Summer spins out. I have barely enough in my checking account to last me two months in New York. My blood grows stale as I thumb through Instagram Reels. I spend my days wandering the grocery store, shoplifting sushi and cake with my oversized black Telfar shopper. I call friends and colleagues to shout at them for not appreciating me, a neurodivergent icon. This is stupid. I need a fix. It’s time to go raving.

I head to Merge, a warehouse party thrown at The Chocolate Factory in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It’s Pride Weekend. Cedric Antonio is working the door. They’ve been doing this for 10 years, at venues like Basement and Nowadays, or parties like Unter. They smile, they chat, they keep things moving. Tickets don’t guarantee entry; you can still get turned away. I don’t discern a pattern or formula to who Cedric lets in. It’s not really about outfit, or scene, or group size. They recognize most of the party’s regulars. Anyone they don’t recognize, they personally introduce themselves to.

“You’re super sweet,” says a gay guy in black techwear.

“Mouth closed so I don’t have to repeat myself,” Cedric says. “We’re a queer collective who have come here for our resident DJs. Mind the way you move through the space. Your energy is more valuable than your money.”

Inside the massive, windowless venue, the 4/4 presses against my body. I go straight to the dance floor. I am a pool of vibrating water. The techno greets me with a sinister glee: Hi Geoff!! I’m not checking my texts. Collective motion swerves and pivots. People are snorting and sucking up and down the mezzanine. It’s four in the morning and the weirdos are out. I recognize dancers, even if I don’t always know their last names or day jobs. Marc Lacognata, Merge’s self-effacing promoter, told me he created the party for “professional ravers,” his phrase for the group of 1,000 or so clubgoers in New York for whom nightlife is not escapism but the core around which all else orbits. I know a millennial millionaire who hasn’t let the untold thousands he lost this morning in the crypto crash stop him from dancing all night. I know a trans rabbinical scholar with green hair who says about parties, “It doesn’t hit if God isn’t in the room.”

“In no metaphorical sense do I feel I have been possessed by Dionysus, the god of getting your back blown out.”

Merge began in 2021, after Marc and his then partner Nicholas Grubbs were driving down the Massachusetts Turnpike from a show in Boston and said to each other, “Let’s just do the thing.” They emailed DJs and threw their first party at Market Hotel. After their fifth party, they needed a new venue. Word had begun to spread: Merge was the new Big Party. Soon, Marc left his job in marketing and began producing parties full-time.

Merge happens eight to 10 times a year. Its location is emailed out to ticket holders only a few hours before midnight. Securing a venue remains the biggest challenge in throwing a night like this, because New York real estate loves no one back. (Marc, whose bearish gravity grounds his gentlemanly manners, tells landlords it’s “a birthday party” and puts down enough cash upfront to make “an offer they can’t refuse.”) He runs a well-calibrated system of operations: bartenders, U-Haul drivers to move couches from the storage space to the venue, bouncers, security, and an on-site EMT. Sometimes, venues try to insist on staffing their own EMT, but Marc uses the same guy every time—regulars call him Chet—who is seen as a member of the community people recognize and trust.

Oni Lem, Merge’s charismatic bartender, also works as one of the party’s Safer Spaces monitors, whose job is to enforce the party’s ethos: no violence, discrimination, or sexual harassment. Safer Spaces dates back to feminist activist Audre Lorde, whose organization Safe OUTside the System promoted community-centered strategies for protecting people’s safety without involving the police. Oni’s task, which under various names and to different degrees has become more common at raves over the past decade, also involves a harm-reduction approach to substance use. Unlike at legal venues like clubs—surprise, all warehouse parties are illegal!—drugs are permitted here. Oni might approach people who seem like they’re “falling out” or who are gravitating toward the couches while on a bad trip. If they need an EMT, or just a soda to raise their blood sugar, she provides it. Otherwise, she mostly leaves people to their own devices. She prefers a hands-off approach to harm reduction and allows patrons to take drugs conveniently and socially, instead of mandating that they sneak off into corners alone where they can’t dose properly in the dark, or take “a monster bump” because they don’t want to do the whole bathroom line again. This approach extends to destigmatizing the use of GHB, a potentially lethal drug that once got you permanently banned at Unter, and will still get you banned from Nowadays for a year.

