Long Street has a carnival air on Halloween: the breeze is warm and it seems everyone is out on the pavements, mostly dressed up. I don’t remember this part of town being this busy since I was a teenager. We’re all costumed and on the way to Death of Glitter, one of the staple queer parties in the city.
We head down a side street to Botanik Social House, a converted bank which plays host to the revels tonight. Someone is checking tickets wearing a lime-green balaclava threaded through with cable ties. Later, he turns out to be an acquaintance from student politics days. There are a lot of re-meetings like that as the night progresses; part of the point of these sorts of scenes.
The first act we catch on the main stage starts with, “Do we have Inappropriate in the building?” to great whistles and cheers of YASSS!! Many of the audience members are shirtless, gender irrelevant. Then: “I hope you ready to shake your ass, get sweaty…” The queue at the bar takes forever, with an anticlimactic VIP area penning in some well-dressed older people. A trio of male nuns make their way past at various intervals over the night, blessing and bowing as they go. After three or four sightings, they start to feel familiar.
Traditionally, D. O. G. has been held at Evol. I can’t say I’m sorry it moved. The old bank is nice; there are considered touches throughout. A bathroom has been decorated with lots of dried flowers and, inexplicably, a taxidermied buck leg and hoof.
I really liked exploring the new venue, all the little rooms with their subscenes and performances. Some spaces have people sitting quietly on the floor, jamming out to electronic music played by almost stationary DJs; others hold much more energised crowds. And it is crowded. I can tell I’m getting old because so many of the girls seem too thin, their nervous spines knobbling out from behind spindly-strapped black dresses.
Later, the wrong bathroom turns out to have a queue that takes forever. The guy ahead of me has an ‘I heart hardcore’ T-shirt. Someone else has a hairline tattoo atop an open smile. Eventually a woman who was behind me earlier, who bailed, comes all the way back across the dancefloor to point me to an emptier set of stalls. This is the vibe: everybody looking out for everybody else at the party, and I appreciate it.
As we’re scudding around trying to find danceable music, a friend spots her lecturer making out with someone enthusiastically on the bridge overlooking the main stage. Curtains frame it like a proscenium arch. Looking up from the main dancefloor, it has the grandeur of an opera house, complete with masked and mysterious patrons. We enter another room filled with tiny old TVs with convex glass, all showing the same saturated image of a man getting a handjob.
At one point, in another room, I think someone is trying to get my attention, but it’s only a dinosaur tail tapping me on the shoulder as its wearer turns around. I see a playwright I admire, and confess my longstanding fangirldom. She is friendly but bemused and moves past me to her friends and another room. We turn our attention back to this hour’s performer, a person wearing a white hand-sewn gimp mask and moving slowly across the floor.
The music is a weird mix of live punk and various vaguely-dancy electro vibes. My favourite sound is upstairs in a tiny room filled with red light. Unfortunately, none of the windows seem to open, so it’s like a sauna and not possible to stay for more than a few minutes at a time. As is so often the case in South African nightlife, streams of dolled-up partygoers are punctuated by underpaid, exhausted-looking cleaning staff. There are women with buckets and aprons, and girls in silver deely-boppers and lots of sticky rhinestones near their eyes.
The thing that astonishes me about this sort of event is how un-sexy it is. I have the same sense when I watch a burlesque performance: it feels much more like a school play than anything erotic, and that’s quite nice. Everyone has worked hard making their costumes, and we’re all here to cheer each other on. The kink stuff is so ubiquitous it loses its potency—incredible how quickly a leather harness becomes commonplace.
But the night is also surprising in other ways. I bump into a recent acquaintance at the foot of a stair and have a genuinely interesting conversation about what we’re reading. Sometimes, at a party, you just have to accept defeat: once I realise this isn’t going to be the best dance of my life, and drinking more probably won’t help, I relax and end up having a pretty good time chatting to someone on the roof.
By 2 am I am ready to go home. The realities of going out on Halloween in Cape Town are making themselves felt: a 10-minute Uber home will cost nearly R200. We decide to wait it out, slowly doing the rounds saying goodbyes, and then sitting on the stone steps outside Botanik, reminiscing about similar nights out. I want to take my shoes off. The party does a good job of making a world within a world, but that ‘safe space’ ends at the pavement. We can’t get an Uber for a reasonable price, can’t walk back without taking a serious risk. But it’s worth stepping into the world of the carnival, even though stepping back out is inevitable.
I didn’t know what I expected to read, but I’m so glad I got a glimpse of your world on that night. I too was there, but I’m realising through your words, my awareness barely extended beyond an arm’s length. I want to change that and try…be more present you know?
Thank you for this gift.