I I was born in New Jersey and have been trying to live it down ever since, anyone who has ever grown up in New Jersey will know exactly what I mean. I lived with my mother and her parents in a comfortable and curious home on the side of a mountain. They were kind, opinionated, very funny, and always gave me the room I needed to grow. I spent most of my childhood with my nose in a book or obsessing over horses, and I wanted to grow up to be an artist and never ever get married.
When I was 14 I discovered boys, or a boy to be more specific. He was a 16 year old rat faced metalhead with a skateboard and for some reason I found him appealing. I suppose in a town that was less than 2 miles square he was about the edgiest thing going. One evening while my parents were out he pretended he was deaf and ignored me out of my virginity, I said no about a half dozen times and he just didn't seem to hear me at all. I only mention this event because I believe that it changed me, it left me with so many questions, and I never really looked at men quite the same ever again.
I spent the remainder of my high school career snubbing my peers and slumming it in New Brunswick with bands like The Bouncing Souls. I felt stifled by the conservative environment of middle class new jersey and I think its fair to say I was an over bearing pain in the ass, but what teenager isn't? I had sought out the punk rockers in hopes of liberation but found them to be just as restrictive socially as high schoolers were. How can something that's supposed to be about anarchy have so many rules? I was desperate to find a place where there were no rules and NYC seemed like a safe bet. They say you should be careful what you wish for, but I had always thought that was just a tired cliché, little did I know.
In 1992 I was just about to turn 18 and I left New Jersey to go to college at the New School for Social Research in NYC. I had every intention of being a thoughtful and serious student, but things don't always work out as planned. The lure of NYC nightlife was too strong and I decided to trade in classes on Hegel and Marx for downtown raves. I was brainwashed by the bright lights, candy colors and repetitive music (the ecstasy probably didn't hurt either). In the beginning the scene had this really inclusive positive vibe going, I had never experienced anything like that before and it was infectious, it was also short lived. I soon noticed that at every party at around 5 am this strange group of people would show up, they weren't like the ravers, they were more like elegant monsters, they were the club kids. They lounged in the corners, observing everything and talking in tight little cliques and I knew that's where I wanted to be. I had had enough of pigtails and pacifiers; I wanted to move on to bigger and bitchier things.
By now the school year I had not attended was over and I needed a job and an apartment. The apartment was easy; I found a one bedroom to share with a Jersey skater kid. He was an ideal roommate, we were never home at the same time and I hardly saw him the whole year. The job, it turned out, was pretty easy as well. I browsed the back of the village voice and found an ad that said "fantasy role-play, no nudity, no sex, no experience required", I was savvy enough to realize that meant S&M and I thought I might be qualified. I had some experience in boy torture and figured I could easily learn the rest. The dungeon was really a 3 bedroom apartment on 30th street and the interview process was fairly nonexistent. In short, I got the job and became a teenage dominatrix. This also proved to be my entree into the world of the club kids.
You see, to become a club kid it didn't matter where you were from, you could be a trust fund baby like James St James or from the suburbs of Ohio, like my friend Sacred, it never really mattered you just had to have a hook, something that made you different and special. We were all self created creatures and I had finally found a place with no rules. The more twisted and bizarre you were, the more popular you were, Michael Alig was our ring leader and was the most twisted of all, and in time it would be his undoing.
But before we get to all that bad stuff, there was a lot of fun to be had. Every night was Halloween, a new theme, a new party and a new costume. Peter Gatien built us an oversized house of cards on the 3rd floor of the club where we could all hold court and indulge in our favorite pleasures. He paid us too look fabulous and behave outrageously, and we did our best to live up to his expectations. My job was to dance in the Shampoo Room, on a tiny wobbly podium to Whillyem's eclectic mix of 80's, disco, new wave and hip hop, I had to beware of records that had a skip in them since it amused him to fling them at me like a frisbee. On Fridays I held the velvet rope to the VIP area, basically I was that bitch you had to get past to get to the good party, but fortunately for most people I was easily bribed. Saturdays I was back up on the podium, teetering in my platforms and dodging vinyl. My days continued to be filled with sweaty business men begging for spankings and licking my boots. The whole thing was held together by constant momentum, drugs, and eyelash glue and it was only a matter of time before we all succumbed to our own fabulousness.