(Clockwise): MEMPHY, DJ, model. Memphy wears top and trousers by Area. VOLVOX, DJ, Organizer: FLINTA NYC.  Volvox wears top and boots talent’s own. Shorts from Albright Fashion Library. ANTHONY PARASOLE, DJ, Booker: H0l0. Anthony Parasole wears top talent’s own. Jeans and boots by Diesel. CONCRETE HUSBAND, DJ, musician. Concrete Husband wears top, jeans, and boots by Diesel.

Left: CONNIE GIRL, door, artist. Connie Girl wears dress by Area. Right: CEDRIC ANTONIO (AKA S’AINT PANIC) (left), artist, door. Cedric Antonio wears tank top, shirt, shorts, belt, earring, and necklace talent’s own. JONAH ALMOST, musician, door. Jonah Almost (right) wears tank top, necklaces, and ring talent’s own. Jacket and trousers by Dion Lee.

“There are a lot of people who use chemsex to escape the feelings of shame around their sexuality and their desire formation,” Oni, who also works at Nowadays, said. “My Safer Spaces role is one of harm reduction and looking out for people’s wellbeing.”

As the night goes on, ravers do less drugs, either because their baggies are empty or because a flow state kicks in, which can carry you to morning. At peak hour, I watch the heads of dancers gyrating like the surface of the ocean during a hurricane. Ron Like Hell is DJing. Ratchets glide into the lock of the kick, warm and whole. Sounds bubble and burst, gashes sheer through corrugated steel. That demented, spinning sound from “The Ha Dance” by garage duo Masters at Work comes on, resembling the sound when a Looney Tunes character goes crazy with tiny birds spiraling around their head. A muscle gay lowering his shorts to reveal his jock strap tells me, “Trying to be as slutty as possible, but it’s not working.” Currents of sound move from underneath the ground, like torrents of sewage. A girl behind me is shouting, “I just swallowed my gum. How long does it stay, seven years?” I feel an internal quickening overtake me like an urgent glee for my jaded soul—I farted. “D, D-D, D-D, Diva,” sing the vocals. Bliss ravages me in an instant. “Work pussy work pussy work pussy work.” My grin turns into a grimace: the world is mine. I wrench my mouth open wide, nose scrunched, teeth bared. Do I stick out my tongue? Will he drop a pop edit? “I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” I stick out my tongue. Ron’s back bumps to the beat, twisting knobs like a necromancer who can turn up joy on a dial. Hell is a teenage girl. Hell is empty, because it doesn’t exist. In no metaphorical sense do I feel I have been possessed by Dionysus, the god of getting your back blown out. Percussion rumbles forward, lifted by the sound of a motor in a warehouse full of problematic muscle gays.

You want this? Do you want it?

FASHION, DJ. Fashion wears dress by Proenza Schouler.

Left: KAI (left), lighting designer: Wildblur. Kai wears dress talent’s own. KIP DAVIS (right), lighting designer: Inner Light. Kip Davis (right) top, shirt, necklace, and holster talent’s own. Right: (Clockwise) JONI, DJ, organizer: Intima. Joni wears dress and bracelet talent’s own. FRANKIE DECAIZA HUTCHINSON, co-organizer: Dweller, Discwoman. Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson wears hooded sweatshirt by Coach. Shorts and shoes talent’s own. OSCAR NÑ, DJ, co-organizer: Papi Juice. Oscar Nñ wears sweater, shorts, socks, and sneakers talent’s own. KATIE REX, DJ, organizer: Bound. Katie Rex wears dress by Collina Strada.

“It’s hard to predict what the future of nightlife will look like as it is so intrinsically tied to socioeconomic and cultural trends. Nightlife is highly adaptable and responsive to the environment it exists in. My hope is that it can become even more accessible and rewarding for both the communities it serves and the artists that uplift it. The dolls have and always will be leaders in the path of nightlife culture. I’m glad so many of them are getting recognized for their contributions today, but there’s still a lot of progress to be made.” —Oscar NÑ

The next night, I’m at Bound: Blackout, the version of the nationally touring event which takes place six times a year at Basement in Maspeth, Queens. Gaining access with a flash of an orange VIP wristband, I survey the vast, private complex known as “the green room”—two open lounges, three rooms, three bathrooms, and a swing—almost as large as the main dance floor itself. It remains mostly empty on any given night. As I wander sleep-deprived on Adderall, carrying a can of pineapple juice, I see a group of boys in the lounge, smiling and whispering, angling their necks.

