The Goddess of the Nightclub

“It's a place where black, white, straight and gay, came together. And if people can dance together, they can live together.” —Mel Charen, founder of the Paradise Garage nightclub

What defines liberalism, and forever yokes it to its restive left-wing progeny, is the fundamental conviction that humanity can be improved in this life rather than the next. It’s hard to overstate how radical this idea was in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how the reaction against it still rages brushfire-hot. Indeed, there is an unbroken line between today’s cargo-cult neofascism and the earliest expressions of fundamentalist reaction. 

It is the battle of our time, in every hour of the modern world. 

If that duty seems heavy, we should take comfort in the fact that liberalism has supplied us with a few benefits as well. Chief among them is the right to take pleasure in earthly delights, without shame or guilt, and to find in our pleasures a workshop for still greater freedoms. The beauty of liberal hedonism lies in the fact that it is both an end and a beginning; such eschatology lends itself to the apocalyptic depictions of decadence down the decades, conservatism’s revenge against the fact that we just have more fun. 

Liberalism’s highest duty is to guard our fundamental rights, to act as a shield against the depredations of the state. A shield against the prejudice of individuals. A shield against our worst collective impulses. But it also guards the ability to create; to think, speak, sing, and dance freely. A liberal society, whether it is the ad hoc society of dissidence against an autocratic state or the well-established freedom of institutional democracy, must guard the right to express itself in all the plurality of a rainbow. With all that implies. 

The forces of reaction, whether wearing the cloaks of the right or the left, zero in on pleasure and decadence as the mark of the devil. We need spend no time on how much conservatives hate queer spaces—whether nightclubs, bars, or pageants—and only a little time on how, of all things, brunch has become an object of hate in some precincts of the political left. It’s the most extravagant act of revenge against a single protest sign that I’ve ever seen, certainly. There was abject terror of the idea that people might enjoy themselves amid the absence of fascism, or abstain momentarily when it is present. But somehow the idea of liberals going out to brunch has become a mainstay of thoughtless anti-liberal criticism. 

But, let us give the critique its due: the argument is that if one is brunching, one is not firebombing the Wal-Marts that revolution’s maw rapaciously demands. Or, at the very least, one is failing to show up for their community, failing to do the civic duties demanded by activism. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, fails to accord with the reality of everyone I’ve had brunch with: activists, advocates, pillars of the community all. The meme of brunch nixing real political work could only come from the one place that truly precludes it: social media, that fertile ground for political reaction, continuing the long legacy of illiberal movements’ cult of asceticism, sacrifice, and suffering.

But why should such aspersions be cast upon fried eggs and hash browns? Or the odd sausage and bit of bacon? Should that bite of beef or pork repeat on the body politic like Scrooge’s ghosts? Fuck that, let’s actually engage with something real here.

You like to eat well, you like to drink well, you like to sing, and dance, and thrill to the extremities of experience; spice that burns, a drink that scalds, food that satisfies, a dance that expels the demons, sweat that carries away tears; these are not the only notes and phonemes of a well-sung life, but they form the bass beat. A life that rocks. A life that has been the dream of all who yearn to breathe free.

I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know what a ryobra was until one of my partners told me she owned one. My wife excitedly told me all about them when I reported back to her—eagerly hoping she could catch a glimpse of the thing. 

The object in question was, perhaps appropriately, macabre. A medical X-ray, carved into the shape of a record, and then imprinted with samizdat music. The X-ray sheets were plucked from the Soviet Union’s hospital dumpsters and used to reproduce the forbidden music of the West. Ryobra, or Ribs, referred cheekily to the music printed on the bones of those long forgotten to carry the sound of things forbidden, of songs denied, of thoughts that could never be spoken, much less gyrated to. 

To anyone that sneers performatively about brunch, a simple question must be asked: why was this music so important to these people? 

It’s not a coincidence that the Soviet Union’s openness in the ’80s coincided with a shift in the music that was permitted. Suddenly, dissident rock found a socially-permitted expression on the grand stage of Pesnya Goda (Song of the Year), and the likes of Zemlyane and Allianz belted out music that echoed counterparts and inspirations on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But this Soviet music was not a mere imitation of the West’s. It was resonance; something new that would eventually ricochet through many languages, each of which developed their own resounding beats, creating a nightclub grammar that would command the fluency of all Europe. 

Such music shook free of Soviet influence into expressions of language and culture that Russia, old and new, had tried to suppress. 

Freedom has a beat to it. 

