Yamil Avivi
Michael Alig, who left his hometown of South Bend Indiana as a gay misfit in the late 1980s, went to New York City (NYC) in search of acceptance and community. By the early 1990s, he became the ‘king of the club kids’ in NYC’s rave scene. Under Alig’s wing, the club kids were a group of chosen individuals who developed glamorized and commodified personas and guaranteed a profitable nightlife that helped expand impresario Peter Gatien’s ‘Clubland’, which consisted of four Manhattan nightclubs: Limelight, Tunnel, Club USA, and Palladium. In this role, Alig undisputedly empowered many misfit and disenfranchised queer club kid youths. He became famous with his signature party, ‘Disco 2000’, at the church-turned-nightclub known as ‘The Limelight’, which was run by Peter Gatien and his ‘Clubland’ enterprise. By furthering a creative queer nightclub subculture built on rave and hard drug use, Alig became an indispensable asset to ‘Clubland’. At the peak of his fame, however, Alig, along with his confidante Robert Riggs, brutally murdered the Colombian American and queer ‘low-brow’ club kid and drug dealer Angel Melendez.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s ‘crackdown on drugs’, together with Angel’s gruesome murder, brought the New York City club kid subculture to a halt. Both Alig and Riggs were imprisoned in 1997, only to be released in 2014 and 2010, respectively. Ever since, Alig, rave fans, journalists, and film producers have struggled to make sense of the murder of Angel. In interviews, books, and documentary films, Alig describes the murder as a ‘freak accident’ induced by irresponsible drug use. He has expressed his willingness to resume his role as a nightlife public figure, but Angel’s murder remains a hurdle for his anticipated success.[1] In Glory Daze (2015), the documentary that celebrates Alig’s release from prison, he articulates a tearful remorse, perhaps partly in order to sway disgruntled fans and on- the-fence audiences to support his comeback. In the film, a number of former impresarios, confidants, and club kids express their full confidence—even while some express disgust and hesitation over Alig’s erratic behaviors and murder—that he is ready to return and contribute greatly to the nightlife or other creative industries given his past success.
In this chapter, I ask what role racism played in Angel’s murder, given that the drug addiction narrative centers Alig’s drug consumption and does not sufficiently contemplate the racial overtones in the act. Longstanding colorblind narratives about NYC’s legendary club kid subculture can be found in film productions like Party Monster: The Shockumentary (1998), The Party Monster (2003), and Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig (2015). For audiences not to consider head-on the unspoken racial overtones and even murder within the club kid culture is troubling at a moment when their ‘king’ is attempting to ‘reinvent’ his life out from prison.[2] In this chapter, I argue that the constant retelling of the club kid scene’s downturn in documentaries and scene publications has led to a whitewashed narrative of drug addiction that erases racial violence and exclusion and sustains a nostalgia for this 1990s subculture that awaits Michael Alig’s comeback.[3] Further, I aim to reconstruct the intolerance within the scene that excluded Angel and other non-white ‘low-brow’ subjects from the privatized 1990s nightlife economy that thus privileged white(ned) queer subjects—a situation that should not be glamorized in the present. I do this by taking a critical cultural studies approach that involves a discourse (and visual) analysis of three films in order to reveal the (erasure of) racial overtones in a privatized scene that privileged white homonormativity and simplified Angel’s experience and existence in it. There is more to understand about Angel than the dominant narratives of club kid subculture have offered, especially regarding his experience of race, exclusion, and violence within the club scene. This chapter offers a counter-narrative by investigating the scene’s racism through Angel’s high-profile murder.
Drawing on local sources, I offer here a version of Angel’s story shared by Latino queer men who knew him in high school and as a neighbor, which differs from versions told through the voices of mostly white(ned) club kids, promoters, and impresarios in the dominant narrative of NYC club kid subculture. As a former doctoral student studying working-class Latina/o youth in NYC nightlife culture of the 1990s in Elizabeth, New Jersey, I learned that Angel was not from Queens, New York, as media and film productions have indicated, but actually lived and went to high school in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where I was also born and partially schooled.
Angel was a 1.5-generation Colombian American who immigrated to the US around the age of eight.[4] A student at Elizabeth High School, New Jersey’s third largest high school at the time, he graduated in 1989. His defiant self-presentation in his Class of 1989 graduation picture shows his ‘hardcore punk edge’, with gelled and spiked long hair, while he slightly and deliberately slouched instead of sitting up straight. The picture is revealing of how my informants perceived him as a queer leader among local Elizabeth youth struggling to come out. He encouraged other minority underclass students to come out during a time of great sexual repression and HIV/AIDS stigma amidst the town’s conservative mainstream and Latino first-generation immigrant community. After he graduated, underclassmen were aware of Angel’s ascendancy in the urban-queer-and-black-majority ball subculture of voguing and fictional family networks or “houses”[5] and dance club scene. One informant, Danny Tiberius Ninja, who was a former Elizabeth High School student and a longtime member of the local ball scene, remembers: ‘And by the time I had graduated, he was already deep into the [metro New York City dance] club scene [that includes Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey]. And when I got into the club scene, I was a statement and he was already a star. He was already growing high.’[6] Ninja recollects (with admiration) that Angel became a reference for him as he climbed up the ball scene ladder among the houses. From a local perspective, Angel’s promoting and club kid status, whether chosen or not, was admirable to Elizabeth queer youth of color.
In this chapter, I first offer a brief historicization of the films produced between 1998 and 2015 to illuminate the metanarrative that exists about Alig, the 1990s club kid scene, and the consistently simplified ways Angel is portrayed. The next two sections offer a more in-depth historical and ideological understanding of Alig’s rise in the club kid scene that shaped these films’ narratives. The second section examines the ways in which Alig’s ‘creative class’ innovation of the club kid subculture could easily be commodified in New York’s privatized nightlife economy and how, as a result, club kid subculture was whitewashed during the 1990s. The third section offers a historical narrative of the NYC techno/rave scene that ultimately gave rise to the club kid scene and one that is featured in the films produced between 1998 and 2015. I highlight how Alig’s rise contested US rave subculture as a straight and white scene to make it queeraffirming, but not truly inclusive of racial and ethnic minority subjects.
