| Event | Dripping 2025 |
| Date | June 12 – 15, 2025 |
| Location | Camp Sacajawea, Sparta, NJ |
| Attended | 5pm Thursday – 1pm Sunday |
Dyke Sex
I used to write off this festival because I didn’t like the puppet show. I tend to find the theme of “healing the inner child” incredibly corny in art. I had associated Dripping with the music of Slink or Groovy Groovy, which was not in my taste. Cuteness can be manipulative, it begs for attention. It is also a part of commodity culture under capitalism, à la Sianne Ngai. Having spent months screaming at the NYPD, I was not in a mood for cute. The rounded interpretation of techno, the transformation of a thudding punch to a bloopy side-hug was suspicious to me. But a hot futch violinist I went on a date with told me their friend was playing the bassoon, a discount ticket link circulated, and ba-bam, I was buying some tarp at REI.
I was doubtful about the weekend. R said she might find a car leaving if the rain didn’t stop. Everybody was talking about the rain and about tick season. Nonbinary camp dad told us how a small creature called the American Dog tick can potentially kill you. My mind was preoccupied with a politically sensitive fling. The moon was pink like a sore. Someone saw a bear. The opening acts, Laraaji and some white man with an electric Gong were too eager to calm as my phone buzzed with the preludes of World War III.
Look, I sometimes disagree with the ravers who justify their anxious hedonism by describing the rave as “generative” or “synecdochic” or “queer possibility” or whatever, (thinking about David Guetta’s “I have a dream” samples). There was a Palestine flag hoisted on a towering pole and keffiyehs everywhere but what the fuck does that do?
Friday afternoon, I had run into M on the way out of Amapiano by German DJ Mark Ernestus. We talked about how majority culture takes and takes and how queer representation turned out to be pointless. We talked about the war and fascism. They said they were ready to go live in the woods. We talked about invisibility as survival and bloc attire at protests. The betrayal of showing queer bodies to the world. Being topless on the lake. The extraction of Black and Brown music. The bittersweetness of non-belonging on stolen land. We talked about how a friend snatched a police baton earlier that week.
So I was grumpy on Friday night. There were too many people there, I didn’t like small-talking acquaintances. One particularly social-climby acquaintance was giving extra climb energy and my eyes were shamefully darting alongside theirs each time I was with them. I missed Charmaine Lee, apparently the highlight of the night. I shared a smoke with E, who described Lee’s throaty noise set as stretching the human-technology divide into shamanic realms. I was aching for an exorcism. The good music was at the smaller dancefloor, The Barn, which was teeming and packed to the brim, while “stupid” classic techno was on at The Inn, the bigger dancefloor, a dull dance. I couldn’t get into it and the night was a blur, no set particularly memorable. The fog machine was inadequate at the Inn and choking at the Barn. A bald man with a wide rat-tail-mullet-thing kept creepily following me around. I snorted a line of mystery drugs, and it didn’t do much until the morning when the trees were four-dimensional. Arushi Jain made up for my grumpiness. Ragas interwoven with pulsating waves of gently caressed modular synth. Ethereal. The cloudy sun and dewy chirps seemed to tell me it was fine to relax a little.
Anyways, every time someone comes out as a dyke they usually tend to get dismissed as “experimenting.” I think this is why experimental music is lesbian. This might be about the margins, like how lack breeds innovation. It is also lesbian like how lesbian sex is a postmodern novel with sub-plots of foreplay and reverberating orgasms. It might also be related to how women loving women are circumspect. Male masculinity demands, female masculinity makes it happen. Femmes don’t always ask people out, they linger. But more seriously, experimental music is like the practice of disidentification – a strategy of working on, with, and against majority culture by queers of color, according to José Esteban Muñoz.
The early evening of Saturday night was like this. Joy Guidry trio was just catholic (adjective), with the bassoonist, electronic violinist, and drummer guiding each other in communication with QTBIPOC angels. Chuquimamani-Condori made those angels weep in Andean, harrowing, cyber-folk twang. Young Boy Dancing Group pinched souls like a long acrylic nail in the trenches of wet, nasty yearning. Cel Genesis felt like the satisfaction of fisting. Ariel Zetina skillfully made scary sounds joyful like a kinky vampire romance. Currency Audio pushed the beat as if Whiplash was about drum and bass. Rain condensed, I kept washing out my eyes. I felt like a stye was about to form. None of the acts were hopeful but all of them felt consolatory, like a complicated lover that makes you smile. Striding the boundary of machine, human, noise, and melody – the performances were negotiating with the sublime and grotesque. It felt anguished. A friend once told me queerness is infinite because there are no rules adhering to a dominant script. The carving out of marginal space were forlorn in that way. Unguided, mysterious, forest-like.
The spectrum of dykes at the festival: bisexuals in interracial hetero relationships; the transsexual leather folk; Anna Freud reincarnate with a meme page; chest-tape they/thems; heteronormative lesbians who just love camping; popular kids of the party Gush; cerebral non-binaries shy with dysmorphia; art lezzies; T4T sapphics; Shyboi and Lord Anna; protest dykes taking a breather; trans-mascs and trans-femmes on lights; straight girls and gay boys wearing shag haircuts and jorts; lots of carabiners; short kings talking loud; futch-punk transsexuals with soft voices; sensual femmes with hips that don’t lie; towering butch faggots in love with a fast beat; et cetera. The cacophony of dykery signified the multiple ways that queers push the boundaries of identity and classification. Dancers can really make the rave.
The pinnacle of the night was the lesbian and t-girl maelstrom at the Barn from Shyboi to Nino Brown B2B Young Teesh. It felt supernatural. If there ever was raving realer than this moment, it was only in books I read. I felt possessed, like the tick season gave me tarantism. The cure was dancing tarantella. It was uninhibited. Situational but also eternal, fun as fuck, and apocalyptic in the way I thought I lost a part of myself. It was impossible to step away from the Barn. Dubbed “Intelligent Booty Music” by someone on IG stories, the DJs squeezed out sleazy pop-edits that sounded like 2010’s frat boy iPod bops and slapped it on like a piece of baloney on a roll of booty beat – textbook disidentification. Sapphic grind trains emerged and the pussy beat expelled straightness. The dancefloor was Caliban and the Witch as a Rihanna music video. There was no dimension nor a plot and the rave fleeted just as it started. I remember a two-second trepidation -- that we’d get found and persecuted.
Afterwards I felt like I had marathon sex. The participants looked around in joyful disbelief. It felt like a bewitching secret, like we summoned spirits. Disidentification is ultimately about cultural, material, and psychic survival. I sat outside listening to A admire the ways that Ragga NYC transfigured white music. It was an appropriation of assimilation. Gratitude for the Caribbean art collective. Like experimentation, innovation in disidentification happens between survival and the staking of the counter public as we try to figure out ways to live out the Armageddon. With pride and a middle finger drawn.
On Sunday morning I saw M again at Open Air, where CCL played the closing set. Several friends wore keffiyehs and I regretted not bringing mine. I parted with my bitch-ass attitude. A hug for comrades who wear their politics. It felt quite fine to dance in the ambiguity of vapid hedonism and a sincere gathering. We danced too much despite the fatigue. It was raining and I was thirsty. I didn’t want to go home. Somebody handed me a menthol cigarette to coat my parch. It felt like I learned how to make love again in the apocalypse. I mean, Liv Tyler is such a babe.
Since the festival closed with Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, let’s end with Sappho: “And I would rather watch her body // Sway, her glistening face flash dalliance // Than Lydian war cars at the ready // And armed battalions.”