A Walking tour of queer performance on the lower east side
Hello everyone! I’ll be your guide for today’s walking tour. This walk was commissioned by Extra Extra magazine as part of its contribution to Performa 25.
Today we’re exploring a different thread in the history of queer performance here on the Lower East Side – one that weaves together queer theory and punk rock, experimental dance and nightlife, love and loss. Our title comes from the Future Bible Heroes anthology Memories of Love, Eternal Youth, and Party Going (2013), which feels like the perfect soundtrack for this journey through the then and there of José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity.
This walk is also about friendship as a way of life, so it will be an homage to José’s friendship with Claudia Gonson of the Future Bible Heroes and with Kay Turner of Girls in the Nose – a lesbian feminist punk rock band that anticipated riot grrl.
We’ll walk from here at Dixon Place down to Bowery Ballroom, then continue south to Abrons Arts Center, with a few meaningful stops along the way. Our route takes us through Seward Park, past the library where Parker Posey learned the Dewey Decimal System in the iconic film Party Girl (1995), and by sites that connect fashion, art collectives, and the ongoing work of remembering.
1. Dixon Place, 161A Chrystie Street
We’re starting here at Dixon Place, one of the most important venues for experimental performance in New York. Founded in 1986 by Ellie Covan in her loft apartment up the road, Dixon Place has always been a home for work that doesn’t fit anywhere else – queer performance, experimental theater, performance art, poetry, music that defies genre.
In April 2013, something remarkable happened here. A performance called Otherwise: Queer Theory into Song, conceived by folklorist and performer Kay Turner, premiered at Dixon Place. Kay and her collaborators took texts from queer theory – including writing by José Muñoz – and turned them into songs. Judith Butler, Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, Heather Love, and other authors found their words reflected back to them, set to a beat. The show played with high and low, serious and camp, disidentifying with both academia and the punk rock stage. The show has been reprised several times since, including at Joe’s Pub.
Tragically, José passed away suddenly in December 2013, just eight months after that performance.
Dixon Place hosted an impromptu memorial, and the performance community gathered here to mourn and celebrate someone who had given them language for their hopes and their horizons. The fact that he had witnessed his ideas transformed into song at this very venue made the loss even more poignant.
Dixon Place has been in this location since 2011, but its spirit – making space for work that takes risks, that refuses easy categorization – connects it to a longer lineage of downtown experimentation.
Song for this stop: “Cruising Utopia” from Otherwise: Queer Theory into Song – the song that takes its title directly from José’s book, performed at this very venue.
Walking down Chrystie Street:
As we head south on Chrystie, we’re walking through layers of Lower East Side history. This neighborhood has always been a place of arrival and transformation – waves of immigration, subcultural movements, artistic experimentation. In José Muñoz’s terms, it’s a space where the “not yet here” of queer futurity kept finding temporary homes.
Today this area is known as Dimes Square, after a hip restaurant. But the roots of its alternative history go back to at least the 1990s, as epitomized by Daisy Mayer’s cult classic film Party Girl. Starring Parker Posey, it was the first film to premiere on the internet, and encapsulated a Gen X sensibility with its underground raves, overdue rent, and passionately misguided affairs.
Song for this stretch: “Real Summer” from Memories of Love – evoking the fleeting moments of possibility that define this neighborhood.
2. Bowery Ballroom, 6 Delancey Street
We’ve arrived at the Bowery Ballroom. This venue opened in 1997 and quickly became one of New York’s premier mid-sized music venues, known for its excellent sound and intimate feel despite holding 575
people.
The Bowery Ballroom sits on what was historically the Bowery, the avenue that marked the edge of respectability. To the west was Greenwich Village and its bohemian history; to the east was the Lower East Side with its tenements and immigrant communities. Music venues along this corridor – from CBGB to Bowery Ballroom – have always been places where different worlds collide. Vaginal Davis and her band PME performed her iconic “The White To Be Angry” concert here.
On July 10, 2013 – the same month as the Queer Theory into Song performance at Dixon Place – Stephin Merritt performed here with the Future Bible Heroes, with Christopher Ewen and Claudia Gonson.
Merritt is an interesting figure in the lineage of queer art-pop. His songs are characterized by emotional restraint verging on deadpan, coupled with devastatingly sincere lyrics about love, loss, and longing. His music was a shared favorite of Jose and Tavia, who saw that show together.
The Future Bible Heroes’ Partygoing has a track called “Memories of Love” – our tour’s title. The album’s aesthetic perfectly captures a certain downtown sensibility: intellectual, ironic, but never cynical about matters of the heart.
That 2013 show was part of a moment when indie pop was grappling with its queer history, when artists like Perfume Genius and Anohni were bringing queer vulnerability to wider audiences. Merritt’s work bridges generations – from the experimental pop of the 1990s to contemporary bedroom producers – and his performances at venues like Bowery Ballroom connected the intimacy of small clubs to the pragmatic professionalism of larger venues. He is an artist who has managed to stay resolutely outside the “quagmire” of the present.
