From the magazine: ISSUE 71, Dec 2010/Jan 2011
May 2014: Venus X recently tweeted that she would no longer be throwing Ghe20 G0th1k parties because of a growing frustration with Rihanna's appropriation of #GhettoGoth culture. It's not the first time she's put the party on hiatus. In our 71st issue, Venus explained why she felt the need to give Ghe20 G0th1k a break going into 2011.
Every other week for a year, Venus—along with residents $hayne and Physical Therapy—threw Ghe20 Gothik, the best party in New York City. She kicked out photographers, flew in unheralded OG DJs and played regional dance music she found on YouTube. Now she explains why she’s ending the party at its peak before it gets too ripped off, too infiltrated and too cute:
If we do Ghe20 G0th1k again, it’s going to be through text messages, it’s going to be only in the basement and it’s going to be faggots and friends only. Because people are disrespectful. People come in, they’re not used to respecting the music, they’re not used to respecting the space, they’re not used to respecting nothing. They get wasted, and they start touching on each other. It’s a disrespect to the people that are constantly creating culture here in New York, which is a lot of gay people. The more people started coming, even celebrities started coming, it was too cute. Everybody wanted a dance party, no drama, just dancing. People don’t want to be supportive of some shit that’s different, they just want to dance and get wasted, and the party was never like that. It was mad faggots, straight people too, but mostly a fag scene, a one-stop shop. But it was a cute party, not some corny gay party.
We all go to them and we DJ them too, but dance is not really where it’s at, unfortunately, because it’s just not pushing the limit at all. That 130BPM shit? I hate that shit. We wanted to have one place where you could be slowing shit down, mashing shit up that didn’t belong together and that was experimental. The gay parties are corny, and the straight parties have no gay people. There’s next level shit going on but converge! We never see them converge. Honestly, we have a lot of problems with men coming in and touching women. It happens, this is sex and drugs and alcohol, but I just got to the point where I was like, I don’t want to support this. If everybody’s going to take the model of the party and do it, we’re going to have to think of something else. We’re not going to sit here and participate in the same shit we were breaking away from. And it has to be a good space for everybody, that’s the reason women don’t come out to party. Gay women don’t come out to party, at straight or gay scenes at all, because it’s not safe for them. And no, it’s not cool to talk about this shit, but at the end of the day somebody has to. The reality is the parties suck, people aren’t comfortable. Racism exists, sexism exists, there’s mad drama and it’s everywhere we look. We gave it every two weeks. We gave it hard. It’s done.