These two sections together help us to understand that a film narrative created in the years 1998-2015 about Michael Alig has created what Patricia R. Schroeder, in her study of Bluesman Robert Johnson, calls a legendary ‘figure [in] the popular imagination’ or ‘a cultural icon of what we as consumers value’.[7] Schroeder says that these cultural icons are ‘myths’ that ‘lose something of their individuality and their historical specificity as we recycle their images, reflecting on what we think is important about them and thus important about ourselves’.[8] The metanarrative created by all three films sustains and remembers Michael Alig as the myth behind a successful, queer-empowered, and lucrative club kid scene while forgetting the racial overtones of his legacy, including his murder of Angel Melendez. In effect, the film producers’ erasures of racial overtones of Michael Alig’s legacy maintain an ‘evanescent presence, drained of [Alig’s] own history as he comes to signify something about ours’.[9] Essentially, the myth-making in these films is what Charles Ramirez Berg, in his ‘Manifest Myth-Making: Texas History in the Movies’, describes as an ‘entertaining, guilt-free narrative conformed to core American beliefs’ or a production of safe consumption that is reflective of an audience which values freedom, equality, and industry but avoids seriously contemplating the realities of racism in the US.[10] In this case, Alig’s legacy revolves around queer freedom, equality, and industry in light of his lucrative queer-empowered nightlife club kid subculture.
In the fourth section, I closely examine how this development has influenced the club kid narrative of Angel and explore what Angel’s own experience of being racially and culturally excluded might have been. After this, I show how Alig has revised his and other club kids’ relationships with Angel to retell and cleanse the story for the benefit of his comeback. In the last section, I discuss how researchers should approach emerging and existing subcultures in ways that center queer of color perspectives that are often left out of dominant neoliberal and whitewashed narratives.
Building a Dominant Metanarrative of Alig and the Club Kids: Films 1998-2015
The history of NYC’s club kid scene has been thoroughly televised in the films Party Monster: The Shockumentary (1998), The Party Monster (2003), and Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig (2015). In all of these films, it is striking how they portray not only Angel’s racially motivated murder inaccurately (as an accidental crime of hard drug use) but also his overall person. Angel is reduced to Alig’s dependable lowlife Latino drug dealer while Alig is mythologized as the star king of a financially successful and legendary club kid scene.
In 1998, just roughly two years after Angel’s murder, Party Monster: The Shockumentary (1998), a low-budget film released by Alig’s friends, Fenton Baily and Randy Barbato, catered foremost to former partygoers and a US queer mainstream audience that idolized the 1990s club kid scene. The Shockumentary is a reference point for subsequent movies that build on a sustained club kid scene film narrative. The movie features both an incarcerated Michael Alig paying time for his crime and a preincarcerated Alig during the heyday and downfall of the 1990s club kid scene. The directors interviewed both Michael Alig’s and Angel Melendez’s families about their lives. While the directors interviewed Alig’s mother and older brother in the beginning of the film, only Angel’s older brother was interviewed closer to the end of this documentary. In Angel’s case, details about his disappearance were highlighted rather than personal details about his upbringing, unlike with Alig. That is, the producers spent more time interviewing Alig’s family about his personal life outside the club kid scene that humanized him while they rendered Angel’s personal life marginal. Humanizing Angel would disrupt his portrayal as a lowlife drug dealer, which works well throughout this recurring film narrative. Yet, several of the club kids who are interviewed, in addition to Alig’s mother, raise Alig’s macabre tastes, like his famous blood feast party that— intimately foreshadowing Angel’s gruesome freak murder—came with escalating and rampant drug use. Overall, The Shockumentary glorified the drug-crazed club kid scene that peaked with Alig’s party Disco 2000 at the Limelight as recounted.
Party Monster (2003), also produced by Fenton Baily and Randy Barbato, was a larger-scale production with well-known mainstream actors like Macaulay Culkin (playing Michael Alig), Wilson Cruz (playing Angel Melendez), and Seth Green (playing James St. James) that catered to a broader white(ned) mainstream audience. In the opening scene, the viewer is introduced to Michael Alig and his right-hand confidante, club kid James St. James, as the central figures of the story, while the ‘king’, high on Special K, confesses that he accidentally murdered Angel. Both club kids in the scene recount their childhood stories and early history of the club kid scene from their perspective. Essentially, the producers leave Angel’s perspective and story untold. His pronounced Latino and Colombian heritage in real life and close ties to the local queer-and-black-majority ball scene remain unmarked racial and ethnic identities in the movie, which works well for a mainstream consumerist white majority audience and ultimately avoids the racial overtones of Angel’s murder. Wilson Cruz, a US-born New York Puerto Rican, plays Angel, a 1.5-generation Colombian American. Even while Cruz and Angel share significant intercultural experience and identity as Hispanophone brown-skinned Latino men, Cruz’s own mobility, mainstream sensibility, and US-born linguistic and cultural identity displace Angel’s local queer and brown Colombian immigrant identity from nearby Elizabeth, New Jersey, in a way that also whitewashes Angel’s social positioning. With the exception of a few scenes,[11] this whitened Angel is not portrayed as an unfavorable or excluded club kid but as a confidante to Alig who supplies drugs to him. For example, when the club kids are interviewed on the Geraldo Rivera show, St. James dismissively asks Alig, ‘Who invited [Angel]?’ Alig responds, ‘I did,’ to which St. James responds, ‘Whatever for?’ Thus, the movie conceals Alig’s intolerance toward him and ultimately any racial motivation behind his murder. Rather, the producers sustain the notion of a murder prompted by irresponsible drug abuse.
