The idea came to Cyan Rivera, a newish bartender at Rash (941 Willoughby Ave), just a few weeks ago, amid what she described as a drunken daydream. It wasn’t long before signs were printed out and plastered over the bar’s windows and street poles in the area, all reading the same simple, economical, phrase, “HOLE CONTEST,” later clarified in parentheses (also in all caps) with, “YES, THAT ONE.” It was approaching midnight on Valentine’s Day.
It was also the most packed that the small techno club had ever been, another bartender told me, at least since it had reopened after a crazed local software developer lit the spot on fire in 2022. Thankfully, the Rash persisted. The line snaked around the block and bouncers were already turning away stragglers, all hoping to witness promised hole. A man told me that he had come there after spending most of the day with his brother; both had suffered from recent break-ups. They were both here now. “I figure being single is the only time I can go watch this,” he told me, flatly, before shrugging and dissolving into the crowded dance-floor. Tickets, going for $25 a pop, had been sold on the dance music site Resident Advisor, before even those were sold out by midday.
Cops could be seen floating around the periphery of the club, but only because the line from the door stretched across dead-end Charles Place road. The signs hadn’t encouraged them to peer inside. A reporter for one of the city’s tabloids, who lived nearby and had come to watch, told me the whole thing felt to them like the logical extension of that fad that started two years ago with the Timothée Chalamet lookalike contests in lower Manhattan.
Some twenty or so people had signed up to compete for this one, but Rivera said the number had dwindled to about five or six by the time the handful of judges she assembled had arrived on stage, which turned out to be a taped-off section of the club’s dancefloor. To indicate the seriousness of the show, and to hint at the reality of the advertised title, at the front door, a bouncer applied pieces of tape onto both sides of everyone’s phones.
Perhaps a hundred people were sandwiched in the small room by the time the first contestant took her stand, a twenty-five year old who went by the moniker Vagina Ventada, and who eventually strutted, largely nude, in front the judges; they awarded her marks for beauty and grip, something involving crouching and lifting a jade egg supplemented with weights. Behind me, the crowd was yelling “Take down the banner,” which read “HOLE CONTEST 2026,” and for some obstructed the reflection of Vagina Ventada in the mirror above her. Following Ventada, a skinny fat man made the executive decision to stand on a stool, which he occupied entirely naked. Despite, or because of his nudity, he reminded me of John Goodman. There were fewer cries to take the banner down. He smiled good-naturedly. Someone screamed, “We love you, Medium Ugly King!”
“The ethos behind this party is to eliminate traditional ideologies surrounding sterility in relation to the Body and to celebrate sexual freedom in a safe and encouraging environment,” wrote Rivera online. In a post on her substack, she explained: “It’s exactly what it sounds like. I swear I’m not a creep, I just think the Body needs to be shown and judged lightheartedly and queerly.”
How much traditional ideologies surrounding sterility were being eliminated inside the packed room, buying drinks while waiting to see hole before, largely, departing was, perhaps, debatable. The excited, libidinal crowd didn’t feel as thrilled for the possibilities of sexual freedom as they did like a bunch of people who avidly follow the Bed-Stuy bar ‘Singers.’
But that’s probably alright with Rivera. She’s a local character; she sees the hole contest as the most Bushwick thing ever, outside of space, time and law; something that she says she had never done before and never thought of doing until it came to her mind two weeks ago, and is really just a party like everything else.
“I’m from here, I’m Puerto Rican. This is my neighborhood. My mom was a Bushwick girl. Doing this is the entire party girl vibe. It’s just being expressive and being free and enjoying everybody that is here,” she told me. “I’ve been a bartender for ten years, a dominatrix for ten years, a stripper for…” she pauses. “Five.” (Not anymore, she says, of course)
And now she’s running hole contests. And where else but the Rash, which had once been Jen Sillen’s ruby-colored techno club,1 profiled glowingly in Interview a few years ago under the headline The ‘Twinks Are Persisting.’
“This bar does a lot of crazy shit,” Rivera tells me. Right now, she sees a future in hole and that future is bright.
“This brought out people from LA, Detroit, Brazil, and now we have multiple people asking us to come out globally to show hole,” she told me, smiling. “We’re absolutely going to do this again.” Online, she writes: “Stay tuned for new locations willing and able to compete for the BEST HOLE in their city.” And later: “Integration is the main purpose behind this party. The success of the night is thanks to the diversity NYC has always been known for. YOU are always invited. Which city is next?”
The winner, at least for Hole Contest 1.0 was a short twink named Julian, dressed in a small black ski mask and a thin, rope-like jock strap. Rivera had given him a sash and a bottle of champagne, along with some flowers and, eventually, a $300 cut from the door. He giggled infectiously.
“A friends-with-benefits told me about the competition and said I should do it,” he told me. “They were impressed by my hole talents. I’m the whole package. I’ve got tattoos, I’ve got the dick, I have a flexible pussy, I have everything.”
He earned cheers when he waved around a brownish-pink 15” dildo, about the size of a baby, before his ass consumed it.
“I trained for this for two hours,” he told me later, sagely. “Poppers, big toys and patience.” After some years doing what he called “weirdo drag,” he had been eying the idea of competitive kink.
“I told myself that the only way I would lose would be if someone did something insane like a three foot long stick up their ass or something like that. That would be more impressive, actually,” he told me, thinking about it. “I was invited a while ago to join a kink contest at the Eagle [near the West Side Highway] after I sent a submission of a video of me riding a big dildo and they wanted me to go, but I chickened out because I wanted to do it with a partner, but now I have the confidence to do it by myself.”
Julian was born in New Jersey but lived in Bushwick for the last seven years. When he wasn’t performing kink on stage, he was a caseworker, somewhere in the maze of public social services.
“I love it here, I don’t want to leave. All the techno and fun stuff is here. But it’s gotten so much more expensive. Rent has gone all the way up. I might have to move next year, which really sucks. But I’m living in my basement apartment right now, I love it here. I feel like I have a whole life. I have a daytime job where I’m a normie and I have a degenerate nightlife. It’s perfect.”
photos taken by Bobby Lee Palmer and Brandon McClain.
“Jen doesn’t own Rash anymore. It’s Claire and Nell who I actually don’t have last names for,” reports Rivera.
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