{"id":3006,"date":"2015-03-31T12:08:57","date_gmt":"2015-03-31T12:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/home\/?p=3006"},"modified":"2015-03-31T12:08:57","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T12:08:57","slug":"the-kids-are-alright-brooklyns-bath-salts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/the-kids-are-alright-brooklyns-bath-salts\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kids Are Alright: Brooklyn’s Bath Salts"},"content":{"rendered":"

[dropcap]G[\/dropcap]ays and gentrification have historically had a chicken\/egg relationship\u2014which comes first is unclear, but you typically don\u2019t get one without the other. Brooklyn has proven no different, and the borough\u2019s rapid demographic change in the past decade has also ushered in an ever-growing LGBTQIA population. Yet Brooklyn\u2019s 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\u2014population 750,000\u2014has roughly the same. Compare that to Manhattan\u2019s 30-plus. So where exactly are Brooklyn\u2019s gays partying? Secret warehouses? Seedy dim-lit back alleys crowded around an iPhone playing Robyn on loop? Or\u2014dear god\u2014Manhattan? Enter \u201cQueer Nights\u201d\u2014evenings 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s raw, unpolished drag scene. It\u2019s working class, it\u2019s friendly, it\u2019s $5 for a shot & a beer, and if you go you\u2019ll probably see someone\u2019s 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. \u201cYesterday was the pride parade,\u201d Macy moans into the mic with exhaustion. \u201cIt was awful! I don\u2019t know if I wasn\u2019t drunk enough or something, but I could not stand a single person there! Not even who I was with!\u201d \u201cThis pride turned me into a homophobe!\u201d chimes in Macy. \u201cPeople kept asking Mame to take pictures, and she just kept being like, \u2018Yeah, a dollar.\u2019 And everyone was like, \u2018Really?! You don\u2019t look that good!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

[blockquote]There wasn\u2019t 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]<\/p>\n

\u201cI just wanted people to stop asking me for photos!\u201d 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. \u201cWhen I started no one was coming here, so it was just like us hanging out,\u201d says Macy. \u201cThen when people started coming here it was like, \u2018Why would we do things anything differently?\u201d<\/p>\n

It follows that the crowd they attract has very few walls of its own.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cI think that\u2019s what it is about the queer night,\u201d adds Macy, cigarette smoke curling through her blond dreadlocks. \u201cIt\u2019s not a place where you go to cruise. You know you\u2019re going to have a common interest with people. You\u2019re going there for this atmosphere we\u2019ve created so people let their guard down a little more.\u201d \u201cThe gay bar world is awful!\u201d laments Mame. \u201cThen the nights that happen at them are so boring. Friday nights at [Williamsburg gay bar] TNT? It\u2019s awful! The crowd is so basic: one gay guy with three of his straight girlfriends is like the whole crowd. So it\u2019s primarily a straight crowd with their faggot friend. They only want top 40 hits, something they recognize. I don\u2019t really enjoy it.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>Which is not to say that straights aren\u2019t allowed at Bath Salts.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur crowd is legitimately probably 50\/50 straight-gay. And the straight people follow us! They love us.\u201d Macy says that\u2019s part of the difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan gay culture.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThere wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s going. I think it\u2019s going to be more mixed going forward. Queer is very all-encompassing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2120c\"<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have no money to pay anyone and everyone knows that we have know money,\u201d jokes Mame. \u201cPeople like our show because it\u2019s a sounding board. That\u2019s what\u2019s very different about us and other drag shows. We just want people to come and have fun, we don\u2019t care if we\u2019re giving them a fierce show.\u201d 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\u2019s scene.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cHere, it\u2019s more like needing an outlet for this kind of stuff. There, it\u2019s more like a system. You need a drag mom and someone to teach you ways to be like this beautiful creature. Which hasn\u2019t really happened here because it hasn\u2019t been around as long.\u201d 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\u2019s working for this party.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2209c\"<\/p>\n

Photos:<\/em> Craig Hanson<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[dropcap]G[\/dropcap]ays and gentrification have historically had a chicken\/egg relationship\u2014which comes first is unclear, but you typically don\u2019t get one without the other. Brooklyn has proven no different, and the borough\u2019s rapid demographic change in the past decade has also ushered in an ever-growing LGBTQIA population. Yet Brooklyn\u2019s gay party culture appears to have not grown in suit. With a population […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":3008,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[49],"tags":[146],"class_list":["post-3006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-bath-salts"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paoQFa-Mu","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}