Photos by Bobby Viteri
It’s barely 9 PM on a Friday night and the dancefloor I am standing in is already fucking lit. Next to me, a topless girl with Venus of Willendorf curves is rubbing her silver spandex shorts onto an equally naked flesh pole. He scoops up her pendulous breasts from behind—bounce, bounce, bounce. I try not to stare but he catches my eye. “Would you like to dance?” (“No thanks!”) Surrounding me: a conga line of grinding gay guys, smooth skin upon skin. A militant in a “Film the Police” T-shirt doing lightning-fast tectonique hands. Homemade lasers and confetti guns exploding on a man with a crown and pink tutu who is spinning his baby daughter—matching tutu—in giggling circles. A bite-sized stripper-cop strutting to the sharp flicks of his feather boa. From the speakers: robust deep house pounding to the glorious falsetto of a disco classic: “youuuu make me feeeel, mighty reeeal!”
Videos by VICE
Earlier, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage—a decision that was ecstatically celebrated around the country. But the news is a blip on the radar for many people in this crowd. Which makes sense, considering that we’re at the biggest rave at PorcFest, an annual gathering of hardcore libertarians in the White Mountains of rural New Hampshire. The festival is organized by the Free State Project, an organization aiming to get 20,000 people to move to New Hampshire in order to make the state a bastion of libertarian ideals.
As dedicated activists who oppose the government’s infringement on individual liberties, these folks are raging tonight regardless of whom The Man decides they can or cannot marry. The most enthusiastic response I get about the ruling is when I ask Dale Everett, one of the whip-smart hosts of a LGBT libertarian radio show called Flaming Freedom, and he chirps, “It’s cute!”
A bittersweet sense of finality looms over the festivities. Since 2010, a 48-year-old lesbian named Buzz Webb has been responsible for all this theatrical debauchery. She’s been running the rave as a one-woman show, spending hours putting together the DJ set, lasers, smoke machines, and lights—what she calls “flashy flashy”—into a party that just barely breaks even. This year, she’s decided to call it quits—”It’s just so much work, and there’s just one of me,” she says sadly—but not before one last hurrah.
In between drags of her clove cigarettes, Buzz tells me she became an anarchist after watching the authorities turn their backs as hundreds of her friends died from AIDs in the 80s. “It was a fucking horrible time,” she says. “Gays make the best libertarians because we learned how to help each other when the government wasn’t there.” When I ask how she feels about the legalization of gay marriage, Buzz replies, “You don’t need a permission slip from the government to marry who you love.”
Buzz Webb, the host and organizer of Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party
Buzz started the party as a joke, which kind of explains why the rainbow-covered billboard outside—which she knocked together herself—displays its tongue-in-cheek title: “Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party.” Really, a queer bacchanal has no business in the predominantly heterosexual and conservative culture of libertarianism in 2015. But that’s exactly why the party needs to exist—gay visibility matters. “I didn’t really see myself represented at PorcFest back in 2009 when I first came,” Buzz says. “I’ve had so many people come up to me and say, ‘I just want to thank you for making a safe space for gay people to feel comfortable.’”
To reach peak levels of dancefloor liberation, Buzz enlists the help of her friend, DJ Wendy Hart—a 68-year-old lesbian who has been dubbed the “Queen Mother” of DJs because of her long career. Hart spun at gay bars and clubs in Boston throughout the 80s, did the circuit party thing all over the country, and now lives in Florida, where she still plays Disney’s gay days.
Buzz says she spends hundreds of hours trawling through Beatport to select her favorite electro, deep house, and trance tracks before sending them over to Wendy. Wendy then mixes them into a four-hour set, opening with Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Welcome to the Pleasuredome,” cycling through George Fitzgerald’s remix of Jon Hopkins’ “Open Eye Signal,” Deee-Lite’s “Power of Love,” MK’s remix of Bakermat’s “Teach Me,” and winding down with The Crystal Method’s mix of New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle.” To counter the limitations of a pre-recorded mix, where a DJ can’t respond to the energy levels of a crowd, Wendy arranges the tracks according to ascending and descending BPM. While many DJs would snort at this kind of gimmick, most of the time, it sort of works.
Although it stays true to its open-minded gay ethos, the party quickly morphed into a larger purpose: an orgiastic catharsis for hundreds of political diehards who have spent the last week pontificating at daytime discussions with titles like “Atlas Shrugged as a Philosophical Novel part 1: A Philosophical Thriller Wiggly Wonders,” and “Bitcoin is Rothbardian Money.” Buzz’s Big Gay Dance Party is their one night to throw on Mardi Gras beads, maybe snack on some mushrooms, and let their freak flags fly. And let’s face it: at PorcFest, that flagpole runs pretty damn high.
Buzz already knows this. “Oh yeah, 90 percent of the people who come to my party are straight.” But she cites libertarianism’s avowal of individual freedom with limited outside interference: “Whether you identify as gay or straight is nobody’s business. People do what they want to do.”
The party ends promptly at midnight when Buzz turns down the volume and sweaty limbs untangle from each other to give her a deafening round of applause and whistles. Whether or not you agree with libertarianism principles, one thing’s for sure: the “do whatever the fuck you want as long as you don’t harm others” thing is exactly the mentality you need for a damn good party. Buzz lords over the crowd in her bright red jacket, smiling through sad eyes. She thanks everyone, and asks for help cleaning up. A few people stay to pick up trash, but most file out looking for the next thrill. Someone tells me there’s an afterparty in the sex tent.
Michelle Lhooq’s freak flag is at half-mast today. Follow her on Twitter
Bobby Viteri is a professional lurker based in Brooklyn. Check out his Tumblr.