Glory Daze (2015), produced by Ramon Fernandez, harkens back to a documentary style like The Shockumentary (1998), but now in the moment when Alig has recently been released from jail and has served his time for Angel’s murder. Unlike the producers of the first two films, who were friends in the 1990s, Fernandez was not friends with Alig, although he enjoyed the club kid scene. Ironically, Fernandez shares Angel’s identity as a brown-skinned Latino but sustains Alig’s club kid scene dominant narrative. The film celebrates a free Alig and many of the original club kids who retell the heyday of the legendary club kid scene. While most of them denounce Alig’s behavior and act of murder, memories of the height of the scene and the hope that Alig will return to jumpstart today’s New York City nightlife are the centerpieces of this production. Fernandez portrays Alig as mostly remorseful, but with one uncensored moment of Alig and St. James joking light-heartedly about dumping Angel’s torso into the Hudson River. While the film does briefly touch upon Angel’s belonging to the New York City pier scene—a majority queer and black space of ball subculture—this is cast negatively. He is described as a ‘pier queen’, and there is no attempt to unpack any meaningful understanding about the late Angel Melendez outside the club kid scene.
Investing in the King and His Chosen Club Kids
Alig and the club kids gained stardom through their residency at the Limelight. Club kid Walt Paper has rightly stated that the 1990s club kids ‘brought people to New York […] it was an industry’. In Glory Daze, ‘Chief’, a black security guard and the only black subject in the documentary, explains: ‘Alig was like an attraction. People came to see the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, they would come to see the club kids at Limelight.’ As club kids were all the rage, they were covered in newspapers and magazines and frequently invited to make televised appearances on talk shows.[12] Their glamorous and outspoken nightlife celebrated a ‘homonormative’ queerness that was often advertised as being available for consumption at different Clubland parties. Club kids guaranteed profit in a privatized nightlife industry, but this did not mean that all queer kids were welcome. Instead, the club kids rage celebrated mobile and enfranchised, white(ned) gays or queers.[13] It was these kids who were invested in and perceived as capital for industry and development.
The role of gay and queer men in capitalist urban development has been theorized by Richard Florida, among others.[14] Fiona Buckland has built on this in her research, suggesting that homonormative men are often intimately tied to furthering capitalism in the entertainment industry and nightclubs.[15] Christina Hanhardt has reconstructed how, in the 1970s, ‘gay white men were extolled for saving declining cities as vanguard members of the vaunted back-to-the-city movement’.[16] She further writes that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, ‘gay populations were invoked as enticements for the creative class of workers to settle in, and thus revitalize, restructured regions’.[17] Hanhardt’s description of these gay men and women as a ‘creative class’ is similar to notions of the glamorously homonormative club kid society that became profitable. Village Voice columnist Michael Musto perceived Alig and his club kids as part of this creative class, who were countering the ‘death of downtown’ New York’s nightlife. William Bastone and Jennifer Gonnerman, too, claim that Michael Alig and his club kids ultimately ‘revitalized’ a downtown economy of nightlife and entertainment.[18]
That Alig was, at least in retrospect, aware of this is shown in the documentary film Party Monster. Before the producers turn to a 1993 TV commercial advertising Club USA’s opening, they write as a preface: ‘As the Club Kid Movement grew, Gatien launched Club USA with a huge publicity campaign’. Alig is subsequently quoted saying: ‘Club Kids were very current to the 80s of the packaging, press, publicity, corporation-y, out for yourself, money, you know what I mean, for nothing, it was very American […] give me money, because I’m fabulous ’cause I say so’.[19] His argument links the club kids’ creative ingenuity with queering American values (‘It was very American’), by claiming that it is homonormative men like him who forge industry and profit (‘give me money, because I’m fabulous^) through their self-confidence (‘I’m fabulous ’cause I say so’) and their ability to be commodified (by the ‘press’ and ‘publicity’). Near the end of Glory Daze, Alig embraces the American values of ‘selling yourself’ and ‘creative prowess’.
Michael Alig’s revival of downtown nightlife and lucrative success in the New York nightlife industry occurred during a period that David Harvey calls the ‘neoliberalization of New York’.[20] Harvey explains how politicians, investors, and developers promoted a neoliberalized culture that erased the collective memory of democracy ‘via artistic freedom and artistic license’ and a demand for lifestyle diversification that promoted an environment of individualism and privatization.[21] Political and economic power privileged sexual and gender diversity for purposes of profit, but in ways that depoliticized it and marginalized, erased, or criminalized racial, immigrant, and ethnic subjectivities in privatized publics such as NYC’s nightlife empire. When Peter Gatien invested in the ‘creative’ and glamorous innovations of Alig and his club kids, he at the same time promoted a spirit of self-made queers and entrepreneurship that discouraged racial democracy.
Of course, the homonormative queer scene did bring positive change in various respects. According to Peter Drucker, the club kids were inspiring and legendary because of their ability to ‘undeniably [move] sexual liberalization [forward] and expand sexual possibilities’ of eccentrically gay and gender variant subjects within prior heteronormative-only and sexually repressive dominant publics.[22] For queer youth of color, being a part of this sexual and gender nonconforming scene could be empowering—if you were accepted by them. Club kid Walt Paper remembers that Alig could act ‘like an old Hollywood boss grooming you’. He designed or approved of club kids’ personas and costuming, which were racially depoliticized and dehistoricized. Alig helped whiten club kids like Ernie Garcia and Desi Santiago (both with Hispanic surnames) by giving them official club kid names like Ernie Glam and Desi Monster that erased their Latino identities and possible connection with low-brow black and brown audiences and their politics. Instead, this club kid glamour was a chic that celebrated a consumptive white(ned) homonormativity. For example, in Party Monster (2003), there is a scene when Angel (played by Wilson Cruz) introduces himself as Angel to Michael Alig to enter a party. Alig (played by Macaulay Culkin) as the gatekeeper of his scene asks Angel: ‘Where are your wings?’[23] In that moment, Alig whitens Angel by ‘grooming’ him to wear wings but displacing the racial and social marker the name Angel has for ‘low-brow’ urban working-class Latino men as a nickname or actual name. Alig’s commercial insight is shown in the fact that these personas provided safe forms of queer consumption that sidelined underprivileged racial, ethnic, and class markers among chosen club kids. Club goers treated these club kids, with their personas and costuming, as actual privileged celebrities. The Village Voice columnist Michael Musto has claimed that in the 1990s, ‘one went to see these club kids instead of actual famous people’.