As time passed the theme of our parties became darker, and our choice of drugs more serious. We traded in Clara the Chicken and ecstasy for Blood Feast and heroin. Drugs used to be something that enhanced our experience and it degenerated into the reason we threw parties at all. Emergency Room was an excuse to dress up like doctors and hand out rohypnol, and in one of Michael's more obvious moments he threw one for the Worlds Largest K-Hole. He actually distributed flyers advertising this event all over NYC and then was surprised when the DEA took an interest in the Limelight. Things were taking a bad turn but we were all to fucked up to notice or care, and besides we had always counted on Peter Gatien to take care of those details. What we didn't know was that Peter was in just as much trouble as the rest of us. Mayor Guiliani had pledged to clean up NYC and the Limelight was one of his prime targets, too bad Peter was too busy being holed up in the Four Seasons Hotel with Michael smoking crack to do anything about it.
We had all gone off the deep end and no one more so than Michael. He was on more drugs than all of us and if he could get his hands on yours he would do those too. In fact it was his passion for drugs that made him invite Angel, a local wanna be, to move into his apartment. Angel may have been a wanna be but he was also a very proficient drug dealer and desperate to be in Michael's inner circle. Michael, in typical form, exploited that need for acceptance and convinced Angel to open a line of credit, which was Angel's first mistake, his second was to leave his stash at home unattended. A blizzard trapped Michael and his friend Freeze in the apartment with nothing to do for four days except consume all of Angels product. He came home and confronted Michael and no one can be perfectly clear what happened but we do know this:
Angel was furious, and a fight ensued.
Michael fought back but was losing, so Freeze decided to help with the aid of a hammer, three times to the head.
Angel was bloodied but not dead, so Michael and Freeze decide to finish the job with a pillow and some household cleaning products.
They then move him to the bathroom and leave him for about 10 days.
Freeze buys Michael a bundle of heroin and a set of knives and left him to it.
What's left is boxed up and dropped in the river.

Unfortunately instead of sinking as they had hoped, it floated to Long Island where it was immediately found by the police. Now you would think that the cops would figure something like that out quick, but they don't give a shit about some gay puerto rican club kid drug dealer. It took 8 months before they arrested them, and then only because Michael would confess to anyone who sat still long enough to listen. He really believed that no one would turn him in, but apparently he was wrong because they sent him away for about 10 years. He managed to murder not only a human being, but a whole subculture in one drug addled afternoon.
I left both the club scene and the s+m world in the same year. The two were interdependent in my mind and when one collapsed so did the other, besides I had a burgeoning heroin habit to support and the money just wasn't good enough. A taste for heroin was part of my Limelight severance package along with a very cute but very unemployed boyfriend, who also shared my inclination for the powder. We moved into a hotel, a place famous for being a home to various hookers, transvestites, artists, crazies and a fair number of European tourists on a budget. On any given day you were as likely to run into Madonna in the elevator on her way down from a photo shoot as you were to trip over someone OD'ing in the hall. The rooms were slightly larger than a walk in closet, and contained no extra amenities, including a bathroom, you had to share one with the whole floor but if you were lucky you might get your own sink. There was something incredible about that place though, I don't really know how to describe it, the building itself held so much energy and history, sometimes it felt like you were residing in a living thing. I was supporting myself and my boyfriend by stripping at the Harmony Theater, one of the most notorious strip clubs in NYC. To say it was hole would be generous, I never quite figured out if I was working there to get heroin or if I was doing heroin because I worked there. Either way after a year I realized I was well on my way to becoming a cliché and I wanted out.
I left everything, the job, the drugs, the boyfriend, the hotel, everything. I took time off, I traveled, I spent some time in Dallas (hot) and some time in Miami (hot and humid) mostly sitting on my couch watching Northern Exposure and playing with my cat. After a year I returned north and moved to Connecticut and started over. It is a quiet place, nothing like the city, I am surrounded by trees and animals and in the winter I actually need the 4 wheel drive on my car. It was a tough adjustment at first, I was bored and lonely but I bought a camera and everything changed. Here was the perfect thing to fill my time, indulge my obsession for dressing up, to document life around me and to communicate it to the world, all without ever having to leave my house. I took all that time I had alone, and all those costumes I had collected from my club years and I let my imagination play itself out for my camera. Here was the ultimate opportunity to express myself, my camera felt like a projection screen for the inside of my own head and an extension of my own hand. Some pictures were love letters, some were inside jokes to myself, all of them are a reflection of something that matters to me, something that I wanted to share with everyone here.