[dropcap]G[/dropcap]ays and gentrification have historically had a chicken/egg relationship—which comes first is unclear, but you typically don’t get one without the other. Brooklyn has proven no different, and the borough’s rapid demographic change in the past decade has also ushered in an ever-growing LGBTQIA population. Yet Brooklyn’s gay party culture appears to have not grown in suit. With a population of 2.5 million, Brooklyn has six gay bars. Fort Worth, TX—population 750,000—has roughly the same. Compare that to Manhattan’s 30-plus. So where exactly are Brooklyn’s gays partying? Secret warehouses? Seedy dim-lit back alleys crowded around an iPhone playing Robyn on loop? Or—dear god—Manhattan? Enter “Queer Nights”—evenings dedicated to gay patrons at otherwise heterosexual bars. As it becomes less economically feasible to open any establishment dedicated solely to one subculture, queer nights have become the viable business option for bars and a regular party solution for Brooklyn queers.
One such evening is a trashy little gem of a party called Bath Salts. Hosted at Bushwick dive bar Don Pedro, Bath Salts boasts a weekly line up of gender bending performance artists, offering a fascinating showcase of Brooklyn’s raw, unpolished drag scene. It’s working class, it’s friendly, it’s $5 for a shot & a beer, and if you go you’ll probably see someone’s ass. At the center of the fun are promoters/performers Severely Mame and Macy Rodman, the latter of whom started the whole thing two years ago. At the top of each show, gays crowd around the small stage to hear Mame and Macy talk shop with an off-the-cuff vibrancy that Letterman would envy. “Yesterday was the pride parade,” Macy moans into the mic with exhaustion. “It was awful! I don’t know if I wasn’t drunk enough or something, but I could not stand a single person there! Not even who I was with!” “This pride turned me into a homophobe!” chimes in Macy. “People kept asking Mame to take pictures, and she just kept being like, ‘Yeah, a dollar.’ And everyone was like, ‘Really?! You don’t look that good!’”
[blockquote]There wasn’t this precedence of needing a gay bar in Brooklyn. In the 60s and 70s, for example, in Manhattan you needed a gay bar because otherwise you would get arrested.[/blockquote]
“I just wanted people to stop asking me for photos!” From there the show devolves into a low budget variety hour with periodic smoke breaks scattered in between. Virtually no fourth wall exists, and audience participation is half the experience. Macy and Mame mill about during breaks and get drunk with the crowd, many of whom are dedicated regulars in drag themselves. “When I started no one was coming here, so it was just like us hanging out,” says Macy. “Then when people started coming here it was like, ‘Why would we do things anything differently?”
It follows that the crowd they attract has very few walls of its own. “I think that’s what it is about the queer night,” adds Macy, cigarette smoke curling through her blond dreadlocks. “It’s not a place where you go to cruise. You know you’re going to have a common interest with people. You’re going there for this atmosphere we’ve created so people let their guard down a little more.” “The gay bar world is awful!” laments Mame. “Then the nights that happen at them are so boring. Friday nights at [Williamsburg gay bar] TNT? It’s awful! The crowd is so basic: one gay guy with three of his straight girlfriends is like the whole crowd. So it’s primarily a straight crowd with their faggot friend. They only want top 40 hits, something they recognize. I don’t really enjoy it.” Which is not to say that straights aren’t allowed at Bath Salts.
“Our crowd is legitimately probably 50/50 straight-gay. And the straight people follow us! They love us.” Macy says that’s part of the difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan gay culture. “There wasn’t this precedence of needing a gay bar in Brooklyn. Like in the 60s and 70s in Manhattan you needed a gay bar because otherwise you would get arrested. I think [queer nights] are where it’s going. I think it’s going to be more mixed going forward. Queer is very all-encompassing.”
“We have no money to pay anyone and everyone knows that we have know money,” jokes Mame. “People like our show because it’s a sounding board. That’s what’s very different about us and other drag shows. We just want people to come and have fun, we don’t care if we’re giving them a fierce show.” Based on the friendliness of the crowd and the apparent lack of attitude in the air, something else is at stake for patrons at a night like Bath Salts: a desire to connect and express that is sorely missing from the richer borough’s scene. “Here, it’s more like needing an outlet for this kind of stuff. There, it’s more like a system. You need a drag mom and someone to teach you ways to be like this beautiful creature. Which hasn’t really happened here because it hasn’t been around as long.” In a city that is constantly displacing its poor people in favor of its wealthier citizens, Bath Salts reflects more than just the differences in drag culture between two boroughs, and much of it comes down to economics. Catering to a poor crowd in a poor neighborhood might not guarantee authenticity, but it’s working for this party.
