Raucous and youthful, this is where you go to dance with your friends and finally see that guy on Scruff in real life. Nights like Cissy (Wednesdays) reaffirm your faith that the young gay boys of NYC are still having fun.ġ08 N. In less than a year, this “sister” bar has become a welcome presence at the Lorimer stop. Macri Park reopened as a gay bar in August 2015 under the same owners as Metropolitan. Also: Nights like Hella (every fifth Friday) and Frankie Sharp’s Metro-Sensual (every other Saturday) are popular people come religiously to Queeraoke on Tuesdays and the party/vintage-clothing auction/drag show Alotta Stuff hosted by Alotta McGriddles and Thorgy Thor (every third Thursday) is hilarious fun.Ĥ62 Union Ave., at Metropolitan Ave., Williamsburg 71
And now that summer’s coming up, Metropolitan will be resuming its legendary free (with a drink) Sunday barbecue. The place is known for the outdoor patio, where you’ll find many a bearded grad-student dude with a beautiful woman who looks like she’s in HAIM. Both divey and dynamic, the big, multi-roomed locale has a cool factor without trying too hard (a.k.a. The long-running Metropolitan bar has always been the casual first and last stop of the night, but it’s evolved to become something of a Grand Central Station for Brooklyn’s gay scene, with a lively roster of DJs, drag queens, and events that are always mixed and never exclusionary. How we all might live, even after we close our tabs at the end of the night, and stagger back to our muted routines.559 Lorimer St., nr. Because it embraces a radical softening of social category, it suggests something about how the world might be. Even with the careful distance that I-as a straight, cis woman-must maintain when I enter queer spaces, I feel animated by the revolutionary premise of this kind of drag. The variety and fluidity here hint at larger trends within the art form, and have implications that reverberate beyond the drag world, too. “We don’t always need to be padded or shaved.”įor a school of drag to have liberated itself from binary rigidity is no small thing. “No one should say, ‘This is how you should or shouldn’t look,’” she insists.
When I first saw her gliding across Bushwick, she had on a full face of impeccable makeup, a tight shirt whose round cut-outs revealed hairy nipples, and a trans pride flag draped over her shoulders, cascading down her body in baby blues and pinks. She’s a trans femme queen based in Miami, but because of her deep Brooklyn ties (Brooklyn maven Merrie Cherry is her drag grandmother), she’s frequently in the Rosemont’s orbit. “There is no reason at all to subscribe to a binary in an art form that is meant to be subversive,” Jupiter Velvet tells me. Where some drag prizes clear-cut movement across gendered categories, this work worships the collapse of category altogether. A cinched waist sits below an ample beard.
It’s a church of “genderfucking,” where high-femme makeup gets paired with flat, hairy chests. It engages explicitly with contemporary politics, does not shy away from pain and ugliness, and is uninterested in restraint.Ĭrucially, a lot of drag at the Rosemont resists binary expectations. Its performers identify all along the gender spectrum.
But here, in this dim sanctuary from the bitter Brooklyn cold, you sense a hunger for something more knotty. Cis men are still the majority of drag performers, and many queens still aim for drag that’s “fishy” (or female-passing) and polished. The art form has often provided space for cisgender gay men to perform exaggerated femininity: this might be called “binary drag,” the older and more mainstream school, where prettiness and pageantry are prized and performers are expected to cross unambiguously over a perceived gender line. Used with permission.Īt Guernica, Amanda Feinman visits the Rosemont Bar in Brooklyn, New York, to learn about how the venue’s drag shows are expanding the art with boundless inclusivity and one rule: “No one should say, ‘This is how you should or shouldn’t look.’”ĭrag has exploded in recent years, reaching larger audiences than ever before on social media and YouTube, and through RuPaul’s sprawling empire.