#fcknlz

Any 2012 gay boy worth his lube (or party girl worth her double-sided-tape) knows his club kid history (HERstory, natch). We've watched Party Monster three hundred times, we've seen the lights glinting off Amanda Lepore's plastic face at parties (I horrifically once saw her in line for the second Sex and the City movie...wearing sweatpants), and we've watched YouTube clips of club kid royalty like James St. James appearing on daytime talk shows in the early nineties. Art collective and performance group FCKNLZ went one step further, recreating those talk show appearances in a live theatre experience, FCKNLZ on Broadway.

The sold out event at the Museum of Arts and Design in Columbus Circle was a celebration of 90s club culture, the resulting furor it caused in mainstream media and it's continuing influence. The FCKNLZ cast appeared as renamed versions of party icons on the fictional Toni Bernice Show and were questioned by the hilariously over-the-top Toni Bernice (played with total commitment by Emily Lowinger). Lucky Go Lucky (Olen Holm), Dean Savory (Alberto Cortes), Mary Poppers (Bryce Henry), Yolanda Demure (Rebecca Mimiaga), and Hard Candy (Molly Kimzey) ruled the stage in fantastically realized club kid looks and fully inhabited their characters, with the dialogue coming verbatim from these oft-watched YouTube clips:

Holm and Mimiaga were especially good as the fictionalized versions of Richie Rich and Amanda Lepore. The entire ensemble, from the perfectly costumed kids to the "production" crew running the show, helped create a show that was not only fun to watch, but had a triumphant and celebratory energy. As the club kids repeatedly stressed, this whole lifestyle is/was about having a good time and turning daily mundanity into a living work of art. With queer culture so often plagued by meanness and snobbery, it was nice to be part of an event that was so refreshingly positive.

This celebration of club kid herstory provoked a lot of thoughts about how 90s club culture and it's entire raison d'etre has influenced how I feel about party culture and my participation in it. The most frequent questions asked of the club kids were about their drug use, a stigma that still haunts the boys and girls of 2012. Parents and teachers and the media wanted to whittle the club scene down to it's most dangerous factor and use that as a reason to disapprove. And yes, the club kids did do drugs and some of them died and some of them were just awful people (I mean, Michael Alig KILLED SOMEONE, he's IN PRISON). But, speaking for myself and probably some of these famous partiers, drugs can be super fun and a way to free yourself so that you can have this pure, transformative and completely wild experience. They make your inhibitions and your doubts fade away so that you can commit fully to having a fucking incredible time.

Just don't fall out of your platforms.