By ‘grooming’ the club kids in this way, Alig pushed to the background the club kids’ collective memory of the struggles in New York’s downtown regarding racial and queer equality, in favor of glamorized and homonormative identities. At the same time, Alig and the (nightlife) industry provided a sense of belonging to the club kids, as he ‘gave them names, dressed them up and told them what their personalities were going to be’.[24] To stay chosen as a club kid, most went along with these whitewashed values. In hindsight, some comment critically on their behavior. St. James stated: ‘It was a vampiric kind of thing. These people would follow [Alig] around and worship him.’[25] Walt Paper has stated that ‘people would follow him [Alig] like ducks’.[26] The loyalty of many club kids to Alig reached its apex in the period following the murder of Angel Melendez.
A Racial History of NYC’s Rave Scene
New York City’s 1990s rave scene comprised five prominent rave parties, all with their own character and fan base: STORMrave, Future Shock, Disco 2000, NASA, and Tunnel Saturdays. Mireille Silcott has highlighted the diversity of the rave scene, stating: ‘If the history of rave proves anything, it’s that the rave format is wide open to interpretation and sculpted by set and setting’.[27] The parties developed different ‘interpretations’ of rave, particularly in reference to race and gender, Afrocentric music genealogies, and commodification. While some embraced the queer scene and ‘the original gay-Black house model’, others developed techno music, claiming that because it was ‘rendered straight ’n white, this thing could go places black ’n gay could not’.[28]
The divisions between house and techno were deepened in the early 1990s by the rise of white DJs such as Larry Dee, Frankie Bones, and Joey Beltram. Frankie Bones and Adam X organized the first STORMrave party in 1991 in Brooklyn and later continued to organize raves in Staten Island and Long Island.[29] Charles Aaron, Spin Magazine’s editorial director, ‘who began raving in the early 90’s’, later reminisced: ‘I think what fascinated me about the STORM raves [was that] the music was just so ferocious and intense and macho. […] It’s so much about this wound-up energy. […] They didn’t […] want […] to express it through the preexisting [disco and house] music.’[30] Aaron reveals here that Bones and his alliance of mostly borough-raised Italian American DJs created a racialized and gendered space (‘macho’) for white male ravers to exert their energy and claim their white masculinity on a musical project that distanced itself from blackness or non-whiteness and gayness. The overwhelming majority of the first ravers who attended these parties were white working-class to middle-class borough youths who were energized by this refreshing outdoor dance marathon that challenged nightclub and Afrocentric house music conventions.
Frankie Bones and his team of DJs, however, had an unrelenting competitor in Michael Caruso, aka Lord Michael, a promoter for Limelight. Caruso also threw raves in the outer boroughs and eventually organized two hardcore techno parties at Limelight called Adrenalin and Future Shock.[31] Although the music was basically the same, a big difference was that Caruso incorporated his party into Peter Gatien’s nightlife empire rather than keeping it underground, pure, and not profit-driven in the boroughs. Caruso envisioned techno as a commercial undertaking, capable of ‘taking us there’ and filling Gatien’s nightclubs to capacity while ‘forget[ting] mushy house’.[32]
As Gatien and his promoters were interested in profiting by catering to high-paying majority-white customers, they wittingly or unwittingly introduced rigid racial and social hierarchies into the rave scene. In Glory Daze, club kid Walt Paper claimed that ‘there was an A crowd, B crowd, C crowd, and D crowd’, thus illustrating the enactment of deep social and class hierarchies and borders within the scene. Meanwhile, Bones’ crowd was labeled ‘bridge and tunnel’ by the select ‘in’ crowd of Peter Gatien’s Clubland, especially Michael Alig’s club kid society.[33] ‘Bridge and tunnel’ referred to a crowd perceived as low-brow and potentially criminal or violent, working class, white ethnic, brown, and black and from outside Manhattan. They were thought to be unfit and undesirable in the glamorous nightlife scenes unless they could successfully hide their racial, geographic, lower class, and cultural origins. In the documentary film Limelight, filmmaker Billy Corbin portrays ‘bridge and tunnel’ ethnic white Italian Americans from Staten Island as low-brow, outer-borough ravers in a dance space where they could only mingle if they were lucky with white(ned) glamorous ‘in’ or ‘A-list’ club kids and high-end customers. It is telling that Limelight did not include any club kids of color perspectives in its story. Bringing in these perspectives would inevitably raise the topic of racism in the scene. Michael Alig’s initial ‘genius’ lay in inspiring an ‘anything goes’ sexual and gender diversity that also appeared racially inclusive in Clubland’s rave scene. It led to the rise of the Limelight’s filled-to-capacity rave parties.
Even so, race very much played a role in Alig’s musical and commercial decisions. Alig’s signature party at the Limelight, Disco 2000, became the most successful and profitable party in Clubland. According to Larry Tee, who helped Alig run Limelight’s Disco 2000 raves, Alig decided to play techno early onward, explaining: ‘We made a decision not to play house on the main floor because he wanted the latest, newest sound’.[34] Screamin’ Rachel, another club kid, who became successful as a house music vocalist, claims however that the sidelining of house music was intended to displace or exclude a largely non-white house crowd: ‘Behind the scenes [T]hey wouldn’t let me put the term “house music” on the party invitation because they thought it would attract blacks, even though they played house in the club’.[35] She further remembers: ‘Old school hip hop legends like Melle Mel and Afrika Bambaataa […] Alig turned [them] away’.[36] Journalist Frank Owen even quotes Alig as saying: ‘We don’t want stupid [n-word] or lowlife spies coming to the club. When the [n-word] start showing up, you know your club is over.’[37] Screamin’ Rachel’s account suggests that Alig wanted to maintain an exclusively white(ned) club space inspired by (the binary between) techno and house, an Afrocentric musical form. Alig’s use of ‘lowlife (n-word) and spics’ shows what subjects he wanted to keep out. In recent films such as Glory Daze, however, these exclusionary politics are erased and instead a supposed unity and diversity of club kid culture is celebrated. Club kid Walt Paper describes the 1990s scene as a ‘global village’. Club kid Astro Earl claims that in the scene, ‘it could be like a midget, a tranee, a hasidic jew, a chelsea gay, a club kid, a raver, a gothic and we all got along’. As a result, a colorblind inclusion is suggested and celebrated, while in reality white-coded subcultures and ethnicities were privileged.
