Raveforum Communique: Blue New York

Let’s talk shit on Dimes Square for a second. It was a vitriolic micro-scene in the Lower East Side, just under a decade-old, that made rabid, cat-nip headlines in the mainstream American media and, oddly specifically, the Berlin art press. As far as I know, it was the only underground literary movement in New York over the last century that was associated with the new right, not the left. This wasn’t The Poetry Project.

The scene, not unlike how our rave scene works, thrives on consistent energy, which generates soft power throughout institutions, social clubs, publications, and bars catered to a hyper-specific clientele of MAGA supporters who didn't need to feel embarrassed hanging with straight, white Bernie supporters with an ax to grind with identity politics and the Dems. Sovereign House, a chic social club in Lower Manhattan, is run by Nick Allen—co-founder of a fintech company—who socializes regularly with high-level Trump Administration officials along with artists and playwrights. Several Sovereign House attendees went on to work for the Trump Administration, after his reelection. The name Sovereign is, among other things, a nod to new, American-led city states that are, in 2025, legally colonizing indigenous and poverty-line land from Honduras and Malaysia, rebuilding companies and vacation homes and resorts, and rewriting their own constitution that replaces a president with a CEO, effectively “sovereign” of Honduran laws. The space hosted magazine-issue launches, film screenings, debates, and plays, as well as parties, where it became a zone where gigglingly dropping “nigger” and “gay” (as a slur) and “retard,” framed as anti-woke resistance, in conversation felt as glamorous as smoking indoors. Prominent Black artists like Aria Dean and queer writers like Steven Phillips-Horst frequented the scene, but they didn’t seem to have much sway against this new social norm, I’m sure they gave it their best shot.

Before Dimes Square—with the rise of venues like Beckett’s or the bar Clandestino—the right did not have social spaces in New York where politicians, artists, and intellectuals socialized regularly, gaining momentum. The scene had cultural touchstones, like the Substacks by Angelicism01—a mysterious writer in the UK who was secretly funded by unlimited wealth, despite his working class upbringing and no job that anyone knew of—which published incoherent, edgelord-style prose poetry that praised the Holocaust and casually name-dropped influential people in the scene, who addictively read these newsletters for the ping of dopamine in seeing their names get mentioned—and once the influential people in a scene all get talking about something, everyone else wants to be in on it. The frequent references to philosophers and critical theorists gave this whitewashed idea that far-right extremism was justified—and could be taken seriously by Ivy League intellectuals—through critical philosophy. A resurgence of Catholicism emerged: nodding to a return to an elitist, undemocratic, monarchic, and feudal government that predated universal human rights and liberalism.

They had literary magazines. Forever, a literary journal ostensibly aligned with the left, peppered the issues with Hitler jokes. A literary magazine named The Mars Review was funded by Curtis Yarvin—the intellectual of the Dark Enlightenment, an anti-democratic movement seeking a return to autocracy, and who is a close associate and influencer of J.D. Vance. It is edited by Noah Kumin, who has perfected his practice of performing Ivy League cultural criticality that associates fascist ideas with the sheen that it isn’t just the “basket of deplorables” who go for these things, but elite white intellectuals who wear Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers.

This city-wide, systemic effort at cultural manufacturing, normalizing extremism, and clout-as-propaganda telegraphed the Bernie-to-Trump playbook to the New York Times and New York Magazine and The New Yorker, who reported on it incessantly, making it clear that fascism has officially been rebranded. It’s aspirational, edgy, underground, fashionable, intellectual, transgressive, funny, and entertaining. Who wouldn’t want to vote for Trump if these are the people you say you hang out with? At least cop the MAGA hat.

