Bring Back Pre-Internet Underground

Art by Jaya Jerome

New York is obsessed with the door, because the door is humiliating. The door is where the city’s most insecure men cosplay as bouncers. In many ways these men get the best of us. We dress up, doing our hair and makeup in hopes that they might deem us worthy of entering Basement’s sacred gates. But with the growth of social media, exclusive clubs and underground scenes have become more accessible than ever. 

Places, previously known as the “the spot” for a specific demographic, circulate through every newcomer’s algorithm as A Guide to Surviving the City. A room full of first-timers who aren’t exactly there out of pure curiosity generally creates unwanted stiffness, where you and fifty other people arrive through the same post and the room emulates that energy. When a night starts circulating publicly, it gets new people faster than it can keep repeat people. Half the room has no stake in coming back. And repeat people–– though sometimes elitist–– matter, because they set the tone and keep the place’s integrity. 

For some communities, overexposure is not only just annoying but it can risk livelihoods. For queer and trans nightlife spaces, the communities that ballroom served were dealing with surveillance and poverty, so they couldn’t afford the potential discrimination and violence that occur in overexposure. Performers have had their legal names posted online after getting clipped from a set and people who thought they were in a semi-private space have found their images circulating without consent. Venues have been targeted by coordinated harassment. They have a structure that moves the scene socially through word of mouth. Once this is stripped away and publicised, the actual community has to work harder to protect itself, often with fewer tools because of all the attention.

But social media makes this risk seem worth it, gossip is unsexy. A community’s attempt to sustain its culture is repackaged as gatekeeping making it inherently toxic. No one cares that the risk of virality becomes more surveillance, more enforcement, more pressure from neighbors and landlords, fewer risks taken artistically, and eventually a room that has lost its purpose. 

Due to this, the door becomes both pivotal and detrimental to the preservation of a social scene because not all publicity is good publicity. Soft-gatekeeping and gossip is almost a safety net for marginalized communities in already gentrifying neighborhoods. But truthfully, in New York City it is a very thin line between preservation and ostracization. We constantly see clips on social media, women of color, plus sized women, and trans women talking about their experience of being rejected or treated poorly at the club. Promoters talk about protecting a club’s “image” and the debate around who gets let into the section and who doesn’t continues. A lot of “scene” behavior is ridiculous. A lot of it is status. New York has never met a hierarchy it couldn’t aestheticize. But it’s also true that certain spaces like, queer, punk, cultural, and racial communities don't have the luxury of treating attention as harmless. The wrong kind of attention ruins these spaces built for refuge to some, into a vulnerable space for coordinated harassment, doxxing, increased police presence, and predatory attendees, to name a few.

Nataya Subowo

Art by Jaya Jerome