Angel as a Wannabe: Being an Unchosen Club Kid
Despite his association with Michael Alig’s club kids and being the ‘king’s’ roommate, Angel Melendez was not really fit to successfully belong among Michael Alig’s club kids. Even though Alig now claims that Angel was part of the club kid family, it is evident from many of the club kids’ and promoters’ recollections that he was not liked by most. In Glory Daze, St. James simply affirms: ‘I didn’t like Angel very much’. Angel’s costume, which had wings accentuating his nickname—‘Angel’, a typical nickname for urban Latinos, specifically Boricua and Chicano men—was too revealing of his personal life and racial and ethnic identity, which did not seem glamorous to those in the club kid scene.
Furthermore, Angel’s costume choice went against the club kid glamour as it was also influenced by aesthetics of youth of color scenes like the queer pier scene of the West Village. In Glory Daze, Angel is described as ‘a pier queen’, which has deep yet unspoken racial implications to a white(ned) club kid scene but is insufficiently contextualized for a broader audience. In the film, journalist Frank Owens describes Angel as ‘part of that rough gay crowd that hung around the West Village Piers’. The pier queer scene was a local queer of color youth scene, where queer of color drug dealers also found belonging. The mainly white residents of the neighborhood did not welcome these youths, who were perceived as dangerous, criminal, and loiterers. By characterizing Angel as a ‘pier queen’, the dominant narrative reduces Angel to a low-rung drug dealer and a wannabe club kid and a ‘poser’.
In The Tenets of Neoliberalism, Henry Giroux explains a colorblind strategy of language to thwart perceptions of racism by producing less overt versions. In light of this, I see language in The Party Monster: The Shockumentary (1998) that could harbor racist overtones. For example, Michael Alig opens the documentary by talking directly about Angel: ‘He was a copycat […] one of those copycats we hate’.[38] Alig’s use of ‘hate’ to describe his feeling toward ‘copycats’, and toward Angel Melendez in particular, is a reflection of racial overtones that are often hidden or downplayed by this colorblind strategy of language. According to Giroux, ‘marketplace ideologies now work to erase the social from the language of public life so as to reduce all racial problems to private issues such as individual character and cultural depravity’.[39] For example, Alig’s use of words such as ‘copycat’ or ‘wannabe’, as well as club kid Gitsie’s use of the word ‘tacky’ to describe Angel’s costume, can be seen as colorblind enunciations that demean Angel as a ‘lowlife’, brown, undesirable immigrant who does not belong among the white(ned) and favored entourage of club kids.
Another way in which Giroux sees those in power hide racial overtones is by posing a ‘leave it up to the market’ view. Those in power justify neoliberal projects of development by claiming that everyone has a shot at achieving success through individual self-sufficiency and effort. Rather than blaming structural social and racial inequalities, this ideology claims that the market decides whether individuals ‘make it’ or not. In a similar way, Walt Paper claims that Angel did not have what it took by saying he ‘wasn’t fabulous enough’ or ‘couldn’t penetrate the upper level with his [whitewashed] looks or expression’.[40] In Glory Daze, Paper puts it simply: ‘He wasn’t really A-list’.[41] Giroux explains that neoliberal values celebrate individual freedom, ‘a freedom […] no longer linked to a collective effort on the part of individuals to create a democratic society’.[42] In other words, in a dominant neoliberal public, one’s individual character, in this case Angel’s, is emphasized over collective markers of race, ethnicity, and class—despite how relevant these are to how individuals fare.
Using Paper’s words, Angel Melendez had an ‘expression’ and a ‘look’ that was too racial and too immigrant to make it in the club scene. Angel’s racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural excess were both voluntarily and involuntarily unwavering. He wore his racial and immigrant markings too visibly, and possibly proudly, on his sleeve. We do not know whether he wanted to exude those individual markers or, on the contrary, knew that he could not play a fabulous, whitewashed role. Ernie Glam (club kid Ernie Garcia, who also played Clara the Carefree Chicken) says in Glory Daze that ‘Angel had this paranoia that people were making fun of him. That people secretly didn’t like him or that we were all laughing about him behind his back.’ Glam’s reminiscence may be reflective of Angel’s own sense of not-belonging. The ‘paranoia’ may have sprung from Angel’s sense of inferiority or feeling less than those among an A-list of white(ned) club kids.
But Angel really was not erroneously paranoid given some of the views that the club kids and promoters expressed in the abovementioned films. They reveal a disliking or even hatred of him that ended in his murder. While Owen does not discuss the racism in the club scene in detail, he briefly raises the club kids’ views by saying, ‘a pronounced streak of racism ran through the club kid scene’.[43] And he specifically mentions Angel’s case, stating that ‘many of the club kids looked down their powdered noses at [him] because he was Latino’.[44] In Glory Daze, club kid Astro Earl recounts Alig telling him once: ‘I wish Angel were dead’. In another moment, Steven Lewis, a major promoter for Gatien’s clubs, passionately says: ‘I didn’t like Angel, I thought he was a piece of shit. If you lined up people that should die, he would be near the front.’ In the same film, Walt Paper explains: ‘Michael [Alig] was putting drug dealers [like Angel] on payroll not because they were fabulous but because he wanted x amount of drugs to be available for the party’. Paper goes on to say that ‘[posers like Angel] would [hang around the A-list club kids] by becoming drug dealers’.