“They’re partying…” Katie Rex, Bound’s promoter, whispers to me.

I drain my juice and leave the green room. Tonight, people flood the catacombs—the small network of brick walls off on the shadowy side of the dance floor. They’re thick with potential. I watch a woman with wing liner, a bleached-blonde buzz cut, and a wandering eye rest her fist above her head on a column. Beneath her arm, a girl rests her back against the column, afro framing her cheeks, and her waist jutted forward, swaying aimlessly. By the bar, there’s a platform built like a step pyramid for an ancient sacrifice. A woman in a black spiderweb collar stands at it as her partner below, shirtless in a leather harness, slowly runs the flat of his nails along the backs of her thighs.

Katie, who started raving when she was 14, had the aspiration to throw her own party ever since she worked all-age goth nights in Philadelphia’s kink scene. She wanted a night for the queer, kinky set in Bushwick—girls who would show up to parties with floggers and spank each other in the club. Volvox, a New York-based DJ who plays regularly at the Berlin club Berghain, played one of Bound’s first party at TILT, the underground bar of the McKibbin Lofts in Bushwick, back in 2016. For crowd control, Katie had initiated a tiered door policy, where queers and femmes were charged $10 and straight cis men were charged $50 to enter. The line had gone down the block.

“At the rave, you can examine each of the rules you obey in your life and decide which can be violated.”

In the catacombs, I find Dahlia Damoiselle. She wears oversized glasses and brows straight out of a Fellini film. Tattoos sprawl over her arms. Leather straps trace her stomach and thighs, holding her fetish garters. A utility belt carrying various rave essentials cinches her sleeveless black top, which reads “MONITOR.” Dahlia runs Bound’s team of monitors, who—like Safer Spaces monitors, but trained specifically for sexual safety—make sure that no one looks too unwell to communicate consent or that no one’s presence is making others uncomfortable.

The monitor team mostly employs trans and nonbinary “working girls,” whose sex work is not protected by New York City labor laws. This has pushed the city’s escorts into an underground whisper network, through which they share resources and spaces, and circulate blacklists of abusive clients.

“A lot of us do sex work for survival,” Dahlia says. “I see our work here as a little bit of an extension of sex work,” which, for her, involves care and education.

By the pyramid platform, two women, a domme and a sub, set up a vacbed—body-sized sheets of latex over a fold-out frame. The sub, made up like a goth Natalie Portman, wears nude-colored underwear. The domme is in a white ribbed tank top, hair buzzed with no makeup. The sub, shoulders thrown back, juts her neck toward the domme, eager to prove that she isn’t daunted. The domme returns her look, unmoved, as if she is trying to teach her something about pleasure’s slowness and its secrets. The domme squeezes lube over her sub and their freshly made latex bed like chocolate syrup, and the sub slides between the layers of industrial rubber until it covers her head.

“It feels like a second skin,” Katie says, watching beside me.

A crowd has formed a ring around the pair. Dahlia, clutching a riding crop, stalks around the performers, her glasses glinting in the red glow. Slowly, the domme operates a machine that sucks the air from the bed. The sub lies between the still flaccid latex, calm, until the sheets are so tight I can see her individual teeth. The airless latex sculpts her entire body, now gyrating in fresh panic, a touch theatrical, though the domme remains unimpressed. Part of the allure of watching is feeling the urge to help the sub and choosing not to.

At last, the breaking point arrives. The sub slows and writhes as sheets of intimacy touch her every inch. Her mind is elsewhere now, lost in two places at once, as her hands caress her ribs and groin. In a jarring motion, the domme jumps onto the vacbed, crouched over the sub like a praying mantis. She strokes her cheek and neck, but it seems to make no difference. She’s already gone.

Left: CHOQUE (left), DJ, producer: LadyLand. Choque wears shirt, and shoes by Diesel. KILOPATRAH JONES (center), DJ. Kilopatrah Jones wears wears shoes by Eckhaus Latta. Top and trousers talent’s own. BYRELL THE GREAT (right), DJ. Byrell the Great wears shirt, hooded sweatshirt, and pants talent’s own. Right: GEGA JAPARIDZE (left), booker: Basement. Gega Japaridze wears top and jeans talent’s own. TÉA ABASHIDZE (right), booker: Basement. Téa Abashidze wears top by Melitta Baumeister. Skirt talent’s own. Boots by Dion Lee.

