Dancing in the breeze, I abruptly become faceless.
It’s Sunday afternoon, and the bass thumps, and I am on the wooden decking in Oxi’s garden surrounded by queer people in little groups and by decorations, hanging red and blue and orange and green paper strip decorations. And now, weirdly I have no face.
Just like a jellyfish has no face, just like an oak tree has no face, I’ve become just a body in motion. When I close my eyes, I am the amorphous dark, the depth of which is suggested by a sole red dot of light shining somewhere far off.
Because on the dancefloor, there’s only what I am feeling and what, through the music, I experience. Here, my particular being is determined otherwise than in a crudely human way—determined, in particular, by that dimension the music cleaves open.
Then, within seconds, it’s gone.
I’m back to being this person again, the person who will go home and write this, the person with a face and identity, being seen by people, the person wearing a green belly top and a red waistcoat and bracelets and necklaces and wristbands and red sunglasses, with a heart full of dread and veins full of doubt.
Outside the covered wooden-decking dancefloor—which truly is a magic square—summer rain starts hissing down in the humid Oxi garden. I see S—, who is wearing an ‘I ❤️Fingers’ t-shirt, and I see B—, who passes by in red shorts. I see others I recognise whose names I don’t know. Cigarette smoke billows. Lips smear against lips. Hands go down shorts. G-strings and basketball tops and eyeshadow and torn t-shirts abound.
Instead of writing an overview of Buttons and of Lecken, the two promoters who were having this double eighth birthday party, I’ll quote from their event blurb:
For 8 years, our hard-boiled parties have socialized the burdens of life and proselytized the rave sublime. Suckling the teet of Homopatik’s gayravesexcomplex, we were born under the same moon (June 2016) and shared kindred mandates. Buttons called on all freaks_social bottoms_bisexual sluts_Marxists_homos_poz_Lacanians_Italians, while Lecken rallied hivesex_nomadic fetishisms_decolonized masculinity_feminist whores_desire without a subject_comfortable alienation.
New girl on the block, Lecken, made waves right from the start by opening up FKN3000’s darkroom for the ultimate coalition of the 99%-—dykes, trannies and fags. Inspired by Virginie Despentes’ King Kong Theory for femme rulers of the night, they innovated awareness work as self-organized party care, by ravers for ravers, without drug demonology or punitive feminism.
Both our raves set up playgrounds for egalitarian protagonism, ateliers for permanent education, rooted in Berlin junkie family life, broke but with elevated cultural tastes. Over the years, we gathered a rich legacy of shared controversies: we perfected the art of cruising and stranger sexuality; explored consent for better sex, not just safer sex; wrote about the psychoanalysis of junkiness; said queer as in Free Palestine (bye aboutblank); survived cancel culture and outlived identity reductionism; worked trauma-informed but never as a justification for violence; understood queer as a universal horizon, not personal property; and remained committed to principles before personalities.
And here goes our ball once more. […]
Indrani and I had walked up from Ostkreuz. ‘Remember the last time we came here together, it must have been a year ago, to Cocktail d’Amore,’ I said to her. It feels like a lot has changed for me since then. Later, I would realise that I used to come here when I worked freelance and stay out till late at night, whereas now that was impossible; I could only come in the day, which was not at all the same.
Ahead of us walked a person, bald, in a scarlet cocktail dress and hat on their bald head, clearly going to the same party.
At the door, a trans woman, brown, asked us if we had been at Buttons or Lecken before. Indrani stood as the first person and I the second. ‘Yes,’ I replied. There was no queue. After we put the yellow stickers on our phones, I walked on in and showed the security man the contents of my TOLKA bad (‘formally promiscuous’ the bag says, which would mean something else today; its meanings would promiscuously proliferate).
The cashier charged us €15 each, which was decent given how other clubs never reduce their price later in the party. There was a sliding scale depending on what you earn, and a donations box for aid to Gaza. The cashier was Australian and tall with eyes madly dilated and she was chewing gum as she welcomed us with a stamp.