America is in a crisis of community. Unions are being aggressively gutted and oppressed at all costs. Academia has cannibalized and professionalized with cut-throat competition. Leftist faith communities are near nonexistent. Do you know a single friend who regularly goes to Community Board meetings? Two years ago, the U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy issued a 71-page report declaring the emergence of an American “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” A vast majority of Americans are truly desperate for community—this is a primordial human need—and when their only access to regular community outside of the fucking office is social media, they expose themselves to predatory algorithms that spread sensational, extremist political content for the lolz. Yet in our post-truth condition where rational debate is impossible because the premise of shared reality has been systematically ruptured by the state, people no longer make political commitments based on policy proposals, but to signal tribal belonging to a community, in an atomized world where the very real desperation for community, or even just the feeling of parasocial belonging, is now the dominant agent of political change. This is why local, IRL communities are more important than ever. Adopting political commitments has become like wearing Cayce Pollard bomber jackets, or putting safety-pins on your combat boots. We live in Christopher Wylie’s world: Politics is like fashion. It's all about clout in the end.

A friend recently phrased Dimes Square and the ravers like the Jets versus the Sharks, the warring families of The West Side Story. We may not have the secret investment funding that Dimes Square has, but we have our own institutions that are deploying similar strategies to promote leftist culture. Studio places like Light & Sound Design have become a community center with a very robust calendar of weekday programming—dance meditation workshops, parties with free vegan meals, panel discussions, Writing on Raving, music showcases devoted to culture from, say, the Global South. Capacity is around 70, so no one ever feels anonymous. Mutual aid for Palestine and ICE incarceration is foregrounded at every event. Tickets are tiered at multiple cost levels, never denying anyone from a lack of funds. They have a loose membership system, and organize their events with frequent meals to promote casual socializing. Important to the model is that communications, invites, and ticket sales happen through email only, taking control of invites and communications in-house, and away from predatory or clout-driven algorithmic platforms. Members also host bi-weekly dinners, publicly open and spread word-of-mouth, by LSD regulars, though it doesn’t happen at the space. It's like the grown-up evolution of the golden era of DIY: grassroots, semi-secret.

On the other side of Brooklyn, the Queer Nightlife Community Center has recently opened. It's bold, aspirational, intertwined with the government through the office of nightlife, and aims to institutionalize the last fifteen years of Brooklyn raving. Materially supporting nightlife workers is the core of its existence. They host experimental performances, dance parties, lectures, artist talks, screenings, or other arts and queer history exhibitions. They also host (not as official programming on their Instagram) workshop sessions, advertised to working class Brownsville locals, that equip them with practical tools and professional training. They plan to provide well-paid employment opportunities, apprenticeships, consultancies, and residencies to expand and sustain an ecosystem of nightlife workers. These in-person events not only place training and culture at its core, but it gets people in the physical room, sharing ideas outside of the predatory algorithms that prioritize outrageous or meme-funny content.

The visionary predecessor for this model happened at Nowadays, which set the blueprint of weekday, overtly political programming for ravers. Founded by Zoë Beery in 2019, the weeknight series was meant to build community off of the dance floor through learning together. The nights consisted of panels, workshops, screenings, and readings that covered creative skills (throwing DIY parties, DJing/producing, crit sessions) and community organizing (tenants’ rights, or disability justice). In 2023, the club ultimately no longer considered this a priority and shelved the program, but its spirit lived on and successfully inspired other institutions to copy the model.

Then there are the raves. Today, queer-centered parties—Merge, Zero Chill, Nocturnal Emissions, FAW—are the gravitational center of big-box warehouse parties. These came out of an Obama-era culture of identity politics, that was legitimately critiqued as using notions of tokenism to advance a culture where neoliberal politics remained unchanged, while telegraphing an illusion of progress with images of multicultural representation. At worst, this created a culture that aligned narcissism and careerist self-promotion with social justice. The fault of the idpol movement was its fundamental misunderstanding of identity as expression and representation, which synced with hyper-individualized entrepreneurial ways of being. Yes, we're all sick of this. But why are queer people getting scapegoated, from the left and the right? Ostensibly liberal mainstream publications are systematically thrown the entire trans movement under the bus for handing Trump the election, such as the New York Times’s deplorable 11,000-word mud-sling on the fight for trans rights.

