The circuit party is dead. According to this month's issue of OUT magazine, this particular genre of dance party is biting it - primarily because the young party homos that sustained them are now middle aged . Like me. For a few years now I have lamented the loss of these outings in my life, but should I really care? Has the scene changed so dramatically that it would bare no resemblance to what attracted me to it in the first place? Are young homos really becoming more main stream and assimilating to a softer style of music on the dance floor?
The big parties are in decline: White, Black, Black & Blue, Red, Cherry, and the Blue Ball are barely generating a pulse. I remember these parties as incredible rides lasting days—18 hours but who's counting—and discovering the euphoria of constant motion, dancing in 40-minute blocks and being overtaken by the music. I fucking loved it. I was also really high. I think the drugs took away my compulsion to control the scene; they helped me put my faith in a higher power: The Dj.
My boyfriend and I would begin our night at the Roxy on 18th street. Initially we would separate: he headed straight to the main floor, and I would run to the Crystal room on the upper level to hit on the Dj. It was a ritual. The Dj loved it, I loved it, and my boyfriend couldn't have cared less. That was a relationship that really worked (well, not exactly, but that's another story all together). The Crystal room at the Roxy had a wall of glass that looked out to the arena below, a crystal chandelier that hung above clusters of leather sofas, and 70s-era disco that sang down on the comparatively small group (50-ish). I loved to dance on the platform behind that wall of glass staring down on the 1500 dancers below, especially if I was dressed for it. One of my favorite dance outfits circa 1999 was a Raymond Dragon skin-tight sleeveless white mesh tank top and matching shorts, both pieces had a fat stainless steel zipper running up the front, with black Doc Marten lace-ups that nearly reached my knees. That was a hot number. So after an hour or so of flirting and pretending to be a circuit go-go boy up in the Crystal room, I would join Todd on the main floor and dance for a couple more hours before heading over to Tunnel on 11th avenue.
Junior Vasquez crafted Tunnel into an underground trance-techno train ride. Tunnel was the perfect midpoint; the music was far from the bubble gum of the Crystal Room, yet nowhere near the metallic sound of what would follow. Tunnel put me in a trance.
Around 8:00 a.m., the final leg of our club tour would land us at the Sound Factory. (Later, SF morphed into Twilo.) I loved both Twilo and Sound Factory. While SF had a more calm trance-house vibe, Twilo's sound became much harder, more industrial and repetitive. I loved it. Because of the emergence of meth in both that culture and my own life, I was even more drawn to Twilo and that sound; even sober, I still love that harder beat-driven style of music, despite OUT's insistence that the new generation has rejected it.
I stopped going out to the clubs when I got sober 5 years ago. I guess as one approaches 40 and beyond there are all sorts of reasons to give it up, but honestly, if I didn't feel that scene threatened my sobriety and if in fact that scene still existed, I would probably still be hittin' it.
TWILO: Tough
