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No one phones it in for Black Party.
Arguably, the biggest party on the
circuit calendar, Black Party demands
preparation and training. In the weeks
before Black Party, health clubs and
leather stores are second homes - and
Roseland becomes a little city of
production and tech people, costume and
props departments, all working together
to mount a theatrical extravaganza that
lasts more than eighteen hours, while
hosting more than four thousand leather
queens, porn stars, drag queens, bears,
seals, deejays, twinks, and fetishists
from all around the world - all dancing
together in the name of dick.
The party that dick built. And Bruce
Mailman, of course, the creator of the
original Saint. And now beautifully
orchestrated by Steve Pevner and Mike
Peyton, with a cast of creative
wunderkinds who fine-tune this party
over the course of a calendar year in
order for its birth during the weekend
of the vernal equinox.
This year's edition of Black Party
occurred during what the media called
the "super moon," the largest full moon
in over twenty years and more than
30,000 miles closer to Earth than in
other years. Maybe it was the super
moon's impact, but everyone connected
with Black Party 2011 raised the bar on
this beloved bacchanal to create a
mind-blowing, pelvic-grinding, ecstatic
event that was fueled by music, sex,
desire, and appetite.
The 2011 Black Party invitation was a
stylized rendering of the letters BP,
which evoked a molecular structure, and
which was accompanied by a photo of a
quadruped man, with arms instead of
feet: in other words, a mutant cloned in
his own image. The accompanying Black
Party Expo Zine, a beautifully realized,
52-page collectible entitled FUCK YOUR
SELF, further examined the idea of
cloned selves and narcissistic lust
through the provocative and sensual work
of eleven New York artists.
Inspired by a four-day-and-night, sexual
free-for-all, New Year's party at
Berghain in Berlin, production designer
Adam Koch ran with the concept of
dancing on the edge of apocalypse and
transformed Roseland's enormous
dimensions into a power plant fallen
into desuetude. Neon tubing framed the
massive dance hall, with black and white
directional scrims, and plastic sheeting
billowed by steam and smoke. A surfeit
of multi-colored lasers fanned the room
like intergalactic searchlights - and
the overall effect was an amalgam of the
worlds depicted in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis and Ridley Scott's Blade
Runner coalescing to form a New Weimar
Republic in the middle of New York.
8OR15 from Berlin was this year's opener
- and by two am, the line to get into
Roseland ran all the way down 52nd
Street. Once inside, one was greeted by
a packed house of some of the world's
more pulchritudinous specimens, redolent
of leather and sweat, working their junk
and shaking their booty while outfitted
in every leather, latex, and rubber
accoutrement imaginable.
At the risk of stating the extremely
obvious, this Black Party was truly a
sexual celebration. Boys at the lip of
the stage knelt for those in front of
them - and on the risers and boxes,
dicks waved and rose like a night forest
of mushrooms. Porn stars roamed the
stage, while a corps of hardcore
aerialists soared above the crowd in a
series of overhead (and over the top)
tableaux that, over the course of forty
minutes, depicted the insemination,
consummation, conception, and rebirth
(including the breaking of water, which
rained over the crowd) of one's very own
clone. You had to be there to grasp the
surreal concept - but when climax was
achieved and the aerialists were
released, post-orgasm, the thunderous
cheers around the club made it clear
that the point was made. Love your self;
fuck your self - what could be more
basic?
For those of us who've been around for a
while, on this planet, and at numerous
Black Parties, this, then was the world
to which we gave birth: a world where
the exceptional is now the norm, where
transsexuals are free to be, where
extremism is celebrated and raised on
high: in short, a world where you can
fuck yourself - and be born again.
And when Manny Lehman took over the
booth, the renaissance metaphor was
completely apt. This was the Manny who
grew up at the Paradise Garage, where
every Friday and Saturday night was a
full-on, complete symphony of sound.
This was the Manny who worked at Vinyl
Mania where the Garage boyz headed to
grab the tracks that Larry Levan had
played the night before. This was Manny,
the connoisseur of rhythm and beats, who
was relentless and hard as he threw down
a masterful big room set of tracks,
including "The Only Girl (In the
World)," "Born This Way," "I Will
Survive," "Release Me," and "Pushin to
the Top." Multi-layered, seamless, and
rhythmically complex, this was a peak
hour set that pushed the energy ever
higher, keeping the sexually-charged
crowd on that blissful precipice
preceding orgasmic release.
Perhaps the most emblematic line of the
night came from a studly specimen who
saw our cameras aimed in his direction
and said, "You want to take my photo?
Okay, but I gotta take off my harness -
because my mom sees all my pictures."
That's the kind of crowd it was: a
roomful of well-loved boys, the light in
their mothers' eyes, all raised with the
confidence in their right to be here,
wearing and doing whatever their hearts
desired.
And everyone was there, from the
well-known and the well-hung, to the
well-connected, and the well-loved, and
yes, also, the well-worn - but this was,
for the most part, also a very
well-behaved crowd, who knew enough to
be respectful of each other and the
party. It ain't easy keeping this party
in New York, at Roseland, and no one
wants to be the fool who killed Black
Party.
For this is the one party that pulls
them all in, from every demographic,
every walk of life, every age group,
every profession - and you'd have to be
completely jaded not to marvel at the
breadth of our community and its
manifestations. And then marvel again to
realize that we were all united for one
night in honor of Priapus. The party
that dick built. There it was again.
Everywhere you looked. So many fine...
boys. And men. And women. And more.
And let's pause here and give a
shout-out to the incredible sound
engineers who insured that the music at
Black Party was as crisp as a new
Benjamin and clear as cut crystal - and
to lighting operator Darren Kawa who
worked the lights into a
highly-choreographed, hallucinogenic
frenzy.
It was nearly seven am when Danny Tenaglia took over the booth with a
hypnotic choral march into the galaxy of
after-hours. His beat was as deep as it
was ethereal, and immediately resonant
with the packed house, which, if
anything, was even thicker on the floor.
For years, Tenaglia has been as
masterful as the Pied Piper in leading
his crowd and lifting them higher with
carefully-constructed sets that are as
inventive as they are reflective of
Tenaglia's vast knowledge of dance
music. Apart from Main Event at Black
and Blue in Montreal, Tenaglia has
played no other circuit event - and yet
he read this Black Party
crowd perfectly, hitting their g-spots
over and over, and leaving them grinning
and sweaty as they worked it out hard
until late Sunday afternoon.
Now thirty-two years old, this year's
Black Party fucked itself - and came out
smiling, bigger and better, and ready
for more.
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