is the party over?

an essay by Elyah Benson with help from Angel Arias.

I walk into one of my favorite clubs after not having visited for several months. I’ve been out elsewhere, but working the dinner shift on the west side of Manhattan is not really conducive with my typical partying schedule. To make it all the way back to Bushwick with enough energy to get dressed, get drunk, and get out the door is getting increasingly difficult at my old age of 25. But one of my favorite DJs is playing and my friends are in the mood to dance (a rare occurrence) so I decide to drink a Redbull on the L train home and rally. 

When I first started going to this club a good amount of people were turned away at the door if they failed to meet the dress code and vibe-check requirements of whatever rude door bitch had the misfortune of standing out in the cold for hours on end, so I always dress the part. 

This particular club has always had a (semi)-secret free entry list for trans people so we don’t rush to miss the hours-long wait with the unticketed undesirables. As we wait in the much shorter ticketed line, a group of about 6 twinks push past us without so much as an “excuse me.”

“Why the fuck are you cutting?” I bark. None of them even turn around. 

The door bitch calls “Next!” and the twinks prance forward. 

“Hiiiiiii babes!” the door bitch says. Each twink receives a double air kiss and they kiki for a moment before skipping down the ramp into the party. I have never seen a door bitch with such minimal bitchiness. 

“Next!” the androgynous door bitch calls. As we approach the bench I can see they have freshly bleached eyebrows and are dressed in that faux-poor chic stapled by Bushwick transplants. 

“Hi, how are you?” I ask. 

“Please stand directly in front of me,” they order.

“Oh. Okay.” We comply.

“Do you have tickets tonight?” 

“My friend and I are on ____’s list.”

“Do you know what ____’s list is for?” they yawn with an eyeroll. 

Now maybe this is my anti-white, anti-twink, anti-dumb-cunt bias speaking, but I don’t necessarily enjoy being questioned about things related to my transness from white twinky dumb cunts. 

“Of course we know what ____’s list is for. It’s for trans people.”

The door bitch looks each of us up and down before handing my friend and I our tickets and ushering us inside. 

“What a miserable faggot,” I whisper to the rest of my group so as to avoid being kicked out before we even entered. Security pats us down and checks inside our purses for weapons and other contraband, of which we have nothing. Another (less powerful) door bitch scans our tickets and asks for our phones before placing stickers that read “NO PHOTOS NO VIDEOS” over both the front and back facing cameras. (I learned in the early days of this club that they take this rule very seriously after a former friend immediately took her stickers off to take both photos and videos before being asked to leave by an undercover employee. They let her stay but told her she risked being banned if she broke another rule.) Once we finally passed the last checkpoint to enter the party, we stuff our puffers into one of the $9 lockers that aren’t broken yet and make our way to the dance floor where we are met with earsplitting bass and the stench of undeodorized armpits. Home at last. 

The music is simply fantastic. For all of my complaints against this club, I must admit the lineup of DJs has never been an issue for me. Sometimes I get a bit too overwhelmed by the hard techno and the rush of my chewable molly candies but in that case I typically take a smoke break outside or head into the smaller room to the side that plays bouncier house music. 

Most nights, the crowd tends to lean quite straight as the club recently blew up on Tiktok after someone found out people have sex (*gasp*) there, but tonight is basically a circuit party with waves of shirtless twinks and muscle gays. Though I have found gays can hold their liquor better than straight people, this particular night my friends and I keep getting separated by stumbling drunks with very little spatial awareness. After being bumped around way too many times for my liking I decide to take a stand. As the next couple of twinks trip over themselves toward our group, I put an arm up to keep them from barreling into us. 

“Move, you tranny,” the drunker of the two spits. 

This is the first time anyone has called me that word. We argue back and forth for a few minutes before the more sober twink drags his friend away into the party.

Though I try to shake the situation off, I can’t help but stew in the anger. Any sense of liberation that parties typically offer is no longer there and I begin to think back to my recent trip to Berlin, a city I herald as one that knows how to party. 

As I waited outside the brutalist building that houses Berghain and Panorama Bar for the first time it dawned on me why “bitch” is a necessary signifier in the term “door bitch.” Without the strict (some unspoken) rules of the rave, we can’t separate those who heard about the party in a viral Tiktok from those who live to party, who have earned the right to party; we run the risk of hosting shitty parties with weird noobs who barely know how to act normally in everyday life, let alone in a space where raunchy sex, the hardest techno you can imagine, and enough cigarette smoke to necessitate a tracheotomy the following morning (or afternoon if you’re doing it right) are all staples. If you’re experienced enough to know to keep your shirt on and not to smoke while waiting outside, you earn the privilege of twirling nude and smoking in whatever corner of the cavernous building you find yourself in once you’ve made it inside. 

Although it seems contradictory to our neoliberal understanding of inclusivity, not everyone can be willkommen. Exclusivity is necessary to the inclusivity that the club offers. You don’t have a safe space for faggots and rave rats if you let every Tom, Dick, and Stacy in blindly. At Berghain you don’t get the feeling of finally making it inside, getting your stamp of approval, if you don’t first feel repressed and harshly policed by the 8-foot-tall bald (or balding) German bouncers. For me, the anxiety of an hours-long wait in front of the stoic, post-war edifice and an inquisition-esque line of questioning is worth it for the peace of mind in knowing that I will not be judged once inside. 

I don’t mind a rude skinny faggot asking me a million questions so long as those questions are being used to weed out voyeuristic non-dancers. I don’t mind sitting through a minutes-long spiel about the expectations for a party so long as everyone actually meets those expectations. I’m willing to overlook a lot for a good party. But please do not put me through the torture of dealing with an anorexic, non-binary bottom with too big a head just to be surrounded by groups of vaping 21-year olds who always fail to adhere to the “no talking on the dance floor” rule and apparently have an affinity for transphobia. 

As I bounce along to the hard techno, trying my best to forget about the twink who so boldly displayed his hatred for trans women, I can’t help to pose the question, “Is the party over?” If a trans girl can’t go out to dance at a place that claims queerness as a founding principle without being harassed by gay men, have we lost the plot completely? While my hope dwindles for party culture in New York, there are many others who stand firm in their love for the city that never sleeps. When asked about partying in NYC, nightlight personality Angel Arias says, “My favorite thing about clubbing now is the community that I have found. I can go out alone and find friends, old and new. At the club I found love and sisterhood. Club culture continues to provide me with beautiful moments that remind me there is still love and hope in the world. The club can seem so meaningless at face value. However, the club offers a shared experience and opportunity to make and deepen connections.”

Perhaps I allow my personal anecdotal experience too much weight but I am still not convinced the party ended long ago and that it’s time to go home. Although, perhaps all I need is another good night out to change my mind.