On a fateful Sunday, Angel went to Alig’s apartment to collect a large debt owed to him for Alig’s drug use. Robert Riggs was there also and yelled at Angel: ‘This is why nobody ever likes you. If you weren’t a drug pusher, you wouldn’t have any friends.’ Ironically, it was at that moment that Angel, according to Alig’s testimony, was the first to get physically confrontational and started choking Alig. In Glory Daze, Alig explained: ‘[Riggs’ blunt insult] hit him so hard’. But what ensued was a hateful crime committed by two drugged up white men full of pent-up ill feelings toward Angel. Riggs took a hammer and clubbed him on the head three times, leaving half-moon dents on his skull.[45] Moments after, Alig finished Angel off by holding a pillow over his head and pouring Drano down his throat. Alig and Riggs placed Angel’s lifeless body in Alig’s bathtub, where it stayed for days. Later, under the influence of heroin, Alig dismembered Angel and shoved his remains into a cardboard box that he and Riggs threw into the Hudson River. Alig’s other confidant, club kid Gitsie, is quoted saying that ‘Angel was tacky—He deserved to die’.[46]
Was Angel ‘Like the Rest of Us’?: Alig’s Post-Prison Trivializations
In this section, I examine a Huffington Post post-prison interview with Michael Alig, produced a week after Alig’s release, which focuses on his exit from prison, the 1990s club kid scene and Alig’s relationship with Angel.[47] Like in Glory Daze, the interviewer, Huffington Post’s Queer Voices editor James Michael Nichols, offers moments of critique but falls short of deeply centering at any point on the topic of race/racism in Alig’s relationship with Angel. In effect, Alig’s narrative downplays Angel’s negative treatment and outlier positioning among the club kids. Even so, Nichols remains skeptical about Alig’s retelling of the story, saying: ‘And you at this point get to be the face, you get to come out, you get to do the interviews and Angel is still gone’.[48] In the Huffington Post interview, Alig downplays the racial aspect of Angel’s murder by simply not mentioning the murder and therefore favoring the standing narrative that explains the murder by inappropriate drug use and media hype. Thus, Alig claims that he was drugged up and that his club kid friends (including himself) employed savvy ‘media pranks’ that exaggerated the storylines (including Alig’s actions and remarks) to gain media coverage. When Nichols confronts Alig with the scene in Shockumentary (1998) in which he said, ‘he was a copycat […] so we killed him’, Alig disqualifies the quote entirely, saying it was ‘slightly disingenuous’ to publish it. Instead, Alig emphasizes that he was ‘very high’ at the time and that he does not recognize himself in that scene. By claiming that he does not know his current self in that scene from 1998, Alig aims to convey to his audience that he is a changed and remorseful person, while furthermore framing the murder not as a hate crime but as a freak accident and not a true reflection of his person. By discrediting quotes as mentioned above, Alig is inviting his fans and audiences to give the new and remorseful Michael Alig a chance.
Alig even asserts that Angel ‘was part of the family’ and challenges the frequent depiction of Angel being disliked, sidelined, and unchosen among the A-list club kids. By doing so, he seems to offer a revised depiction of his relationship with Angel and the other club kids that is less hostile and exclusionary. He explains:
In spite of how the media has portrayed our relationship with Angel, you know […] it’s this gallows humor thing. I have the same relationship [with Angel], with me and James, me and Walt Paper, me and Keoki. All of us have this relationship where we can be very sarcastic and send barbs back and forth with each other. [.] That’s how we show our affection, strangely enough. It’s the same with Angel, yes, did we ever make fun of his clothes or did we ever make fun of some aspect of his personality, absolutely. But, on the other hand, he was just like the rest of us. […] When he came and was part of the fold, he was part of the club kids. He was part of the family [.] he was very loved, you know, despite what horrible things we might have been quoted as saying in the newspapers. He was at our house. We had dinner with him all the time. He was very loved. He was happy. In spite of what happened in the end. He was in a good place.[49]
With such remarks, Alig attempts to erase the social and racial inequalities and violence that Angel experienced among Michael Alig’s ‘A-List’ club kids. He is careful only to articulate colorblind ‘barbs’ such as ‘mak[ing] fun of his clothes or personality’, without mentioning the ethnic or racial characteristics of Angel and his clothes that he was making fun of or disqualifying him for. And instead of admitting that Angel was really an outsider, Alig erases Angel’s proven outcast position by claiming that ‘he […] was part of the fold […] was part of the family’. During the interview, Nichols expresses deep concern over Alig’s use of this interview for his self-benefit, seeing it as an attempt to erase the (racial) hatred of Angel and redescribing his actions in order to humanize him and the 1990s club kid scene to prepare the ground for his comeback. As a result of this redescription, Angel’s full story continues to go untold. I argue that this media clip is another example of the dominant narrative that excludes perspectives of others who truly valued or loved Angel. Without their accounts, Angel’s full story will remain forgotten.
Research Implications
Behind Michael Alig’s rise, there was a significant amount of racial exclusion within the club kid scene, promoted by neoliberal projects of industry and development. In this section, I note five areas that researchers must consider when gathering interviews and primary sources to articulate alternative narratives of racial democracy that stand against whitewashed mainstream and subculture narratives. In doing so, researchers will be able to include youth of color perspectives and experiences that often stand at the margins.
What White(ned) Only Means
For researchers, it should always be a flag when white(ned) bodies in music scenes are glamorized while bodies of color are nonexistent. In a white supremacist society that promotes privatization over racial democracy, mobile white(ned) bodies will always be privileged and remain superior while bodies of color are excluded and criminalized. The media productions raised in this chapter only include privileged white(ned) actors in a network of power, deliberately leaving out people of color perspectives and knowledge to sustain a white(ned) privatized context. Given that approach, a majority of bodies of color will continue to face exclusions that instill boundaries and hierarchies. Researchers must detect these harmful racist practices, including colorblind language and a (depoliticized) diversity that is seemingly inclusive. Alig’s scene of whitewashed queer diversity instructed and policed youth of color to leave their racial and ethnic excess behind.
The Biographical
Researchers must seek for racial subjectivity and knowledge of whitened bodies within a neoliberal and privatized context through interviewing and ethnographic fieldwork. In the media productions about Alig and his club kids, most of the club kids are never asked about their personal life and upbringing, nor do they offer it. Instead, they offer the image and persona that sells. Given the racist and Hispanophobic sentiments voiced within the club kid scene, it is notable that brown club kids like Ernie Glam, Astro Earl and Keoki did not share nor were they asked about their racial backgrounds. The media productions thus decontextualize their personal stories to reify neoliberal ideologies and discourses that value the (sellable) individual in a privatized context. José Muñoz has explained that this form of disidentification by minorities functions as ‘a survival strategy that works within and outside the dominant public sphere simultaneously [or in this case, the privatized nightlife sphere]’.[50] The minority subject simultaneously acknowledges his/her cultural excess and subverts it to ‘follow a conformist path if they hope to survive a hostile public sphere’.[51] Being a brown or black yet whitened club kid could have given minority subjects a sense of community, status, and mobility that they may not have had in their everyday lives.