Left: MADNESS OF (WTCHCRFT AND KYRUH) (left), DJ duo. Wtchcrft in shirt, jeans, boots, and belt talent’s own. Hoodie by Puppets & Puppets. Kyruh in hooded sweatshirt by La Pointe. Pants and shoes talent’s own. MICHAEL MAGNAN (right), DJ. Michael Magnan in shirt, shoes, and hat talent’s own. Pants by Stone Island. Right: (clockwise): STEVEN KLAVIER, musician, booker: Paragon, Public Records. Steven Klavier wears top, jeans, and necklace talent’s own. BOWEN, co-owner/booker: Mood Ring, co-owner: Xanadu. Bowen wears top, trousers, and hat stylist’s own. Andrew Inomata wears shirt, jeans, shoes, hat and glasses talent’s own. ANDREW INOMATA , booker/creative director: Le Bain. JADALAREIGN, DJ, booker: Nowadays. JADALAREIGN wears shirt, trousers, glasses and necklace talent’s own. Shoes by Proenza Schouler. ELI ESCOBAR, DJ, booker: Gabriela. Eli Escobar wears tank top, socks, and shoes talent’s own. Shorts by Coach.

I leave Bound and take two trains to a warehouse in Brownsville, Brooklyn, for a party whose cryptic email blast had read simply, “NEW RAVE / NO RULES.”

It is my third party of Pride Weekend. I am cooked. I have not slept. I cut in line for the Porta-Potties and shit my brains out. I black out for 20 seconds. I wash my hands with someone’s leftover beer.

Downstairs: techno. Upstairs: chaos. People are calling the music “electro,” a stand-in for “anything goes.” Two gays are fucking on a swivel office chair. A twink is pissing into a trash can. Sweat drips from a roof that looks like it’s about to cave in. Lines of cocaine are getting so clumped they vanish off our crushers. We hope they have evaporated and entered our pores.

Enter the rave’s unhinged post-pandemic era. During lockdown, when bars and clubs closed, groups staged “renegade” raves under bridges and on train tracks. Campaigns to decriminalize or find medical uses for chemicals like THC, psilocybin, and ketamine reduced stigma around drugs. The fight for sex workers’ labor rights makes frontpage news in the mainstream press. Ravers organized on Discord to demand the abolition of cops and prisons. The rave had become a quasi-autonomous zone.

A hustler I run into says this party is “debaucherous,” which is a lot coming from a hustler. Gay guys wait in line to get into the fuck booth downstairs. It’s packed. The windows are fogged. It’s giving Titanic. I lock eyes with a gay guy propped on the window who just got fucked. His face says that dick was a lot fatter than it looked. SOS!

A painter asks me how Ron’s set was at Merge last night. “Ron’s my favorite because he always does something weird that nobody asked for,” I say. I also take this to be the ethos of queerness. Aesthetic surplus. The queers are always taking things too far. I am not wearing deodorant.

I find McKenzie Wark outside. She is our greatest practitioner of transgressive autofiction and her tits are out. I tell her my copy of Reverse Cowgirl is smeared with blood. My boyfriend had gotten a nosebleed during sex. It got all over the paperback in bed. “I followed directions,” I tell her.

“Sign a little of your juice in these pages,” McKenzie recites from her chapter “User Manual.”

At the rave, you can examine each of the rules you obey in your life and decide which can be violated. When I first discovered the rave, over 10 years ago in New York, I faced a question asked of all ravers: What would you do in a space where there were no rules to separate you from your greatest pleasures? Could you handle your shit? It began as escapism, but soon took over my fantasies, my social scene, my identity. In 2016, with no job lined up, I moved to Berlin because of the parties.

When I moved back to New York three years ago, I returned to the rave because I was still looking for something. I hadn’t found it at my writing desk. I hadn’t found it at the galleries. I hadn’t found it at the barricades. And I hadn’t found it in the universities. At the rave, I was looking for a pleasure that could show me the abyss of my own interiority. It told me who I was and what I was made of.

