The first thing I thought to ask Cobra Snake was what kind of rig he was using. It was a stupid question that I thought sounded smart. I’m used to asking those. He gave me the look of a true savant and told me there were massive threads on Reddit trying to answer this very question. He smiled. He told me nothing.
He was in the packed, sweaty backyard of Jade (4 Stuyvesant Ave.) for the same reason I was: Cyan Rivera was throwing a wet t-shirt contest to crack open the summer, part of a series of erotic events from Rivera. The first started with the Hole Contest at Rash (941 Willoughby Ave.), a bar she tended a few blocks away that closed shortly after for unrelated reasons.
Rivera then put together a kind of stimulated “erotic acts” contest (dildos, cucumbers etc. etc.) at Friends and Lovers (641 Classon Ave.) in distant Crown Heights (don’t worry, we covered that too). Now she’s returned to Bushwick.
“It’s like classic summer fun, you hear it, and you immediately know what it is,” the actress Meg Spectre told me. “It’s the same way that comfort foods have been trending and all the best restaurants… like, they’re making adult Hot Pockets. And it’s just the same fucking thing, where we know what it is. It’s Americana.”
Spectre knew a thing or two about classic American invitations. In the Times, I read last year she was initiated into an acting club called the Lambs, “former members include Irving Berlin, Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin.” I could picture them with us, as Rivera and her compatriots filled small bowls with water, and then poured them all over the dozen or so contestants who showed up.
“You don’t see wet t-shirt contests like that in New York,” said Azaria, of South Ozone Park. 1“I’ve heard about it, back in the day, so it perked my curiosity.”
“I’m the one who started it, actually,” Gabby Weis said. A native of Cumming, Georgia, she started doing this some years ago at Treasure Club in LES.
“It actually started out as a joke,” said Weis. “Oh, ‘I should do a hot dog eating contest for July 4th.’ And then it was like, ‘How about a wet t-shirt competition?’ But then, this year, [the owners of Treasure Club] were like, it might not be a good look if we have three men who own a bar doing a wet t-shirt competition. Which I think is kind of gay, but it figured out for the best anyways, because we did it here instead.”
“We’re going to objectify women today,” declared Lucy Geldziler, another local nightlife figure who goes by the Instagram handle leg52 and bore a prominent lower back tattoo. Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. It’s Oscar Wilde, she told me3. She was one of the contest’s judges. I asked her how she was planning on judging breasts.
“How hard they are, how wet they are, how perky. Commitment is really important,” she said.
“There’s also, obviously, the subversion of ‘it’s a wet t-shirt contest.’ You’re going to see nipples,” Spectre, the actress, had said earlier. She had given the concept some thought before entering. “This was the summer that was once sold to us. By who, I don’t know, but conceptually, this is what we’re supposed to be doing in the summer. And as people who fashion ourselves to be outside, if we’re going to be outside this summer, we must be at the wet t-shirt-contest, obviously.”
Spectre got second place. The winner turned out to be Alexa Saint Von, a trans model from Austin who lived around Bushwick for half a decade. “Around Starr Bar and House of Yes and that whole area.”
In America, Jean Baudrillard wrote that “the orgy is over, liberation is over; it is not sex one is looking for but one’s ‘gender.’” This was the new “erotic culture,” he promised in 1986, and it’s a premonition that seemed in some sense to govern Rivera’s world in Bushwick, a marketplace of signs that promised the attributes of the old culture in the language of the new.
“I think I brought an energy of autism. Wet nipples, obviously, and queer identity and just the feeling of being yourself and not being afraid of your individuality,” said Von.
“I have a lot of friends in New York City nightlife,” said Von. “My goal is to try to find safety amid all the chaos in the world right now, and I just think that the way to world peace is boobs. And celebrating them. Especially wet boobs.”
“It just means so much to me to have a wet t-shirt contest in Bushwick right now.”
“I think the contest thing has been part of my motif for a minute,” Rivera said. “I’m happy to facilitate more things for people to get silly. It’s effortless, it’s silly and it’s fun.” She’s been keeping busy at her new jobs, working now for a zine called Dirty Mag (not to be confused with Dirt) and behind the bar now at Jade, and she still had the cross-national ambitions of her hole contest brand on her mind.
“I want to do ‘Hole Contest: LA.’ And ‘Hole Contest: Brazil’ is still kind of a thing,” said Rivera. But everything was still being planned in LATAM. “I mean, I haven’t talked to that girl in a couple of weeks,” she said.
The water was creating something, reminding us of the house with a pool, a tallboy pouring himself down your throat on a ninety-degree day. “She’s true to her word,” Bobby Lee Palmer later told me. He’s been around for a while and had photographed February’s Hole Contest. “There’s not a towel in sight,” he said wistfully.
Many told me that it reminded them of the indoor pool at Le Bain, a club affixed to the Standard in the Meatpacking District, and where Rivera alerted me she could be found at later this month hosting a pool party called “Top Storage,” in order to promote that Dirty Mag zine. Geldziler told me that it reminded her of a mud-wrestling contest she had also found herself involved in, put on over at the Ridgewood club Trans-Pecos (9-15 Wyckoff Ave.). Somehow, I missed that one. It reminded me of something I once told Cobra Snake’s intern’s strikingly beautiful now-ex-girlfriend about flash photography; not that it reveals anything, but that we could watch it create entirely new people and relationships between bodies that could never be seen anywhere else because they simply did not exist. I gaslit with the scenery, or so I liked to imagine. In front of me was a woman wearing a tank-top that read: Twinks. It was crossed out like a no-smoking sign.
“At least there’s stuff like this happening in Bushwick again,” a software developer in her mid-thirties told me, who later implored that no photos of her at the contest make it out of Jade’s patio.
“I lived in another apartment in Bushwick, but it burnt down recently,” said a wet nurse, part of a spate of fires in the area in recent years. ”This is just my second apartment fire,” she added.
We had all been here for a while. Life goes on forever. I had recognized another of the judges, a professional dilettante named Izzy Capulong, the most dressed of the bunch, in a Libertines leather jacket and a position at yet a different online magazine. I spotted her at a house party some three years ago inside a converted autoshop on Evergreen. It had once been the “Illmore,” a pandemic-era party house, later converted into a den for poetry readings and other kinds of low-level DIY activities, before more recently converted into nothing at all.
Capulong had been one of the fifty or so people booked that night by a party photographer to read something, “literally anything,” the photographer told me. The theme was “ode to 2022” and, of the bunch, all I could remember was the bankrobber-turned-novelist Nico Walker, who read excerpts from his still-unfinished second book, and then Capulong herself, who grabbed a guitar and played that old Mitski song “Francis Forever,” and I remember it had felt like the perfect thing to end a column on. It was good to know that some things still worked.
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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