This critique is misguided. New York's centering of queer nightlife has suggested that queer people have already resolved the problem of neoliberal narcissism in identity politics. After all, it was the revolution of queer theory in the last two decades that posited identity as a mode of relation—this meant identity wasn’t about who you were as an individual, but how you related to others. This is how queer ways of being can be shared with people who might not identify as queer, and don't need to. Wasn't it Jack Halberstam who said queerness isn't defined by sex acts, but by the way we do time? New York, who explicitly took their cues from Berlin in the mid-2010s, had learned how to create a culture where queer people were given free space to glamorize themselves to eleven. Okay, maybe spending hours on a look you only wear for a single rave might have a purpose. It’s important to know what clout is for. The left is in a vibe crisis, and it's time to weaponize our clout to end the normalized scapegoating of the trans community, and promote leftist ways of being that are consistently at the core of our institutions.

Sometimes, at the closing hours of raves, I look around and think, These are the leaders of the opposition. I’m not just talking about organizers. Painters, newsletter writers, models, poets, circuit gays, asexual dance icons, porn stars, rabbinical scholars, fashion designers, sex workers, and public intellectuals, and everyone's really hot. It’s not a bad crew to hang out with on a weekly basis. But let’s get to the point: We are losing the fight right now, even though we have the tools and the brains and the strategies to win. The problem is our scene is divided by factions. Yeah, the Partok thing was complicated, but the party did remove him from the lineup, and it’s of utmost political necessity to not continue punishing institutions who have effectively satisfied a list of demands (so as not to normalize a culture where people feel that satisfying demands is pointless, why even bother).

In order to defeat the MAGA movement, which we already see cracking, we have to simultaneously play three roles at once—a human, a citizen, and an activist—and we have to know when and how to code-switch between the three, on a dime. As humans, we love foolishly, challenge ideas, let ourselves be changed by call-outs, measure intentions against actions, forgive when we probably shouldn’t, console in grief, and accept conflicts that might never be solved to save the friendship. As citizens, we hold true to the inalienable rationale that every person and every voice is equally valuable, even the normies at Nowadays. As activists, we are only interested in power by numbers, because politics is a numbers game, and we need big tent solidarity. A mistake I have noticed is to use the tactics of humanism for activist means. When we build coalitions, we can’t afford to make purity tests, police what we think should be the real motives behind performative politics, stigmatize people for advocating just because it’s cool, to embarrass weak allies, or alienating interpersonally toxic individuals even if they have the same political commitments and practices as we do. Let’s continue to be humans to the people we love. And then, when we need to, let's switch into the political operatives we need to be to mobilize our world into a supermajority.

There are forces actively trying to divide us. Talk to any of us who have been, over the last decade, tirelessly organizing mutual aid or actions around Black Lives Matter, ICE kidnappings, and Palestinian liberation, who need to assume—the drones obviously came from somewhere—that our communication is tapped, and the scene is infiltrated. It would be quaint to assume this isn’t happening in our scene at the cultural level, too—exacerbating division, normalizing detachment—but let’s try to stick with matters that can be observed.

We have weapons at our disposal, cultural and political. Dimes Square has the writers and—powerfully—the media class. Our scene has the art world and the poets. They have Dasha. We have Hari. Our scenes might have access to different levers of power, but can we get serious about identifying them and how to use them? Is it time to reconsider our taboo around writing about the underground? The common wisdom is that it will blow up the scene to normies, or draw attention to events happening in legal gray areas. But the metastasized media coverage of Dimes Square didn’t water it down, but only amplified its extremism, rebranded fascism, and catapulted participants directly to the Trump Administration.

As a north star, let’s take our cue from the culture at the beating heart of our scene: music. Often, techno isn't about the individual sounds. The synth is really not the point. The artistry is in the system of many instruments playing together, the harmony and constant interplay or relationality within sounds working together. The identity of a sound is always in flux, renegotiating itself over time, redefined across rhythmic contexts. When it’s really working, it’s a bliss like nothing else—in fact, we have devoted our whole lives around experiencing this on a regular basis. Techno can show you how to want to live.