor makeouts. dance floor grinding that results in dance floor half chubs that results in getting ate out in the bathroom that results in a uti. it’s like i said that one time. all the it girls have nasal drip. tuesday is the new wednesday is the new friday and none of us ever own up to our actions. this is my political justification for blacking out on mondays.
it’s about political resistance. there’s political resistance in underage drinking.2 stick it to the man. if you’re old enough to die for this country, you’re old enough to drink in it too. we’re all old enough to get shot by cops. your body your choice.
there’s political resistance in fake IDs. fuck 12 includes bouncers. unless they’re chill. in that case, it’s about political allyship that crosses vertical power structures. bouncers can be allies when they kick out creeps.
i saw / lost a note that said that all the theories about how gen z isn’t clubbing can be explained through one sentence of dialectical materialism. we’re not partying because we’re broke. but the act of being a homie hosting at a nice club and giving free drinks to the homies is our means of economic survival. it’s our means of combatting the recession.
with this state of the world, we have so much to be doing drugs about. the bathroom bumps are how we cope. the yakking is a physical and psychic purging of all the evils of the world and the bar. the hangover and the time necessitated to nurse one is anti-capitalist praxis. being up all night and sleeping during the day undermines the 9-5 and weakens the bourgeoise. calling off work to be hungover is exercising your proletarian rights. withhold your labor power. get irreversibly drunk on a tuesday.3
it is not morally impure to party. it was through partying i learned the necessity of harm reduction and narcan training. it is your civic duty to support small businesses and bars recovering from covid. we are directly combatting the capitalist, almost puritan anti-party moral superiority. it is our job to create signs of life in this seemingly lifeless political stage. the politicians want us dead and it only serves them if our social lives are.
it’s about contact. times square red / times square blue emphasizes the necessity of interclass contact. ross gay wrote a whole poem about everyone’s sweaty elbows bumping each other. the club is erotic not because of who you make eyes at, who you fuck in the bathroom, or who you go home with. the club is erotic because you can’t avoid touching anyone. the brushing of fingers between you and the bouncer in the passing of an ID. swapping spit with whoever had that glass before you. sharing butt-sweat with whoever used the toilet before you. and promoters and bouncers can try to control and “curate” the crowd who comes through the doors. but you’re likely to be rubbing elbows with people a few tax brackets above and below you. we’re less than a breath away from each other.
covid / its perceived aftermath had the whole world in a hedgehog’s dilemma. do i get close to you and risk hurting myself? covid and the fear of contact is comparable to how we saw AIDS. in the intro to gary indiana’s horse crazy, toni haslett called the epidemic “an assault on intimacy…AIDS draws and patrols the line between people; it crumbles the body and poisons love.” in the novel, indiana writes that the only safe sex is “if one person jerks off at one end of a room and someone else jerks off at the other, both trying to hit the same spot in the middle of the floor.” between both AIDS and covid, the question on everyone’s mind was “are you willing to die for love? are you willing to die to touch each other?” we were so scared of each other and we were so hungry for each other.
anyone in the city toward the end of the pandemic / beginning of what we (sometimes incorrectly) call “post-pandemic” will tell you there was a citywide bacchanal for almost two years. we can probably say that the “indie sleaze revival”4 happened because we missed a simpler, debauched, seemingly de-politicized5 time of partying and carelessness. fall of 2020, i was living on washington square. my first night out of university-mandated quarantine, the park was packed shoulder to shoulder. naked jesus was in the fountain, penis to the world. stripping drag queens brought their own wobbly poles that threatened to make them fall on their pleasers. i was tattooing under lamp posts. molly was being advertised on business cards. the pandemic was far from over, and in some ways it was inconsiderate and dangerous — privileged, even — for people to be partying the way they were. in other ways it was desperate. despite the risks, we touched each other. as vaccines became more readily available, we exchanged spit more unabashedly.
sometimes it is about sex. the club as a hunting ground. the club as the pregame to your bed.
xandra ibara’s “hookup / displacement / barhopping / drama tour” maps out now-gentrified places that were once queer latin nightlife havens. juana maria rodriguez theorizes the tour as a form of erotohistoriography — mapping based on the body and its interactions with other bodies. the club, the bar crawl, the week-long bender — erotohistoriography in practice. contact becomes political after it gets policed. i could talk about being gay and in the club and getting to gay make out in the club. but this piece (please remember, half joke) isn’t just about gay people. it’s about me and i happen to be gay sometimes. i do, however, happen to be touching people all the time.
it’s a type of contact often considered too low, lewd, and hedonistic to be deserving of theorization. but it doesn’t have to be precious to be good. there’s a difference between making love and fucking, and going to the club is about is like the quickest, nastiest fuck ever. ibarra’s tour itself became its own queer latin nightlife haven. the action of the tour, the gathering of people, and “ibarra’s encouragement to keep it bien sucio, real dirty,” created a new, traveling, non-displaceable queer latin nightlife. speaking of the temporal experience of the tour, rodriguez notes how attendees “swapped tequila-flavored spit on the streets, mixing fury and desire to do the work of being publicly perverse, of baring breasts and ass cheeks in the name of other ways of inhabiting queer life forms and geographies of belonging.” here we are, a bunch of unveiled perverts, rubbing up on each other. there is no judgment in this basement tonight.