Song for this stop: “Memories of Love” (title track) from Memories of Love – the song that names our tour, with its themes of longing, distance, and the way the past haunts the present.
3. Congee Village, 100 Allen Street
We’re passing Congee Village here on Allen Street. This Cantonese restaurant became a post-show gathering place for downtown artists, performers, and club kids. After performances at Dixon Place, after late nights at clubs, people would end up here until 2am, continuing conversations that had started on stage or on the dance floor.
These kinds of spaces – the restaurants and diners where artists gathered after the official performance ended – are part of the infrastructure of queer performance culture. José Muñoz understood this: utopia isn’t a place, it’s a moment of collective gathering. Post-pandemic, it now closes earlier.
Song for this stop: “A Drink Is Just the Thing” from Partygoing – celebrating those late-night gathering places where the real work of community happens.
4. Reena Spaulings Fine Art, 371 Grand Street
A brief detour: Reena Spaulings Fine Art opened at 371 Grand Street in 2004 as a project of Bernadette Corporation, an artist collective that formed in 1994 in New York’s club scene. Bernadette Corporation emerged from the same downtown milieu that produced the club kids and drag scene – members threw parties at Club USA, created a DIY fashion line, and published a magazine that juxtaposed fashion spreads with French
theory.
The gallery was named after a character in a novel collectively written by Bernadette Corporation – an experiment in collaborative authorship that influenced how younger artists thought about making work together. Reena Spaulings showed early work by artists like Juliana Huxtable, Josh Smith, and K8 Hardy, and the gallery’s informal approach and critical stance toward art world capitalism helped establish the Lower East Side as a center for contemporary art in the 2000s.
Bernadette Corporation represents another version of what we’re tracing: art practices that refuse fixed identity, that work collectively, that move between fashion, theory, nightlife, and visual art without respecting boundaries. It’s another manifestation of the queer formalism José Muñoz identified – work that uses form itself as a way of imagining other worlds.
Song for this stop: “The World Is a Disco Ball” from Eternal Youth – reflecting the collective’s ethos of refraction, multiplicity, and the way surfaces can be political.
5. Seward Park and Seward Park Library, 192 East Broadway
Let’s stop here at Seward Park. The park itself opened in 1903 as the first municipally built playground in the United States, serving the dense immigrant community of the Lower East Side. The library on its eastern edge opened in 1909, one of 65 Carnegie libraries in New York City.
As a scholar steeped in Marxism and social movements, José was attentive to the possibility of public spaces serving as what he called a “punk rock commons.” Public works represent a then and there of social provision that resonates anew today, as we fight for affordability and a city that belongs to all New Yorkers. And the library as a site of banned knowledges was a cultural front to be defended against reactionaries.
An artist in the spirit of Munoz’s punk rock commons is Cameron Rowland. In 2021, Rowland placed five benches in this park as part of an exhibition called “Deputies” at the nearby Essex Street Gallery. These benches look identical to the other benches in the park, except they’re not bolted down. Each one is titled after the address of an unmarked Black burial ground in New York City – sites that have been built over, erased from the landscape and from memory. Perhaps you can find them now.
Rowland’s work addresses the ongoing violence of racial capitalism, the way policing and property relations continue the logic of slavery. These benches are memorials, but they’re also what Rowland calls sites “for resting or remembering or plotting.” They’re unauthorized interventions in public space, acts of quiet insurgency.
The gesture connects to a longer history of queer and trans people of color using art to mark their presence in spaces that would prefer to forget them. Like Marsha P. Johnson claiming the streets of the Village as her stage, Rowland claims public space as a site of historical reckoning.
Song for this stop: “From Some Dying Star” from Eternal Youth – reflecting on memory, loss, and what gets erased from history.
And here’s the Seward Park Library. This magnificent four-story Renaissance Revival building served generations of immigrants who came to the Lower East Side seeking new lives. It once had a roof garden where people could read outdoors late into the evening.
But for those of us of a certain age, this library has another significance. It’s where Parker Posey’s character Mary works in Party Girl. That movie – shot on location in pre-gentrification Lower Manhattan –
captured a moment when club kids and drag queens, underground raves and serious fashion, queer nightlife and intellectual aspiration all collided. Mary goes from throwing illegal parties to discovering her calling as a librarian, learning the Dewey Decimal System high on weed, famously reorganizing her DJ roommate’s record collection by genre: “tribal, sleaze, disco.”
Party Girl documented the downtown scene that many of the same people from Queer Theory into Song were part of – a world where Judith Butler and deep house music could coexist, where you could be deadly serious about theory and utterly devoted to the dance floor. The film featured Lady Bunny in a cameo and captured the last moment before Giuliani’s cleanup of the city sanitized the neighborhood.