There appeared on our wrists a vagina with an eye inside it. ‘Body horror,’ Indrani said, perturbed. It reminded me of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which is a favourite.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ Indrani said when we were inside. She had her hair stacked up in a 1960s style. ‘Sure, I will go to the bar and meet you inside.’ Later, she would mention how horribly filthy the toilets were, where everyone was ignoring the ‘one person at a time’ signs on half of the cubicles.
I liked having a few moments to myself at first as I walked into the garden, past the corridor that led down to a darkroom. It was, of course, a very queer crowd. Lots of naked men and topless women, lots of trans women and men, people whose gender was nonbinary, butch lesbians and femme lesbians, gay clones and twinks, black and brown and yellow and white, chubby and skinny—everyone, basically. Indrani later pointed out how much freedom there was.
‘I love how expressive people are in how they dress,’ I said. That aspect was joyous, the most joyous thing about the party. People owning their own narrative (auto-nomous, self-naming). Indrani replied that it reminded her of the bar in Star Wars. It made sense: people looked like aliens from all over the galaxy, assembled here for the common joy of intoxication and music and dance.
I was dressed in red and green and black.
We missed most of the DJs (Sally C, Objekt, etc.). The set we caught was Dirty Daddy Don b2b Jacob Meehan, and it gravitated around tech house, foregoing (it seemed to me) the more adventurous synthetic fusion stuff you hear at Cocktail, and foregoing old Hi NRG and disco and Italo. So, often it foregrounded a driving repetitive groove and bassline. But there were some outliers: ‘Professional Widow’ by Tori Amos got everyone going.
A couple of hours in, I sat in the rain on the decking, relieved at its cooling down of my body. Beside me, exhibitionistic, a woman who looked like Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element, pumped her ass, then bent over in front of me, showing everyone her red knickers. ‘Eat Me’ was on the black t-shirt of her friend, a butch dyke with angular cheekbones in baggy denim jeans and thick black boots. After a while, a tall trans woman hopped up onto the podium and, again exhibitionistic, spun round and fanned herself with her nipples protruding through her dress. I was wearing my red sunglasses by this stage, relieved at not having to worry about eye contact or seeing or being seen.
I would later tell Indrani that these three or four hours were therapeutic. And they were. Earlier, thinking about something going on in my life at the moment, I felt as though my body had been injected with a poison. At home, I was having a violent reaction to this foreign body entering inside me. It felt confusing not to know why it was happening and torturous to expel it. For the moment, I was returned to myself—my real self. We are our narrative.
I interviewed S. Ruston recently for my book, who were a Lecken resident before they moved back to London, and who often go faceless. If it’s alright with them, I’ll publish some of our interview here when I get time. One thing Ruston and I talked about were Lecken’s manifestos, which I’ve always liked, and one of which from a few years back I sign off with:
a spectre of queers haunts the urban grid at night
outlines of a future-dance etched onto their bodies,
the twinkle of arrogance in their third eye
a constant reminder that this world is not enough.
we have never been queer…, wrote j.e.munoz
ℚ is for risk and the restless
ℚ is for the punk casual
ℚ is for daughters who are daddies (is for COP ENVY because you wanna take the bastards out)
ℚ is for doing so the done never gets done.
so
let’s divest of easy utopianism
let’s abolish the fantasy that
the future is made of progress and this togetherness transcends the algorithm.
for one night only
dance with me a rave of rage for this age of austerity
where false gods decree the meaning of scarcity
and you can wear your failed hopes-and-dreams outfit
to the ball of catastrophe
for one night only
Dirty Daddy Don b2b Jacob Meehan, a few tracks
YSE, Bounce Back
Steve Murphy, Eyes Behind the Door
Taras van de Voorde, 1998 (Deetron Remix)
Willie Burns, Key Horizon
Tetelepta, Flash
Diva DJs Vs Nicki French, Total Eclipse of the Heart Spit & Polish Club Mix
Alinka, Freedom Dance
Dan Curtin, Got Me Somethin (Long Version)