The reggaeton and baile funk were wherever I wasn’t. In the main hall at Elsewhere (599 Johnson Ave.), I tried finding a dance that worked and settled on the mobile pose of a boxer with really soft hands. I kept reminding myself to move my hips.

The final weekend of Pride was a crush of events: there was everything from drag to the weekend-long Bodyhack rave at Nowadays (56-06 Cooper Ave.)—across the street from a Superfund site—an event I only heard about in the most magical of ways: reading the Queens Community Board 5 minutes. And that’s the appeal of Brooklyn: pay a fortune to poison yourself.

Miss Twink USA‘s techno set demanded dance. Their buildups felt planned for a responsive crowd. Words like “suddenly” and “without warning” ring hollow in writing. This is not an urgent form. If you blink, you’re not going to miss anything.

Upstairs, in the Loft, Preciosa Night’s popup delivered the most Latin forward set. All the bodies inside rendered the air tropical. The packed room dampened any noise coming from the DJs downstairs or on the rooftop. Every body lent clarity to the sound inside.

All across Elsewhere, people wore Von Dutch and tatters and athletic thongs exposed by huge, low-riding jorts. Practical sneakers and high heels and a fur suit that I hoped had ventilation. Everyone wore a crop top or at least seemed to own three. Everyone there was beautiful in their own way. I never saw a fight, not even an argument. It was Pride, after all. One concertgoer, Maggie, told me that the lesbian flag’s range of purple to red, and lack of blue, is most apparent in evening time: “Every sunset is lesbian.”

Downstairs, I felt that Flirty800 was buying time, so I almost stepped out just as Isabella Lovestory appeared on stage. It’s a seamless transition when it’s all computers. She wore a Hellraiser bra and Eyes Wide Shut mask and fired a bubble gun into the crowd. Her navel was rainbow-bedazzled.

Lovestory chirped like a hummingbird and said, “The world’s fucked up… Let’s forget all the problems in the world. We’re going to forget… We’re going to turn up.” Inside, the merch was $60 per shirt. The apocalypse was slipping in. We were on the verge of absolute collapse.

“Y escondo mi stash / En mi fake Louis bag,” she sang from “Eurotrash,” a lead single on 2025’s Vanity, and two men to my left sniffed poppers. Closer to me, two men grinded on their hag, one of them cooling himself off with a fan that wafted his BO to me. I looked like I was there to pick my kids up. We were all so close then.

Covering Soulja Boy’s “Crank That,” she warbled the long “Youuuuuuu,” before teasing an as-of-then unreleased hostile situationship anthem: “Don’t stress me /  Just fuck me,” Lovestory demanded. Lovestory didn’t promise love, but glamor, sex, and power: domination and femininity coexisting. She mounted the stage’s banister and hurled ass at the crowd.

The songs alternated between trap, perreo, reggaeton, and Xtina-era pop: all of her sounds coexisted, and genres briefly overlapped without seeming slapdashed together in Canva, just as the individual rooms cohabited in this repurposed furniture warehouse. 

Unlike Knockdown Center (52-19 Flushing Ave.), nothing was ever made at Elsewhere. It’s always been storage for the constituent pieces of different worlds. Nowadays and Elsewhere: two clubs on the polar opposites of Bushwick, neither actually in Bushwick, that either signal toward an atemporal moment or a faraway place.

Both offer so many imported exotics on-hand, or the impression of them (Lovestory grew up in America, and now lives in Montreal), or to be near those with urgent presences, like Lovestory’s, who dominated such a small stage and enthralled a crowd lit only intermittently by overhead light shows.

And then you have to leave, returning into the world, promising yourself you’ve somehow changed (and you did, since you hadn’t done that before), walking past nine food trucks and settling on the tenth along Jefferson because they have surge pricing, not disaster pricing.

“Is this New York City?” Lovestory had asked. “I don’t know.” No, it was East Williamsburg, and the crowd cheered, remembering how lucky they were to live so relevantly as to feel urgent, feel together.