| Event | Blkmarket Membership |
| Date | November 30, 2012 |
| Location | The 1894, Brooklyn, NY |
| Attended | 2-9AM |
| Performers | Ben Klock, DVS1, Ryan Elliott |
Techno Calling
The first lease I signed in New York was an apartment off Wilson Ave in Bushwick, where I lived with my friend M. I was new to the city, and M was one of the few people who embodied my idea of a true New Yorker. He was a man of equal taste and discipline. Born in Manhattan, he had a matching 212 area code, and his father had been photographed once by Andy Warhol. I was just a skinny Chinese kid from the suburbs of California whose father had not been photographed by Andy Warhol, but was a Baptist minister who condemned the very life of pleasure that I had come to New York to embrace.
M was blonde and blue-eyed, six foot four, and austere. We’d been introduced by a friend who worked at extravagant queer parties in Brooklyn, where men dressed up in leather harnesses to play. In contrast, M was minimalist in his aesthetic, with a taste for rare scotch, German opera, and all-black clothing. He was the only person I knew who read Resident Advisor. I knew he often went to techno warehouse parties that went to nine in the morning, often alone, mostly sober. He never told me when he was going, and I don’t know if he told anyone. These curious pleasures were somewhat mythic to me. Like a monastic ritual, something private.
It’s possible that without him, I might not have found techno. My earliest memories of techno are hanging out with him in our living room with his bedroom door ajar, “Subzero” by Ben Klock pulsing out into our conversation. Multiple people have told me that this was also the first techno track they ever heard, which can’t possibly be true, though I like to think that we were all listening to it in our bedrooms in 2012, dreaming of Berlin.
One thing that made M legendary: He had been to Berlin. More importantly, he had gone to the club Berghain, where Ben Klock was a resident. M saved fliers from those parties, which went on for an entire weekend, days on end. One flier had a popsicle in the shape of a dick. Another had a photograph of a shirtless bear in a hospital gown looking resigned and needy at the camera. At the basement of Berghain was a hardcore gay sex club named Lab.Oratory which, M said, was open to all Berghain guests exactly once a year, during Sylvester.
This was something of a revelation to me. I had spent my teenage years wanting to be someone like M—straight, tall, handsome—and here he was in front of me, talking about queer culture as something to be desired. Up until that point, I did not think queerness was something to be desired. M, though, wanted it, seemed to even wish that he was one, while at the same time recognizing he would always be on the periphery of its liveliness. For the first time, I understood that this could all be mine, if I wanted.
In 2012, M took me to my first warehouse party to see Ben Klock. It was hosted by Blkmarket at the warehouse called the 1894, a large, cavernous space with concrete walls, and a skylight above, which I later learned was called a clerestory. As morning approached, you could see the sun come down, giving the foggy crowd of dancers a gauzy glow. It was the first time I did ecstasy, and I danced so hard that my glasses flung off my face.
In 2015, M and I finally decided to go to Berlin together. I got to Berlin while he was out of town, which meant going to Berghain for the first time alone. I walked in with no idea of who would be playing and it turned out to be, I shit you not, Ben Klock.
It’s hard not to read the coincidence as destiny. That summer, M and I went to Berghain every weekend. By the next year, I had decided to leave New York and move to Berlin for good, and I stayed on for five years. If I crunched the numbers, I could give you a ballpark of how many times I’ve been to Berghain, but in my mind, it was countless times.
The crowd was always filled with a curated cast of recognizable characters: shirtless leather gays, models from the Eastern Bloc set, cybergoths, new wave porn stars, speedfreaks from the hardcore scene, and art world intellectuals. I felt privileged to be included, at an age when feeling included meant everything. Rather than something like Storm Rave, which was always, let’s be honest, a bridge and tunnel party, Berghain followed the Limelight model, where the club is known by a cast of fabulous club kids in extravagant outfits who always appeared at the party in different looks, often homemade. The Berghain club kids are who drew me in. I adored them, idolizing them. I experimented with my looks, once gathering two oversize belts I bought at the market, clipped together with safety pins and cross-looped around my shoulders and back like a DIY harness. Another night, I wore a Burberry trench coat—just to fuck with the club’s all black aesthetic—and wore nothing underneath except for white boxer briefs with a band that said Calvin Klein. I loved the frivolity of it. Sometimes, I knew what outfit I would wear months in advance, ahead of something like Christopher Street Day. Then once I started making enough money to afford designer, there were some luxury items that I exclusively wore to Berghain. Nowhere else could I be so extra. Somewhere during these years was some misplaced discovery I made about radical visibility, necessary for minorities, though if it becomes interchangeable with narcissism, as it so often does, it can dupe you into thinking you’re untouchable by shame, which I sincerely believed I was for five years of my life.
Looking back now, that all seems like a long time ago. If I first went to Berlin in 2015, I left in 2020, when Covid had decimated the scene. By then, I had been working as an editor at a fashion magazine, but once lockdown happened, they laid off a third of their staff, including me. They said they hoped to hire me in the summer as freelance, but I needed someone to sponsor my work permit immediately, because my residency was expiring. They never did. So instead, I came back to the States and said goodbye to all that.
*
During one of my first weekends back in New York, after the city began reopening, I was at a Sunday warehouse party when, standing in the outside patio, I saw someone I at first didn’t recognize: this tall, gangly guy in a black, Uniqlo T-shirt with shoulder-length hair and glasses. “Holy shit,” I said. It was M.
By then, I had not seen him for at least a few years. We caught up, as the techno beat went on inside. He told me that he had found the S&M scene in New York, which he called “lifestyle,” his own version of the gay eroticism that he first associated with Berghain. This was news to me. During my Berlin years, we had lost touch, back when I was eager to dissociate myself from the naive, repressed person I was in New York. This isn’t to say exactly that I was drinking the Kool-Aid in Berlin, but I had totally drunk the Kool-Aid, which you can only do for so long until life hits you hard. By my fifth year in Berlin, I had fallen on tough times. I suffered a psychotic break, and started hearing voices. After a certain point, even Berghain can’t save you. The kids in the clubs were always going on about how the club is family, except once I got locked up in a psych ward, all the fashionable club kids I used to party with had had left me for dead. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I have the text messages to prove it. I felt like a scene I had poured five years of my life into had turned to shit the moment I needed them most. I asked myself, What could I have possibly gotten so wrong?
These days, I try to forget about all that, but it creeps up in unexpected ways. During the closing set of Sustain last year, I was dancing and suddenly found tears streaming down my face. M was dancing beside me, and when I turned to him, he saw me crying. He smiled gently. I never told him why I was crying and he never asked. By this time, life had also found him in its own way. These days, he is more reserved than he used to be, with a sadness about him that reads as character. But when I think back about the raver he was ten years ago, who secretly went out at night and attended warehouse parties alone, I strangely don’t see someone so young, but someone old for his body, even wise. He went to the rave to be anonymous, to get rid of himself, almost to disappear in the fog and the music. There is something that raver knew and has always known, but is still elusive to me. If I keep going to raves now, it is because I am still trying to figure out after all these years what he knows that I still don’t know. Except I don’t ask. That’s what the dance floor is for.