Researchers must construct alternative narratives that seek to show the true self while acknowledging the ‘conformist path’ within the scene. Researchers have a responsibility to document—as best as possible—people’s authentic origins while understanding how chosen minority subjects arrived in white(ned) scenes that dehistoricize their racial, ethnic, and social backgrounds. Finally, the fact that some youth of color from nonwhite or immigrant backgrounds were privileged in this scene does not necessarily mean they should be immediately judged as bad individuals. In 1996, New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski interviewed Johnny Angel, Angel’s brother, who explained how Angel wanted to be part of this ‘interesting world’ where the values of ‘individual freedom’ motivated him to be ‘in’ and successful with the club kids, even if the racial projects at play did not favor him. It is important to consider how Angel and other club kids and club goers were influenced by, enjoyed, and assumed the values of individual freedom in this dominant and colorblind public despite their racially and geographically marked ‘bridge and tunnel bodies’.
‘The Underbelly’
Because the documentary films used for this chapter only portray those at the top and thus privilege their perspectives and experiences, they leave the impression that only they or those who have similar racial and social markers matter. Those with the right subcultural capital are often treated as though only they have valid experience.[52] In a 2006 blog post, longstanding Queens Colombian American activist Andres Duque responded to an article in Un Chin Magazine, claiming: ‘Angel Melendez was Somebody’. The Latino magazine had just before published an article that featured the club kid subculture ‘fashion spread’, which failed to mention Angel Melendez’s Latino identity as ‘a Colombian born man’ (per Duque’s words), simply describing Angel as a drug dealer and not even recognizing him as being a club kid himself. Duque criticizes the magazine’s glaring omission of a gay Latino man in the scene because he was not a chosen, white(ned) club kid and was a drug dealer and states that ‘the underbelly’ of a subculture matters too. He uses the term ‘underbelly’ precisely to refer to Angel and other non-white subjects who are on the margins of subcultures, like the ‘bridge and tunnel’ crowd. Especially for journalists and researchers, it is important to examine their experiences, which are just as valid as the experiences of those at the top. It is for example highly interesting that Jimi Dava, patron and promoter at Limelight and one of the few Limelight staffers who affirmed his liking for Angel in Glory Daze—calling him a ‘nice guy’—mentions that Angel ‘always came from the side’.[53] Unlike the other club kids who always entered with entitlement into Clubland dance floors and rooms, Angel did not, which is revealing about his own self-perception. In light of this, it is crucial to compile those subjects’ interpretations and experiences of the underbelly, and the meaning and value ‘white(ned) at the top’ rather than racially democratic scenes had for them.
The Center Is Disputable
Most of the earlier mentioned films put A-list club kids and promoters and impresario Peter Gatien at the center of NYC nightlife. These films sell a subjective centeredness, neglecting various shades of gray. Thus, productions like The Shockumentary or Glory Daze discuss the blind loyalty the club kids had to Alig (‘They followed [Alig] like ducks’). While Glory Daze is subtly critical of this loyalty, there is no discussion of an alternative except for Angel’s liminal positioning of having access but not truly belonging. Ultimately, there is no gray: you were either blindly loyal or not. For a historically accurate account of how subcultures work, it is important to move beyond such binary assumptions and ask whether there were youth that were critical of these power relations and enjoyed other scenes as well, including more racially democratic ones. In my own research, I found that New Jersey youth of color who enjoyed the club kid scene were critical of Clubland (i.e. referring to the Limelight as the Slimelight), yet still consumed it while also enjoying other local house and hip hop music scenes they identified with more and/or preferred.
Supermarket of Style
In light of the last topic, it is important to consider how minority subjects simultaneously identify with different scenes that have vastly different values or racial compositions. Researchers must examine how youths express different associations simultaneously through performance, dress, and group-making. Also, certain scenes compensate for other values or characteristics by including queerness or non-white racial subjectivities that are not found in other scenes. Subjects assume a post-subculture moment in which there is a mixing of two or more subcultures, or what Ted Polhemus terms ‘a supermarket of style’ that allows individuals to create their own hybrid image and styles, and author their own image and style.[54] In the case of club kid subculture, a supermarket of style could disrupt power and control over a fan base that looked to other scenes. Being and looking glamorously homonormative could be part of an individual’s own supermarket of style. For example, Walt Paper briefly mentions that Angel Melendez was “a punk hardcore kid who enjoyed going to CBGB”.[55] We also know that he was in the pier scene and was a club kid as well. Considering how Angel identified with these three scenes, how did the values in the punk and queer pier scenes make up for values and characteristics that were not represented in the club kid scene? What facets of Angel’s personality and self-determination could he explore in the punk and queer pier scenes that he could not as easily do within the club kid scene?
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have challenged the dominant colorblind narrative of the history of the 1990s New York City club kid scene and, most importantly, the story of Angel Melendez’s murder. By focusing on Angel’s experience within the club scene and his murder, this chapter offers an alternative understanding of the racial exclusions and hateful ideologies and (colorblind) discourses Angel and other minority subjects experienced in subtle or openly violent ways. The urgency of this chapter stems from the fact that Angel’s full story continues to be sidelined and devalued in order to maintain Michael Alig’s reputation as a commodifiable subject for today’s creative industries. Angel was more than a drug dealer. Angel’s leadership at Elizabeth High School is one he impacted all youth especially queer youth of color in his everyday life as a brown-skinned club kid who was eccentrically gay in an immigrant Latino majority heteropatriarchal town.
