“It’s what Torrey Peters once called Bushwick Famous,” McKenzie Wark explains when I ask her how she feels about her relative celebrity in Brooklyn’s trans and queer scenes. “For trans people, [this is] kind of a trap, because it’s hard to get to audiences beyond that.” However niche Wark’s following is, it’s steadily growing. Last week, her newest book Raving was released by Duke University Press as part of its Practices series, in which various authors examine a hobby or interest. Along with this most recent project, she’s been organizing the Writing on Raving discussion series around New York, as well as publishing a bi-weekly column with Document, Daytripping. And over the course of our conversation, she hints at another forthcoming book.

This wasn’t always Wark’s scene. Prior to transitioning in her ’50s, she was a part of what she called the “white-boy theory universe,” having written seminal works A Hacker Manifesto and Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? She doesn’t have any regrets about exiting this sphere. Wark’s second most recent novel, Reverse Cowgirl, began her assumption of a new literary identity.

Raving leans heavily into autofiction. The characters Wark identifies as friends are sort of inspired by real people, and parties and clubs likewise go unnamed. This is partly practical, Wark says, as her scene doesn’t need any tourists. So much of the world she writes about feels precarious, especially at a time when the lives of trans people are increasingly under public scrutiny. Inevitably, though, these spaces are found by different kinds of people, and everyone has to share “It’s a good party if it dissipates more antagonism than it generates,” Wark says. “New York’s had this regenerative power of people finding places to create scenes, but you wonder where that ends.”

Jack Hjerpe: I’ve always thought of raving as this thing that is almost against language, and in the book, you talk about that being a big part of the joy of it. So how did you prepare for the task of writing about—and giving exposure to—this thing that is, by nature, underexposed?

McKenzie Wark: I didn’t want to represent it—I wanted the language to sort of be extruded out of it. You have to start somewhere, but a lot of people want to make it about transcendence, or resistence, and all this stuff. How can you have that experience generate language that will be different from and specific to those experiences? That was the task of that. I didn’t want to expose it, though. And I don’t think the little Brooklyn queer and trans rave world that I’m in is particularly exclusive. Once you establish trust, you’re in. It’s more like, it just doesn’t need tourists—I get gawked at every day anyway, so I don’t want that.

“I don’t think the little Brooklyn queer and trans rave world that I’m in is particularly exclusive. Once you establish trust, you’re in. It’s more like, it just doesn’t need tourists.”

Jack: And you wrote it in three months?

McKenzie: Yeah. I mean, the quote-unquote ‘field work’ I’ve been doing for years, and I got asked if I could do it because a book dropped out of the series. I’m a little bit prone to mania, and in a fit of it, I was like, I’ve got it. I’d actually not been doing serious writing for about three years at that point. Since I went on hormones, I couldn’t write, and this was a breakthrough that enabled me to come back to something that was conceptual and emotional and descriptive, and weaves these things together in a different way. So it’s a bit different to my past books, in a sense.

Jack: This book, even compared to Reverse Cowgirl, felt like it had a more understated vulnerability to it. Was that hard to write, and accept that it was going to be out in the world?

McKenzie: I think that the theory books I was writing had a sort of detachment from the world, and that’s why they work. [It’s] a little bit more removed, like most non-fiction. The other interesting space is to be a little bit too intimate; like, there’s sort of a middle ground that’s conventional, confessional prose, and I wanted to not do that with either of these books. It seems like they’re different, but it was just going from one strategy to another to avoid bourgeois literature. All my books are about that.

Jack: Do you think there’s something about raving that lends itself to particularly vulnerable writing, or that necessitated it?

McKenzie: Writing is a thing going on in my head all the time—I can’t stop it. In the best sense, dissociative states of dance will help with that. There’s a certain intimacy, just being on the dance floor, if you’re doing it right. It only works if you let the music fuck you. You can top it or bottom for it—it doesn’t matter.

Jack: But can you top it?

McKenzie: Yeah, some people do! Not everyone knows how to top well, right? You gotta let it in for that to happen, and be in a group of people where what’s happening is kind of surprisingly intimate. It’s not even necessarily sexual, which is interesting. Allowing your body to be with others, and to let go to the music, can be more intimate than sex.