And that’s why so many people try to ban it or in their impotence shame those who find their place in the great chorus line.

Freedom has a sound, and it’s four-on-the-floor. Disco is a fascinating case study, not least because the genre—which would lend its name to the very concept of a nightclub in several languages—was built on and attracted diversity. Its heartbeat was the drumming of Motown and Philly soul, music genres much beloved even by today’s conservatives but scorned by their predecessors in the 1960s. By the following decade, as funk took off, Black, Latino, and Italian city-dwellers congregated in the same establishments to do The Hustle; it was also nothing if not a fantastically queer genre. 

Gay nightclubs, like the Paradise Garage that inspired this essay’s epigraph, grew up alongside and through disco. These spaces of congregation—many of which were filling the voids left behind in city centres by white flight—were places where queer and trans youth turned out of their homes found acceptance in the sweaty haze of hedonism. 

The same clubs that gave life to disco also provided fertile ground for the birth of hip-hop, all at the same time that No Wave/New Wave was growing up. Even in the heart of urban decay, the liberal cosmopolitan mecca was reconstituting itself with transgressive pluralism and creativity.

There’s no escaping the fact that the backlash against disco was driven by homophobia and racism, such that even other self-appointed rock music lovers gleefully participated in a reactionary ritual, performing disco’s banishment from America. As a baseball fan I’m ashamed that this all took place at Comiskey Park as part of a promotional night for a White Sox game; that long-gone temple was profaned in a single evening, and, in the kind of justice that can only be delivered by baseball commissioners, the White Sox were forced to forfeit the next game to the Detroit Tigers as penance. But damage was done to far more than the field’s turf.

It’s always radical art that incites the madness, isn’t it? Many know of the Nazis’ persecution of “degenerate art,” art that was deemed too Jewish, too modern, too queer, too challenging, too outré, too abstract. In the process they set a pattern for all the fascists to come, who would worship the dead idols of ‘classical’ art they barely understand, a sexless fetishism for unpainted Greco-Roman statues and oil paintings commissioned by kings they can’t name. It is, in the end, the compliment fascist vice pays to liberal virtue: they understand art is beautiful and important, that it is a pillar of culture, and a proud standard to which the weary repair. They just don’t know how to create it. 

To look at the AI-generated imaginary of the Trump era is to see a screaming void where a vision should be. The pointless destruction and outrage that permanently characterises the MAGA movement is visible in everything they do. There is no joy or laughter, only bitter and hollow screaming and cackling from the endlessly diminishing returns of catharsis, derived from hurting their enemies. In the degraded pantheon of fascist virtues, suffering reigns supreme; to them, there is virtue in making their enemies suffer, depriving them of pleasure, and also denuding the world at large of pleasurable delights, lest some wrong-thinking untermenschen somewhere dared to enjoy them, brunching beneath the eaves of beauty. Wine and song are degeneracy; only violence contains virtue to the fascist.

It’s telling that the latest fascination of the Extremely Online fascist is headcanoning Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequel trilogy as some kind of hero to young white men; yes, the sulking, churlish, entitled, child-killing pout-monster. That Anakin. Far be it from me to judge a good headcanon, but there’s little good about this: indeed, it constitutes the kind of cultural bottom-feeding that is the last reserve of most fascists. All they can do is mooch off of better art—or, in this case, mooch off of the Star Wars prequels, which is cataclysmically more embarrassing.

Just as the Nazis sought to claim Metropolis for their own, these people can only ever leech off of what freedom created. They yearn for the fruits of liberalism without the fruits who cultivated them. The system they seek to produce could never make anything new or beautiful; everything they appropriate as their own, even the work of fellow-travellers, came from a free environment, one that believed in the power of individuals to create weird shit in the Arendtian space of appearance. Liberalism afforded both the space to be a truly strange and beautiful individual who could create a universe all her own, and afforded the collective that could then explore that strange new lifeworld and make their own meaning of it.

Fascism cannot produce great art, but individual fascists can; they often do so by free-riding off the very liberal democracies they oppose, making art by using freedoms they would give up in an instant. Yukio Mishima arguably literalised this in the tormented art of his very life, staging a pathetic fascist putsch at a JDF military base, wearing a uniform of his own design, and committing seppuku after being laughed at by the soldiers. It was performance art of a kind that literalised the way fascist artists yearn for their self-destruction; the matter of their vocation and the antimatter of their politics at last colliding. When there is nothing else left to give fascism, they can only snuff themselves out. 