rarely do people consider hooking up to be art and sweat to be sacred. dirty, quick, alleyway sex isn’t revolutionary, and fucking isn’t political. until it is. rodriguez and the rest of the tour attendees fuck as a form of protest, they fuck in honor of those who fucked in the very alleys and venues that they now mourn. it’s an interruption to the sanitized, gentrified way of life, as if to say, “if you want to get rid of gay clubs because you don’t want brown gay people grinding on each other next to your restaurant, we’ll just do it in front of your restaurant instead.”
it’s a similar contact that i come back to every time im at home sweet home, sharing sweat with strangers. we’re going at each other like lovers who’ve been separated by war. because we were. despite it all we’re sharing drinks and keys. we’re piling our clothes on top of each other in a frenzy to get out of them. we’re kissing strangers again! we’re letting strangers touch our butts again! isn’t that revolutionary. isn’t it amazing that all we needed was to be taking up the same space in each other?
it’s about love. you can love someone without liking them very much (many family dynamics speak to this). but partying is about love. raves have their emphasis on PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect). the sweet person at the wiggle room door always gives us the pre-entry talk: “we want you to have a safe and fun time, don’t be a creep and if you see something say something.” community building. i’ve invited then-strangers to tables after hearing they’ve gotten stood up by dates. community healing. and have you ever been inside a girls bathroom? love in action.
activism in being a drunk girl on an elevated surface. posit yourself above the patriarchy. in “killjoy survival kit,” sara ahmed says that “feminism is hearty.” it’s about feeling. feelings have use in feminist rebellion because they give space to the emotions that the patriarchy demands we suppress. that’s crying in the uber. that’s dancing on the pool table. that’s yelling at creeps at the bar. and that is, undeniably, the part of the night when you’re however-many-drinks-in and crying because you love your friends so much. if it takes a moscow mule to realize you’re extremely lucky to exist at the same time, so be it.
it’s about ecstasy. emotional and pharmaceutical. sometimes emotional because of pharmaceutical.
jose esteban munoz’s essay, “take ecstasy with me” is named after a (banger) song by the magnetic fields — which as much encourages the pursuit of happiness and joy as it does encourages the consumption of the drug. in my partying lifetime in the city, i’ve been dubbed “the poppers queen of the les” (harrison, luke, kiki, that one guy who came up to me at butterfly and asked, “you’re poppers izzy, right?”). despite their associations with anal and the gay community, poppers are for everyone. nothing says communism like sharing the bottle. they’re loosening. and regardless of where i am — downtown or a show in columbus, someone is asking me for poppers. it’s funny the amount of aggressively heterosexual country men who ask me for poppers. truly democratizing. you haven’t lived til you’ve seen someone who looks like they’d be against gay marriage bent over a bottle of rush.
i miss you all very dearly. this piece was half a joke because more often than not, i see my nighttime habits as contradictory to my daytime practices. frivolous, even. logan once called me a cocaine communist, saying how “my lifestyle is disillusioned but my heart is principled.” what does it mean to be partying while thinking about how ridiculous it is to be partying at a time like this. will there ever not be ‘times like this?’
i said this in my interview with dorian electra (honestly, one of my best pieces)
dorian: capitalism just subsumes everything. you can’t really fight it, but at least you can laugh at it. that’s a reflection of what i’ve seen in meme culture, and how gen z is coping with everything, calling it out and saying it for what it is, but also laughing at it — there’s this multi-layered irony and sincerity that goes into it, because at the end of the day, that’s all we can do to survive. otherwise you just feel horrible all the time, and what’s the point of that?
me: we’re totally seeing a dada revival, all that nonsensical shit, because originally, dadaism first happened after the first world war when everyone was like “this is bleak. nothing matters. let’s make jokes that make no sense.” really a postmodernist art form, because it comes from this dread inherent to capitalism and just knowing what’s up, knowing that it’s so much bigger than you and that you’re not gonna save the world tomorrow. there’s a sense of, “what else can we do other than party?” and you have this lyric talking about how much trash there is in the world, and then you’re like “that’s how you know it’s gonna be the best night of our lives.”
it’s like gallows humor, but gallows partying. but someone once said that there’s a fine line between gallows humor and executioner humor. that it’s gallows humor if you’re joking while on the chopping block, but executioner humor if you’re joking while watching it happen. are we the peasants in the french revolution drinking ourselves even further into death? or are we the ones dm’ing marine antoinette for list?
please dont cancel me for joking about getting canceled
i am 22
to any potential / current employers please remember this is all a joke and im trying out something where i combine humor and serious analysis please don’t fire me
i don’t agree with the name but that’s what we’re calling it and it’s a quick shorthand
i don’t think the early 2000s were actually depoliticized but i was also like, 5, at the time, so i wasn’t really paying attention to whatever war we were manufacturing int he middle east. sorry
not being hyperbolic when I say plur & rave culture literally saved my life if i'd stayed at home bedrotting any longer i would've done something drastic
a joke or not, you’re making points 🙂