Jack: So you said that this is your foray back into writing. What about your transition made you take that pause?

“Writing is a thing going on in my head all the time—I can’t stop it. In the best sense, dissociative states of dance will help with that… It only works if you let the music fuck you.”

McKenzie: I wrote Reverse Cowgirl before I went on hormones. I actually wrote a lot of stuff, anticipating that it would sort of fuck me up as a writer. It was like, if instead of the keyboard, my instrument was a saxophone. I had gotten good at it over decades, and suddenly, it’s a fucking clarinet. I can still play it, but I’m not fluid; I can’t do a jazz solo anymore. I had to learn a new instrument in a sense, sort of repurposing the things I knew about how to be a writer.

I’m interested in cursed, low genres that people don’t take seriously, so I wrote theory for a long time. Now it’s autofiction, which everyone likes to make the butt of a joke. But what if we took it seriously? It’s more in that vein. With this one, I was trying to engage with writing about nightlife and writing about techno. The next [book] is more about engaging with what’s happening in trans lit and trans writing—and a bit of that’s in Raving, as well. There used to be, like, two trans books a year that had visible publishers. There’s always an underground in our literature, but we used to have two and now we have 20.

Jack: Yeah. I read Nevada for the first time this past year, which was great. But the afterword that [Imogen Binnie] includes, I thought was so wonderful. It gives this history, fighting back against the idea that it was the first modern trans novel.

McKenzie: Yeah. I feel like there’s a little development of writing culture around rave culture. It’s what I’ve been working on for the Writing on Raving series with Geoffrey Mak and Zoë Beery, who founded it. I think it’s been five shows, and we have two more already slated. For me, the model for that was Topside Press, which gave us Imogen Binnie and Casey Plett and Torrey Peters, and all that came out of attempting to create space when we were thinking about trans culture.

Jack: How do you feel like Writing on Raving, and then your column for Document, work together with the book? Are they part of the same thing, or do they serve different purposes for you?

McKenzie: It’s all connected. I can’t help wanting to try to build a little infrastructure for queer and trans cultures. I’m not inventing anything, but maybe giving it a bit more of a platform and consistency. So yeah, Writing on Raving is a way of bringing different people together—professional writers, people from the scene who write—and putting them next to each other and seeing what happens. The column happened a bit by accident. The one time I was ever in Dimes Square was for a party for Document, where they were like, Why don’t you do a column for us? And I was like, Alright, fine!

There’s a little fictional element to it, because I don’t want to name parties and stuff. It’s sort of fun, inventing a different geography of Brooklyn. I have a little bit of play with it. Sort of like, Let’s create this little ongoing nightlife journal, because that whole tradition is the common thing of nightlife. Going back to Restif de la Bretonne, who used to go out in Paris, before and after the French Revolution. He would moralize about it—you can never take that part seriously—and have these tantalizing little bits about 18th-century trans life, or the equivalent of it, in Paris.

“I’m interested in cursed, low genres that people don’t take seriously, so I wrote theory for a long time. Now it’s autofiction, which everyone likes to make the butt of a joke. But what if we took it seriously?”

Jack: I think those are some of my favorite parts of the book—the diagrams where you talk about the ravers.

McKenzie: Yeah. People keep asking me, Am I so-and-so? It’s like, yeah, it might be based a little bit on you, but it’s not you. It’s someone who occupies a similar place in the network. And it’s bittersweet, because I’m at least a little bit removed from it; I’m at least 20 years older than pretty much everybody in this story, and I have to be diplomatic, in part, because of that.

Jack: How do you mean?

McKenzie: I’m a little bit of an insider-outsider. There are a few older people in this world, but not very many, and none who I know well. My girlfriend comes to parties with me, but I didn’t meet her there. It’s that ethnographic, inside-outside perspective—where you can sort of see it whole if you’re not quite a part of it.

Jack: You’ve been well-known for a while, and you’ve had a lot of attention paid to you as a writer—but more so recently as a trans woman. Do you feel like that’s an odd space to hold?