Conservative art, by contrast, is of a different kith altogether. While it’s a common social media shibboleth to suggest that conservatives can’t create art, that’s self-congratulatory nonsense that misses a deeper and more interesting truth. There have been many great conservative artists, from G. K. Chesterton to C. S. Lewis to artists who didn’t initialise their forenames, such as Frank Herbert or Patrick McGoohan. Dune is, yes, conservative; as is McGoohan’s mad mod The Prisoner. Each is instructive in a similar way. Perhaps this revelation surprises you. The sci-fi epic where a scion of a great house gives up imperial privilege to embrace the glorious light of Space Islam and overthrow the settler colonialists is conservative? The TV show where a secret agent is trapped in a pseudo-utopian hellscape by a surveillance state of Cold Warrior maniacs is conservative?

Yes, actually. Both are profoundly anti-statist treatises, extolling the deep virtue of individualism and a profound skepticism about collectivism. Paul Atreides is a warning against tyranny (and later books in the Dune series become quite heavy-handed indeed about Herbert’s own anger about American liberalism, somehow putting a very 1980s speech in the mouth of a character hundreds of thousands of years in the future). Meanwhile, McGoohan was a devout Catholic who eschewed the genre’s lustfulness out of respect for his real-life wife, and the climax of his enigmatic Prisoner series clearly condemned the 1960s activists who were drawn to the trippy, anti-establishment show.

But why, then, does this conservative art endure? Put another way, how did Dune and Prisoner trick lefty audiences so comprehensively? Frank Herbert, who had been a Republican political operative and conservative newspaper columnist found himself inundated with hippy fans when Dune took off, after all; they treated him as a guru of environmentalism and anticolonialism.

Still, it’s too smug by half to mock these people’s lack of reading comprehension. They were, after all, picking up on something real. Conservative art is built from liberal grammar. For all the vexatious excesses of Herbert, he modelled Paul Atreides on Hitler, and his was a warning worth heeding for all who loved liberal democracy. Therein lies the clue: great conservative art retains contact with liberal democratic values. Patrick McGoohan was, as many were, deeply terrified of nuclear annihilation and the seeming senselessness of MAD; he was not anti-communist at any price. His extolling of the virtue of the individual—“I am not a number, I am a free man!”—is something that speaks to the yearning of every democratic citizen who yearns to have her individual qualities recognised and accounted for. 

In short, conservative art works when it prays beneath the disco ball of liberalism. If one reads Tolkien’s epic as conservative, it still stirs the soul because it so effortlessly conjures a fight against fascism; Chesterton spoke to the heart of the witty individual against the dead hand of impersonal systems; Lewis at the end of Perelandra gave us the tableau of an Elon Musk-ian figure, a would-be Mars-conqueror who saw no difference between God and the Devil, being beaten to death by a humanist. There are extravagant, even bloody gestures to the triumph of liberal democracy for those with eyes to see.

Anything else becomes purely fascist art, which leaves one only with the likes of Lady Ballers. If anything could repulse immortality, it is that genre of failure. The fascist yearns for the credibility of art, for the eternal life it can grant—not just to oneself but to one’s ideals—and instead finds Allied dynamite waiting for them at every turn, because no one wants Twitter fever-dream ejecta masquerading as Hollywood films.

But what about the nightclub?

If you can dance together, you can live together; it’s true in literal terms, and as a metaphor for so much else besides. Dare one say, if you can brunch together, you can live together. In modern society, life proceeds through its pleasures. It is not a coincidence that modernity gave us mass entertainment on a grand scale, and organised sport on somehow a grander scale still. Gridiron football, real football, cricket, baseball, have all achieved international scales of uptake that would’ve astonished the chariot riders of old. That, in the end, is the fruit of a modern world that afforded sufficient leisure to enough people to crowd the stands and smartphone audiences of these sports. The art almost comes naturally. 

When I watched the end of the World Series this year and saw the MVP drape himself in the flag of Venezuela, I was seeing something I entirely expected, and that I cheered on—not just because I’m Latina and a baseball fan, but because I’m a liberal humanist. The internationalism of a sport that has long grown past its pastoral American roots. 

It is, like music, an international thing that doesn’t just obliterate borders but ignores them as if they never existed. The crack of a baseball bat or the dropping of a beat is an international and profoundly human language that unites us in pleasures, drawing us away from the battlements. I love sport for its own sake, but if it has instrumental value it lies in channelling our warlike instincts into something a little more harmless than literal war. Imperfectly, of course. Violently so. But that’s the story of democracy: a mess of incompleteness.

