When New York Nightlife Queen Ladyfag Hosts a Party, It Never Stops
Photos: Roy Beeson
The party at the beginning of the night.
The week that I’m supposed to meet Ladyfag and interview her in preparation for New York fashion week, she sends me an email: “Hello! Apologies about the delay, I’m in and out of consciousness with some sort of chest virus. But I’ve been on antibiotics since Sunday …so I’ll be ready and all yours when you need me!” She continues with a list of the events she’ll be attending, any of which I’m welcome to join: the Adam Selman show, the Telfar show, a McQ party she’s hosting. The 40-year-old nightlife impresario whom the New York Times has called the “rave of the future” has more get-up-and-go than most twentysomethings.
We decide that I’ll turn up to her party that Sunday night—September 11—for Battle Hymn, her weekly dance party held at Flash Factory in Chelsea, which she hosts in addition to 11:11 Fridays at Open House in the East Village, Holy Mountain monthly at Slake in Midtown, and Shade, a warehouse party whose address is never the same place twice. Ladyfag—or, Lady, as her friends and associates call her—will also be celebrating her 40th birthday that night, which means that even for someone whose professional description requires party throwing, it should be a night.
Ladyfag is a name that the Toronto native adopted in a nod to the contradictions of her persona; though not a gay man, most of her friends are, and though she doesn’t consider herself a lady, her sartorial tastes can often run toward the Victorian. As she tells it, her goal before moving to New York eleven years ago was to open a vintage clothing store in the Toronto neighborhood of Kensington Market. “I thought of this trip to New York as my last hurrah before setting up roots in Toronto,” she says, “and I never went back.”
Aquaria, Harry Charlesworth, Lady, Sussi strike a pose.
She still thinks one day she might return to her shop (“It’d be nice to set up something like a living room where my friends could gather once I turn 60”) and her vision of Kensington Market lays bare a series of predilections in thrall to the high/low beautiful mess of it all. “Kensington Market is amazing because people go to the fruit and vegetable markets there, but there’s also the Caribbean and Jamaican food, and it’s right next to Chinatown, and then there are the hippies and the punks who have stores there, too,” she says. “People have tried to gentrify Kensington Market for so long, but no one ever can. I mean, the junkies are still there. It’s really the one thing I miss about Toronto. It’s fabulous.”
When I arrive at Flash Factory and head to the back room, Lady is getting ready in her Adam Selman dress, her makeup artists applying crystals to her body—“I wanted to go for Studio 54 glamorous disco look.” Even mid-makeup, Lady’s already leading the circus, telling trans model Connie Girl (whose watchful eyes will be determining who makes it past the door) who should be getting V.I.P. and stage tickets tonight—V.I.P.s are allowed into the booths along one wall of the club, while those with stage access can actually enter the security-guarded area around the D.J. booths. Later that night the stage is where I see Lady greeting Mel Ottenberg, Derek Blasberg, and Amanda Lepore.
A glimpse of Lady dancing in the ambient light of the downstairs dance floor.
An assistant comes through at intervals to get Lady’s approval—about lighting, guest list, sound quality. At one point Lady goes out to assess how the Mylar balloons spelling L-A-D-Y should look in front of the stage. “The ‘A’ looks funny. Can you please tie it down in the center so it doesn’t look tilted like that?” she asks one of the assistants. She comes back in the dressing room and checks her phone, answering text messages and responding to birthday wishes on social media. She doesn’t stop. The only concession to the chest virus she’s battling off is the orange vitamin C slurry she’s been drinking in lieu of her usual vodka soda.
As the clock ticks closer to midnight, Lady confers with her makeup artist on the final touches. “What are we doing for eye?” she asks. Her chic platinum-dyed makeup artist, who’s impressively rocking a leather biker during the last throes of summer, says, “I’m thinking we want to do something dewy.” Lady lets a beat pass. “I trust you. I just need something for definition. Some definition and mascara, but not too much. It’s horrible and fabulous, right?”
Lady hangs out at the party she is hosting for McQueen and Document Journal on the Lower East Side.
When it’s finally time to start the party, Lady gives me a stage bracelet—I’ve been anointed—and asks me to follow her as she makes her way up. The route from the dressing room to the stage crosses the dance floor, and as we’re wending our way, Lady stops to say hello to the club kids, the ones in full makeup and costume whose neon paint and headwear and high heels single them out as the former drama nerds and wallflowers whose creative genius the nightlife circuit gives meaning and occasion. Others come up to wish her a happy birthday, and though Lady has to be onstage, she hugs and briefly chats with each person who reaches out for her.
Lady is constantly answering emails and texts.
When we do finally make it, I see the various demographic slices of Manhattan and beyond that Lady has managed to gather together on a Sunday night (9/11, no less): the slim fashion types in tucked t-shirts and jeans, the black-clad Caesar-sporting health goths, the muscled Chelsea daddies, the androgynes doing their best Leigh Bowery impressions. All ages, all races—though, yes, more (gay) men than women.
I manage only to stay till 2:30, but the next day I see on Instagram that Lady has stayed up until the time most people are headed into the office. When I call her later, she miraculously sounds fully recovered. “I go to parties for a living obviously,” she says, “so when it’s my own birthday, I have to really go for it.” I tell her that what really struck me about the evening was how she managed the ship. There was a moment while her makeup artist was applying crystals to her body when Lady directed in her specific way—friendly but firm—how the glue should be put on: “You see, you have to let it dry slightly before putting the crystals on or else they’ll fall off, and there’ll just be a huge mess to be cleaned up.” There was something about her control of the night’s many, many moving parts that I found surprising not in its existence, exactly, but in its graciousness.
Lady poses with fashion designer Adam Selman and stylist Mel Ottenberg.
“I’m so used to doing insane productions and having a million people asking me a million things at the same time while a million eyes are watching me,” she says. “So it’s about knowing that people are looking at me but also having someone on my team catch my signal that I’m not happy with lighting. Making it seem like you’re not working is half the job. In this business, it’s almost true that you’re not really allowed to have bad days.”
That is, after all, why they come to Battle Hymn and Holy Mountain and Shade. To release their bodies to the thump of the bass, to experience the thrill of meeting someone new, to bask in the radiance of Lady’s light. “You want everyone to feel important,” says Lady. “Not just V.I.P.s and not just club kids and not just the younger people. I’m jumping from group to group and making them feel special because they are special—they came to my party!” Gritty, hardscrabble New York, it’s been argued, has been gentrified out of existence, quashed by $19 martinis, Norman Foster luxury towers, and Grindr. But there’s Ladyfag, still throwing parties for $10 a head ($5 before 10) and dancing till the sun comes up over the East River.
Lady takes a seat at the end of a long night.
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