McKenzie: Yeah. Like, I want a mentor for this, but I don’t know who the fuck that would be. I always wanted to be very singular. Oscar Wilde was my first muse in that sense. But make yourself singular, and then it’s like, Who do you learn from? It becomes a little bit harder, and I’m not good at taking advice, frankly. I sort of have to make it up. I don’t like to complain about stuff because I’ve had such a great fucking life. The one thing: I look at a lot of my contemporaries, some of whom have had much better academic careers than me. But the one thing I’m not doing is writing the same book over and over. The adventure sort of goes on.

Jack: Even though Raving is not pulled directly from life, do you feel like it stays far enough away from fiction?

McKenzie: Sometimes, we mistake naturalistic details for the real. So if I said it happened on such-and-such street and the door was pink or whatever, it fools you into thinking it’s the real world. That’s what fiction does, and this is the opposite. It actually doesn’t tell you those details. Or if it does, they’re kind of made up. The diagrams of forces and the atmosphere and the interactions of the people in it—all that is as accurate as I can get it. Like, this is exactly how I perceived it, and it’s also my reflection on what factors might’ve made my perceptions hazy. Drugs were involved, and that’s part of it. I really want to write about the world; I don’t want to make a world up. I didn’t make this world up. It’s there. To me—and no shade to fiction writers—it has different ethics, in a way. That’s the ethics of non-fiction: You’re trying, through one means or another, to express the world.

Jack: Thinking about the drug use aspect, too—especially right now, since that Rolling Stone article came out about ketamine—there’s this idea of, The world is already trying to kill us. You’re trying to figure out how safe you need to be in accordance with that.

McKenzie: I want queer and trans people to live long lives—I really do. I’ve lived a long life, so, like, trust me: This whole thing that it’s all over when you’re 35 is just nonsense. Life doesn’t get good until you’re 40-something. But there’s just so many obstacles to flourishing, particularly for trans people of color. So I get it, why you would exist in nightlife in a way that’s not sustainable.

“I want a mentor for this, but I don’t know who the fuck that would be. I always wanted to be very singular. Oscar Wilde was my first muse in that sense. But make yourself singular, and then it’s like, Who do you learn from?”

Jack: You’ve obviously written a lot about raving, and talked a lot about raving, and about this book in particular. Is there anything you haven’t gotten the chance to talk about yet?

McKenzie: Well, I am interested in dissociated states. Dissociation is a clinical category, usually; it’s a response to trauma, and for trans people, to dysphoria—like, in a bad sense, but also maybe it’s a good experience of dissociation. And is it an aesthetic?

I got this from some random conversation with a trans girl in Berlin: the way you dissociate, but then reassociate into something else. That’s the part that the clinical side leaves out—sometimes it’s out of, and then into. I think I’ve got four versions of what you can get into. Three of them are in the book. But maybe there’s more. Could we have a language for all of the aesthetic experiences of dissociation and reassociation to another state? That could be the beginnings of a whole conversation about this as an artform, not covered by how we usually talk about the performing arts. What’s the experience of being in that? How do we have conversations around it? I think that conversation can be ongoing: Here’s another language, let’s talk about it in other ways, and hopefully that feeds into creating better parties.

The scene is going to go away at some point—they all do. So it’s like, what can we transmit intergenerationally? I think that’s a key, as well.

Jack: Do you feel like your perspective on raving has changed a lot, from when you were younger to now?

McKenzie: Yeah. I wasn’t hardcore at it in the ’90s. I didn’t live in Europe, but I got to experience that Berlin, early-’90s thing for a little bit. I didn’t understand it. I was just amazed by it. Sydney itself was a little bit proto-Burner, had a crunchy vibe, a lot of DIY stuff, lots of 303 analog techno noodling. And that was kind of great. [We had] what we used to call the Bush Doof, where you just drive for hours into the bush, listening. It’s named after the sound: You listen for the doof doof doof doof. The technology now is a lot better. There is sub-bass like there never used to be, because only digital can do that sound. You can’t hear that with vinyl.

I’m resistant to that sort of, You missed it, good-old-days narrative. That’s really disabling. I missed the ’60s—I’m not that fucking old—and everyone’s like, You missed the ’60s, it was so great! And I’m like, Fuck you, we’re going to make the ’80s great! I love the spinning of legends out of these things. But you can spin the legend out of all sorts of things. It’s sort of how you pass on the lore.