At 10 on Sunday morning, I call it. I walk to the train and haul my sorry ass up to the elevated platform. The cool air passes through my black tank top sopping with sweat. A microclimate has formed inside my GmbH vinyl concept trousers slicked by body slime. I sit at one of the wooden benches, legs straightened in front of me.

A woman in her 50s, large with deep grooves on her face, looks at me with globular eyes through nearsighted glasses. She is all but craning her neck to get a better look at the specimen I am. At first she gasps, scandalized, and looks away, until, emboldened, she looks back. We lock eyes. I smile. Pure filth.

(Clockwise): BEARCAT, DJ.  BEARCAT wears bra and dress talent’s own. Jacket and boots by Eckhaus Latta. CLARISA KIMSKII, DJ. Clarisa Kimskii wears shirt and earrings talent’s own. Coat by Coach. FLIRTY800, DJ. Flirty800 wears tank, jeans, and boots talent’s own. Jacket by Stone Island. ACEMO, DJ. Acemo wears shirt, pants, and shoes talent’s own.

Hair Peter Gray at Home Agency using Oway Agricosmetica Hair Care. Make-up Charlotte Willer at Home Agency using Cinema Secrets. Photo Assistants Paul Yem, Michelle Peralta. Stylist Assistants Lucy McCabe, Joseph Weté. Hair Assistant Josie Tippmann. Production Katie Rex, Colin Boyle. Production Assistant Veronica Lam. Shot at Highlight Studios.

“There’s no such thing as utopia in real life, but we can take action to actualize different modes of possibility. My nightlife projects activate the potentiality existing in the collective imagination, giving it shape and a home in order to set the stage for human experiences to flow into new and unseen forms.” —Volvox

“Nightlife is an ever-evolving, living organism that generates new music, art, communities, and thinking while valuing its legacies and luminaries and extending a warm embrace to all.” —Anthony Parasole

“As an artist, I like coloring both in and outside of the lines. To paint a dance floor with vibrant hues of all ethnicities, gender expressions, and social and economic classes. A rich canvas vibrant with the joy of dance and music, a room filled with pulsating energy sparkling lights in a swirling expression of elation. Total beauty.” —Connie Girl

“New York City demands effort. Growth in nightlife requires intention. What you add to any room will ultimately decide what you take from it. Not everyone is equipped for that kind of sacrifice. It’s not just what you do. It’s how you make people feel while you’re doing it.”  —Cedric Antonio

“My nightlife journey began in DIY underground spaces, where I first found the freedom to express myself and be celebrated for who I am. It was in these spaces that I encountered the fab queer and trans people whose authenticity inspired me to pursue my own happiness. It was also in these spaces where I was introduced to DJing, learning with a crate of bargain-bin CDs. Naturally, I transitioned from DIY shows to raves, and from raves to clubs. Having been forced into survival sex work at a young age, nightlife became more than just an escape—it offered me a path toward an alternative future where I could make meaningful connections, live my dreams, and transform my life.” —Fashion

“In nightlife, and especially queer nightlife, it’s essential to create a transformative space and experience. A good rave or club is more than the sum of its parts, it’s a synergy between the DJs, the dancers, and the lighting.” —Kip Davis

“The release of dancing comes from the liberation of my mind, body, and spirit. A playful back and forth between the thump of the music versus the swing of my hips. When I get worked up and sweaty, the act itself becomes a means of self-expression, release, and connection. To me, that’s what makes a perfect night of getting free through dancing.” —Kilopatrah Jones

“Dance music has become a conversation between what we feel and what you feel. A good DJ is bridging that gap seamlessly. The magic lives in that little space between. We think of our sets as not only finding symbiosis with each other, but with the dancers. It’s a constant give and take with the crowd that molds into a beautiful and fulfilling experience. The dancers are offering themselves to our vision, trusting us for the night, and we trust them.”  —Madness Of

“Nightlife is the ultimate litmus test— constantly evolving and always on the edge, it doesn’t just reflect trends, it creates them. It’s where music genres collide, fashion reinvents itself overnight, and art takes on new forms of expression. From breaking down class barriers to redefining genres, nightlife pushes against the limits of taste and social norms. It draws lines only to blur them—inviting chaos and creativity to reshape the rules, again and again.” —Andrew Inomata

“DJing is a healing form of expression for me. I consider myself a dance floor therapist. However, the process is a mutual experience between myself and the crowd.” —BEARCAT