The first time I took MDMA, I ended the night embracing my best friend on a dance floor, crying about my uncertain future. I have never been much of a public crier—unless the altitude of a plane and two vodka ginger ales conspire against me to make me cry at almost anything I watch. Usually, my emotions are tightly sealed in my body’s factory packaging. But that night, at Chris Cruse’s Spotlight party in Los Angeles, I was in unfamiliar territory: my first time taking ecstasy and my first time on a dance floor pounding with techno music.
The dance floor of a club feels like home to me, as if I were Dorothy Gale (the Wiz iteration), but this wasn’t always the case. To be at home on a dance floor, first you must be acutely in tune with your own body. This is not a skill I have always possessed. I had a growth spurt when I was young, around the same time I gained enough weight to be a chubby middle schooler. This was just before I was sent to a predominantly white, all-boys Jesuit high school in Milwaukee. Surrounded by white bodies smaller than my own, I learned quickly how to maneuver myself through the halls, between classroom desks, and on school buses to take up as little space as possible. To avoid being noticed. I retreated into books, wrote Buffy fanfic online, and developed my skills as a writer, but one thing I didn’t do was dance at school functions. Not ever in public. Over time, I developed social skills by connecting with people through the pop culture I consumed. I wasn’t adept at sharing personal things about myself, but I could talk about syndicated episodes of Martin and Seinfeld or every song on MTV’s TRL countdown.
I always felt a panic when plumbing emotional depths. I felt like a country singer who couldn’t cry. How much could you go through the motions of singing about whiskey, trucks, and dirt before the audience needed to know how much you hate your no-good cheating man and want to shoot him with daddy’s pistol?
Which is why the first time I lost myself in a tab I’d popped onto my tongue at a rave and finally opened up to my best friend about emotional topics that we’d never broached, I felt terrified. I was stunned, embarrassed that I may have overshared. Instead, I woke up to a text from him about how he felt closer to me than he ever had. He’d enjoyed my friendship before, but he hadn’t really known me before—not as much as two men who profess to be best friends really ought to.
Through him, I became comfortable with dance floors. I gained an affinity for techno music. In a perfect world, my friend and I would have moved to New York together and I’d have continued my delayed evolution with my dance-floor guide by my side. Unfortunately, Covid shuttered most clubs, keeping us inside, relegated to house parties and far too much time alone in our apartment together. Our relationship turned to codependency and an inability for me to interact socially without my rave Yoda. Whether the romantic feelings that later developed on my part were real or just Stockholm-induced was unclear, but our relationship ended.
We both ended up in New York when everything reopened, though my comfort with dance floors had been replaced by a fear of running into my former friend. I didn’t have an identity on a dance floor without him, hadn’t developed a comfort within my own body. I still danced with my shirt on, even though it was drenched in sweat and stuck to my skin, for fear of showing off every bit of my body’s imperfections while attempting to move.
But I discovered a difference in New York. As a television writer in Los Angeles, I hated talking to people at parties. Either it felt like networking or you spent an endless amount of time discussing actresses and what they had been nominated for and what awards they should have won. But after I’d had a taste of a world where people could dance all night, getting out of their heads instead of standing in a corner talking the entire time, I wanted more. And I found more in New York.
I found denizens of nightlife who embraced me immediately because of our shared hometown of Milwaukee. One was a trans nightlife producer and writer, Linux, and another was a tall, gender-expressive nightlife host who went by the name of Miss Pickles and often wore red-carpet-ready dresses to the club. In Los Angeles, most of the creatives I interacted with were other TV writers who consumed only movies and television. In New York, I found people who spent their evenings in clubs and mornings at after-parties and wanted to discuss Adrienne Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Haruki Murakami (for some reason, multiple queer people in New York are reading Murakami’s 1987 novel Norwegian Wood right now) in addition to Real Housewives. I found queer writers working on their Substacks, novels, and essay collections. I even found editors, like my friend Jackson, who could carry in the club and still find time to handle all the books on his roster. Queer culture has moved into the mainstream, from RuPaul’s Drag Race to the popularization of house music via the success of Beyoncé’s Renaissance. Grammy-winning albums like Charli XCX’s Brat have further popularized rave culture. Now we have FKA twigs proselytizing about the underground rave scene in Prague to promote her album Eusexua (but if the music on that album is an indication, the clubs in Prague must sound a lot like Madonna’s record Ray of Light). Amidst the chaos of our current political climate of heightened LGBTQ+ discrimination, maybe mainstream rave culture is simply following our lead. Queer communities have always embraced dancing and celebrating in adversity.
I gained new friends and dance-floor compatriots by discussing my own writing, but I was creatively stalled. I had all the pop-culture knowledge you could ask for, but I hadn’t figured out how to write about something vulnerable.
Until one night, when I saw Miss Pickles rip off his top at Basement during Justin Cudmore’s Balance party, fat titties shaking behind the DJ booth. And people didn’t recoil. They reveled in Miss Pickles’s pride in his body—pride that he was that bitch and, hell, it was too fucking hot in the club to dance in a sequined top. And on top of that, MDMA warms up your body. If I didn’t want to die of heat exhaustion, I’d have to do the same. I lifted my own vintage Janet Jackson tour shirt over my head, exposing my body on the dance floor. And the record didn’t scratch. The party didn’t stop. I wasn’t kicked out for not possessing a body that looked like the sea of muscled gay men surrounding me. It would be so much easier to disassociate from the world rather than make the conscious decision to live in your body, embrace every part of it and connect with your friends and strangers. But the best part about dancing: It’s fun as hell.