And then there’s dance and the discotheque. There’s that other universal language, with its bass beats and its movements that will summon you to the floor even if you don’t know the words or the moves. 

Pleasure unites us. We can look back on the mechanistic madness of the 19th-century utilitarians with some pity—who could possibly hope, even now, to measure something as abstract as ‘utility’—and with some outrage for how they’ve inspired today’s effective altruists who believe there are mathematical solutions to the equation of morality. But. The utilitarians were onto something with their understanding that ‘maximising pleasure’ was a worthy goal of any society, and that it was a useful measure, fuzzy as erotic handcuffs, for gauging the happiness and liberty of a people. 

Because, at base, they understood that freedom is for something. Not just atavistic struggle for the sake of struggle, in the fascist manner. That can only end as Mishima did; auto-erotic evisceration.

It should be beyond dispute that communists created truly incredible art. Even before the liberationist waves of music and film from the Soviet 1980s, Soviet cinema, literature, and poetry had produced banger after banger after straight-up banger. What should be equally beyond dispute is that these successes occurred almost in spite of the regime rather than because of it; ideological policing stymied great artists, creating censor slaloms for creatives to ski through.

But the question remains: how did authoritarian communist regimes still generate more and better art than their fascist counterparts, who left nothing besides Leni Riefenstahl’s contestable agitprop behind? The answer lies in the reason communism, for all its failings, remains firmly on the left rather than the right: communists believe in the ideal of equality. The struggle was for something. Something real. For the happiness of mankind, for the equality of what they believed to be a truer democracy on the other side of proletarian dictatorship. Unlike fascists who struggle for the sake of struggle at the end of History, communists struggle for something that looks like a more equal world.

This belief was another fruit of the 18th century’s tree: all human beings were equal by dint of being human. There was no other reasoning. It owed something to the way Abrahamic religions viewed all humans as the same children of God, but rapidly evolved into a basic understanding that human beings were yoked together by our shared reason and shared vulnerabilities. Communism’s take on that was that most human beings were definitionally proletarian and therefore had much more in common with each other than artificial nationalisms would suggest; cue the Internationale. Universalism is a fertile seedbed for art, however. And thus communist art slapped, not infrequently. 

Communism as actually practised, however, frequently denied personal liberty. Thus, the greatest Soviet poet would’ve likely despised me calling her that: Anna Akhmatova was confined in a gilded cage in Petrograd while her family was picked off into gulags by a regime that resented her. In a particularly eloquent act of envy, Soviet censor Andrei Zhdanov described her as “half harlot, half nun,” castigating her as a purveyor of “eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference.” Despite all the censorship and attacks on her life, she lived, her work enduring in volumes republished to this day. 

Fascism, meanwhile, denies both equality and liberty. The arterial between communism and liberalism was that belief in equality, and that’s what gave us Solaris and Battleship Potemkin. That’s what gave us Soviet rock in the ’80s. But fascism offers nothing but static. Not even Swan Lake is available to plaster over its failures.

Authoritarian madness often lays siege to the arts first, for our ability to sing and dance will always make a mockery of the self-seriousness inherent to anyone arrogant enough to believe they can reset the clock to Year Zero. Years ago, when I chanced upon the music of Khmer crooner Sinn Sisamouth, learning his date of death stopped me cold. Circa 1976. I knew what it meant. And as I looked up his compatriots in the burgeoning Khmer rock scene of the ’60s and ’70s, the dates of death accumulated against that black filter, hazy in their haunting lack of clarity. Ros Serey Sothea; circa 1978. Pen Ran; circa 1978–79. Mao Sareth; circa 1976. They were all painfully young. 

Must we belabour the reasons that the Khmer Rouge murdered them all? The forces of illiberalism pull the needle off the record wherever they can, because expression in song and deed will invariably lead one away from obedience.

It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that liberalism reigns from the DJ’s booth as a Goddess, whether she wears the clothes of anarchism, communism, or any of the technicolour dreams of liberalism’s own coat. Liberalism reigns in the love of humanity and its universal language, she counterposes herself against the censors who saw hell in “degenerate art,” Khmer rock, the sway of Elvis’ hips, the universal appeal of jazz, doo-wop, Motown, funk, and soul, the queerness of the nightclub, the vivid reclamations of music in every tradition and language, remixed into something ready for the next movement of eternity.

For if we can dance together, we can, at last, live together. That, in the end, is the ultimate goal of liberalism.

Featured image by Roberto Rendon / Unsplash