In the back of Mr. Nancy’s (7-02 Seneca Ave.), Priestess Lolita instructed the crowd where the money was supposed to go. My five dollar bill didn’t miss her corset. She returned to the stage for the chorus of Kim Petras’ “Coconuts.” Her corset disappeared for the rack reveal: nipples hidden by tape.. Happy Pride Month: welcome to Ridgewood.
If Astoria is LIC’s more fun and bearable cousin, proof that even NYC has its own soulless midwestern cores (Downtown Brooklyn included), then, Ridgewood is its own attempted refinement of Bushwick’s nightlife.
In her memoir Health and Safety, Emily Witt describes Ridgewood as “like going back in time, to an orderly and prim fantasy of a city,” over which so many retail concepts have been overlaid: dive bar simulations, a haute restaurant lauded for its artificially scarce burger, and the reification of TV. People have fewer tattoos out here, but when they do, all the pieces of their patchwork half-sleeves seem to’ve come from the same package.
After Lolita, Nicky O took the stage to address her first Pride Month crowd in Ridgewood, which stretched from the backroom to the bar and halfway down Nancy’s block at Seneca and Palmetto.
Nicky O, previously caught mid-nuptials at a “legally inadmissible” wedding1 with Jo Disco at Cassette (68-38 Forest Ave.), gave a rousing speech about having expected acceptance upon arrival to New York before finding none at first. She now had an at-capacity room of people I’d call dolls and queens if I understood the intricacies of what those signaled (limits to allyship).
On the deck, Miss Hap’s set took an exciting route, stopping at maybe ESG before passing definitely Madonna. On dance music, Emily Witt writes that it offers “not meaning but space,” where one can simply be in movement, no longer thinking about weighty days. We’re told these are beautiful times to live in New York; amid victory and change, joy is now mandatory.
There was an obligatory rendition of Charli XCX’s “Guess,” but—bucking against local trends—no queen performed a Stereolab routine. Instead, the Fuppets, a drag puppet duo (“Hag” and “Fag”), mentioned drugs and a flock of men beside me chirped, “Poppers, poppers, poppers” to one another in the way of birdsong. Permissibility was in the air. The crammed dance floor absorbed everyone. Under the fans, even the wallflowers danced.
I was about to ask a stranger, “What’s trade?” before a wandering hand squeezed my shoulder—how flattering, or maybe they just needed to get by, but either way that hand reassured me, lent a sense of permission to be here.
Everything around is a great distraction against redacted heartbreak. Your emotions might manifest the same here as they would in Cincinnati, but you can walk them, like dogs, past and under so many landmarks. That’s why everyone is insufferable when they talk about New York: they contextualize their average experiences within the mythological, and—unfortunately for everyone in Chicago—they are right. So cry all you want on Pride Month so long as they’re tears toward somewhere. This month, for a whole month, you have to be grateful for another, for something or anything.
Everything is precious. I’ll never be able to eat at that exact Agi’s Counter (818 Franklin Ave.) again. Every other bar is alleged and indicted, and a church is probably no longer holy enough to avoid becoming a condo.
We deserve everything we feel; regardless, we keep going. Walking home, past Trans-Pecos (9-15 Wyckoff Ave.), I heard Charli’s “Guess” again. Permission to be anywhere.
Photos by Steven Orlofsky. Follow Nicky O for more drag events in Ridgewood.
- Covered by editor emeritus Cait Flynn in an early Grime Square Instagram exclusive. ↩︎
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