The (re)telling of Alig’s rise and fall in documentary films and other popular histories glamorizes the heyday of 1990s nightlife club kid creativity. Behind this lies a clear commercial consideration: the story of Alig’s impact on NYC nightlife and Angel’s murder continues to sell. In response, Alig continues to capitalize on an erased past of racial violence and exclusion that must be critically addressed, especially among today’s youth club kids and nightlife club goers. Alig is undeniably a creative force and legend who popularized queer nightlife in New York City and empowered disenfranchised youth. He could greatly contribute to today’s (club kid) nightlife and today’s creative industry. However, by avoiding the racist nature of his past rather than addressing it as a lesson for today’s youth to promote genuine inclusion and democracy, Alig proves not to be truly remorseful and continues influencing others to repeat the same kinds of subtle and overt colorblind exclusions and violence.
Notes
[1] To name just three examples: (1) Alig has an official website (www.michaelalig.com) and a YouTube show called the PEE-EW with co-host Ernie Glam, https://www.youtube.com/ channel/UCaEtb-aE5pqGtJWvnf5H8tg [accessed on 13 June 2019]; (2) Alig has spoken about his place in the art scene here: Animal New York, ‘Living Murderabilia or Pop Art?: Michael Alig’s Seamless Transition Into the Gallery World’, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=elDCI9KR9yY [accessed on 13 June 2019]; (3) Alig has spoken about ‘coming back’ to nightlife in an interview with Rolling Stone. See S. McCreesh, ‘Michael Alig Did His Time for Murder—Now He Wants to Party’, Rolling Stone, 28 January 2017, https://www. rollingstone.com/culture/features/michael-alig-party-monster-murderer-returns-to-night- life-w463399 [accessed on 13 June 2019].
[2] R. Fernandez (dir.) Glory Daze: The Life and Times of Michael Alig (2015), at 2:10:11-2:10:20.
[3] Ibid., at 49:30 provides an example of a discussion about the club kid scene becoming ‘druggier, druggier, darker and darker’. Another example is the American Justice TV series episode Dancing, Drugs, and Murder (2000), at 11:00-12:39. Online at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=zoIUTJMOQgQ [accessed on 13 June 2019].
[4] Dancing, Drugs, and Murder, at 12:35-12:50. A source from Elizabeth, New Jersey, and who went to high school with him told me he came to the US at the age of eight.
[5] Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Jennie Livingston (dir) Paris is Burning (1990) documentary. Steven Canals, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy (dir.) Pose (2018-9) television series.
[6] Danny Tiberius Ninja was also known in the scene as Chastity.
[7] P.R. Schroeder, Robert Johnson: Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 2.
[8] Ibid., 2, 13.
[9] Ibid., 13.
[10] C. Ramirez Berg, ‘Manifest Myth-Making: Texas History in the Movies’ in D. Bernardi (ed.), The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008), 8-27, 3.
[11] F. Bailey and R. Barbato (dir.), Party Monster (2003), at 47:15-47:35.
[12] For example, see appearances at the Phil Donahue show, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cY0V4O7ErJ0; at the Geraldo Rivera show, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=sajRVAAk3rY; and at the Joan Rivers show, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GGT982vBiK8 [accessed on 13 June 2019].
[13]K Murphy, P. Kevin and D. Serlin (eds.), Queer Futures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); L. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); C.B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); P. Drucker, ‘Gay Normality and Queer Transformation’, Zapruder World vol. 2 (2015), http://www.zapruderworld.org/gay-normality-and-queer-transformation, [accessed on 16 September 2017].
[14] R. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
[15] F. Buckland, Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World Making (Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 89.
[16] Hanhardt, Safe Space, 8.
[17] Ibid.
[18] W. Bastone and J. Gonnerman, ‘Busting the King of Club Kids’, Village Voice, 17 December 1996, 37.
[19] R. Bailey and R. Barbato (dir.), Party Monster: The Shockumentary, at 16:30-17:20.
[20] D. Harvey, A BriefHistory of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
[21] Ibid., 46-47.
[22] Drucker, ‘Gay Normality and Queer Transformation’.
[23] Party Monster (2003), at 30:00-31:00.
[24] E. Meers, ‘Codes of Silence: For months gay “club kids” in New York City kept quiet about [Angel’s] grisly murder’, Advocate, 4 February 1997, 49-50.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Glory Daze, at 16:23.
[27] M. Silcott, Rave America: New School Dancescapes (Toronto: ECW Press, 1999), 43
[28] Ibid., 41-42.
[29] S. Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999); Silcott, Rave America; M. Matos, The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America (New York: William Morrow Publishers, 2015); D. Sicko, Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010).
[30] M. Matos, ‘Limelight: The Rise and Fall of the Church of Rave’, NPR, http://www. npr.org/sections/therecord/2011/09/26/140804608/limelight-the-rise-and-fall-of-the- church-of-rave [accessed on 15 September 2017].
[31] Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 146-147.
[32] B. Corbin (dir.) Limelight: The Rise and Fall of New York’s Greatest Nightclub Empire (2011).
[33] Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 146.
[34] Matos, The Underground is Massive, 112
[35] F. Owen, Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 159.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Party Monster: Shockumentary, at 1:49-2:05
[39] H. Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism (Boulder CO: Paradigm, 2004), 57.
[40] Glory Daze, at 54:50.
[41] Ibid., at 53:40.
[42] Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism, 62.
[43] Owen, Clubland, 159.
[44] Ibid.
[45] Glory Daze, at 1:09:00.
[46] Owen, Clubland, 158.
[47] J. Nichols, ‘“Party Monster” Michael Alig Tell All After Being Released From Prison’, Huffington Post, 5 December 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/michael-alig-huff- post-live_n_5311434?guccounter=1 [accessed on 13 June 2019]. The full interview was available on YouTube via, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVI3DicsRgc [accessed on 1 April 2018].
[48] The full interview, at 26:00.
[49] Ibid., at 25:22
[50] J. Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota: Minneapolis, 1999), 5.
[51] Ibid.
[52] S. Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
[53] Glory Daze, at 54:41-54:47.
[54] T. Polhemus, ‘In the Supermarket of Style’ in S. Redhead, D. Wynne, and J. O’Connor (eds.), The Clubcultures Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 148-151; A. Bennett, ‘Club Culture and Neo-Tribes’ in J. Green (ed.), DJ, Dance and Rave Culture: Examining Pop Culture (Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven Press, 2005), 98-104; R. Haenfler, Subcultures: The Basics (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2014).
[55] Glory Daze, at 54:07-54:12.