Song for this stop: “I Prefer My Meanings.”
6. Patricia Field Boutique, 211 East Broadway
Just down the street at 211 East Broadway is the current location of Patricia Field’s boutique. Pat Field’s original store was uptown on 8th Street, where it became legendary as a place where trans women, drag queens, club kids, and fashion iconoclasts could find work and community. Many of the performers we’re discussing today worked at Pat Field – it was more than a store, it was a nexus.
Field famously costumed Sex and the City, bringing downtown queer style to mainstream television. But her real legacy is in giving space and visibility to people the fashion industry otherwise excluded. The store was a kind of performance space itself, where gender was always up for grabs and style was a form of world-making.
The boutique’s presence here in the Lower East Side connects to that history of making room for people who don’t fit, for aesthetics that challenge and provoke. The last time I was here, Pat was sitting on her stoop, and one of her children was working the till. Her memoir is on sale, and if you are nice, she may sign it for you
Song for this stop: “Death Opened a Boutique” from Memories of Love – a darkly playful meditation on fashion, transformation, and reinvention.
7. Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street
We’ve arrived at our final stop: Abrons Arts Center. Founded in 1975 by the Henry Street Settlement, Abrons has been a crucial venue for experimental performance, particularly dance. Its two theaters – the Harry de Jur Playhouse and the smaller Experimental Theatre – have hosted generations of downtown artists.
Since 2010, Abrons has been a home for American Realness, the experimental dance and performance festival founded by Ben Pryor. The festival’s mission statement says it presents work that is “loud, queer, disturbing, hilarious, critically engaged, beyond post-modern and undeniably present.” In its heyday, American Realness was one of the most important platforms for radical performance in North America. Artists like Saje Ni’Ja Whitson, Ligia Lewis, and many more were showcased here every January.
Miguel Gutierrez, a queer Colombian American choreographer, was a fixture at American Realness. His Age & Beauty trilogy, performed here in 2015–2016, directly addresses the representation of dancers’ bodies, the labor of performance, tropes about aging gay choreographers, and what he called “mid-life anxieties about relevance, sustainability, and artistic burnout.” When Jose died, Miguel organized the artist tribute memorial at the Whitney Museum, in its former location on the Upper East Side.
In Age & Beauty Part 1: Mid-Career Artist/Suicide Note, Gutierrez (then 43) performed a duet with 24-year-old Mickey Mahar, moving from precise unison dances to what he called “an irreverent and celebratory corruption of orderliness.” The piece suggested that “hyper-emotional affect is not only the conceptual and choreographic core of the performance, but also the only hope for continuing in this fucked-up world.”
This is exactly the kind of work José Muñoz theorized in Cruising Utopia – performance that refuses to be respectable, that insists on messiness and emotion and the body’s vulnerability as political acts. Gutierrez’s work, like José’s writing, asks: How do we keep making art in conditions of precarity? How do we age as queer people in a culture that worships youth? What does queer futurity look like when you’re middle-aged?
In 2018, American Realness presented Variations on Themes from Lost and Found, co-directed by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez, which reconstructed the work of John Bernd, a dancer and choreographer who died of AIDS-related illness in 1988. The piece asks what it means to remember bodies and movements that are gone, to carry forward the work of artists who didn’t live to see their middle age.
Abrons, like Dixon Place, has consistently made space for work that grapples with loss, with queer and trans embodiment, with the question of how performance makes and remakes community. It’s been a home for artists working in the tradition José Muñoz described: using performance to imagine otherwise, to gesture toward futures that don’t yet exist.
Song for this stop: “Something from Otherwise.”
Conclusion
Our walk today has traced a particular geography of queer performance on the Lower East Side in the early 21st century.
José Muñoz wrote that queerness is “essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” The performances and sites we’ve discussed today are all versions of that insistence – moments when artists gathered to imagine and temporarily create other ways of being together.
The title of our tour, “Memories of love, eternal youth, and party going,” might sound ironic. We’ve talked about aging, about death, about loss. But there’s something deeply earnest in the phrase too. These are memories of love – love between collaborators, love between audiences and performers, love for queer elders who didn’t survive. These are insistences on eternal youth – not biological age, but the refusal to grow up in the way straight culture demands. And these are ongoing
parties – temporary autonomous zones where other rules apply, even if just for the duration of a performance.
Thank you for walking with me today. I encourage you to visit these venues, to see performances, to continue the conversation. And if you want to read more about this history, I recommend visiting independent bookstores like Bluestockings on Allen Street or museums like the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art on Wooster Street. As we face repression of LGBTQIA+ across the nation and the world, this extended tour beyond the “four block radius” that was José’s NYU stomping grounds reflects the possibility of a future horizon.
Special thanks to Kay Turner and the memory of José Esteban Muñoz (1967–2013).
