New Year, New York (According to Linux)

Like all New Yorkers, I am an intensely passionate ass bitch (and ass-bitch) about mostly all of the things I love. For one, I love fashion: resulting in my entire Bushwick (sometimes “East Williamsburg,” depending on who I’m talking to) apartment being filled-to-the-brim with barely-worn designer clothing (my roommate wants to kill me.) Second, I love cute boys: leaving my smudged lipstick in a constant state of requiring reapplication. Third, I love a fierce cocktail: meaning I almost always have a headache (that is, until I start drinking again.) And penultimately, I love partying in the city that I call home: New York. These being a few of my favorites things is why my resting state is back-of-the-club-drunkenly-macking-on-a-male-model-in-head-to-toe-Rick-Owens.

New Year’s is the holiday for partygirls-with-intention like myself. The Eve is dedicated to, well — in reference to earlier: being at the club drunkenly kissing someone while in cunty fashions. For the full year following, we commit (as much as one would to their partner in an open relationship) to the new “us” that we give birth to once the clock strikes midnight (or at least until you recover from the NYE bender on the 3rd of January). As a master in my field, I’ve come here to tell you, my ever-learning readers, that there’s only one way to celebrate NYE in NYC: stay out of Manhattan, party-hop your tuchus off in Brooklyn.

Oh, and by the way: Surprise... I’m baaaaaaack!!! For years I’ve concluded each and every month by recapping the wildest parties the denizens of New York City have thrown so that you, my tea-obsessed readers, could get your fill on all the ongoings of the scene in Scene City. But lately there’s just been one issue... New York has gotten too lit. Yes, even I didn’t know that was possible, but recently especially, the parties and after parties and after-after-parties have gotten so fucking good that all of us have, well, just kept going. And going. Aaaaand going... and going. Between the doll raves in Bushwick, never-ending sunrise sets at Basement,and celebrity filled Holiday galas we’re all still-awake at, can’t-miss events have been so prevalent that I’ve accidentally been spending all my time getting my life at them that I forgot to do the other part... tell you about what happened at them! But you know what? I wouldn’t be the Anthony Bourdain of parties if I didn’t get a little too loaded and disappear every once in a while. Do y’all want authenticity or not?!

So, yeah, sorry, my apologies. New York got too good and I literally forgot I had a job. But with New Year’s comes new beginnings, new plans and new promises (ones I totally won’t break... I promise!)

There’s no place like the present to talk about the past, so with that I welcome you BACK to your favorite column in the world. Here is a very “New Year’s In New York” special edition ofWhat You Missed Last Month in NYC (According to Linux)!

But before we pump it to our New Year’s Eve plans, I wanna reflect with you on one of the best parties I threw in 2024, just last month: The Strangler.

11/30: THE STRANGLER

Anyone who has ever visited NYC over the age of 21 or watched a single TikTok on “Where to go Clubbing in NYC” has heard of the city’s most infamous nightclub: The Box. Written by me in PAPER plenty, the broken heart of the Bowery’s half-bottle-service-spot-half-X-Rated-late-nite-Cabaret has been a staple in Manhattan’s social calendar for more than a decade. (Yes, this is the place where Kylie Jenner pays $10,000 to see the legendary Rosewood shove a plunger up her ass and staple her dick into a makeshift post-op vagina.) When the venue hit its tenure post-COVID, the owners decided an expansion was in order. That dream inspired the birth of the three-story uptown Labyrinth-After-Dark that would be called none other than: The Stranger.

One could only use the term “labyrinth” to describe the club, as the winding hallways and hidden rooms — each with their own set of kooky decor and seemingly endless avenues of adventure — combined with the lawless nature of what one can do within those nooks and crannies, is something straight from the mind of Guillermo del Toro if he did a shit ton of speed-laced DMT and had an affinity for women who could be men and men who could be women. After countless wild nights had by me (and forgotten come morning-after!) When The Stranger approached me about throwing a takeover and injecting my doll-from-Bushwick taste level and is-she-or-is-she-not fame from Instagram, you can see how it was a no brainer.

So I did just that. For one night only, the most it DJs in NYC (Flirty800, Fashion and Sevyn0000) blasted cunty techno in the basement. Upstairs in the main room, heavy-house main players Amber Valentine and Alexis De La Rosa held the CDJs hostage while the Stranger’s in-house band of freaks and club kids (who blessed our shoot this column!) wreaked havoc on stage. Around midnight, my good friend VTSS pulled up with her USB and plugged in for a spur-of-the-moment DJ set that flooded everyone’s IG stories. She’s literally playing Coachella this year... did someone say “clout?”

For a nightlife terrain mostly of warehouse moments in Brooklyn, getting the who’s who of who’s left in scene-city to drop everything and sell out a three-story space in Manhattan reminded me of the parties I first started going to when I moved to NYC more than 10 years ago. Think original Holy Mountain at Slake in 2015, if blue checks existed back then. The best way a friend described the night to me was “a breath of fresh air,” and that couldn’t be further from the truth. Amanda Lepore could be seen luxuriating at her VIP table while a doll in Balenciaga with a net worth of negative 20 cents ingested $400 worth of kundle. When my G dealer got there and texted me, “Hey babe, I thiiiink I’m here lol. Is it the Gay Circus?” I responded, “Yepppp.”

For the last five years, I’ve produced my own New Year’s Eve parties. This is a feat I’d wish on none of my enemies, because it always meant missing (and being forced to against-my-better-judgement compete) with Ladyfag’s incomparable New Year’s Eve bash, an MVP of the many NYE parties that take place in our city each year. This year I made the decision to choose peace, and hosted her Brooklyn Edition of Battle Hymn. The party sells out in seconds, so all I had to do was look fab and have fun... two things I do in my sleep.

While Battle Hymn in Manhattan has the bells and whistles that comes with throwing a party in a proper nightclub, its Brooklyn counterpart has the no-rules je ne sais quoi that only comes with that of an underground warehouse party... which is all the rage right now. By my arrival at 11ish, the warehouse was already jam-packed with a sea of muscle gays, already 4 doses in, wearing nothing but sweat, and ready to ring in 2025 doing the same people they did in '23 and '24. Alinka and Manu Miran spun on the decks, and the world-renowned Boris headlined starting at 3 AM and going until the early morning.

Upon hearing a rumor that I would be discussing the immense level of sin that goes on at the hottest rave in NYC for PAPER, the producer (and former failed love interest of mine that took me to Berghain for the first time... that has to account for something!) sent me a beautifully written cease-and-desist disguised as a letter of admiration in regards to running the piece:

“We love what you do for the community, your work is so well written, on the pulse, and humorous. There’s just one issue: your reach is just so strong that everything you write about gets taken over by rich Manhattan gays immediately after. Our niche and carefully curated sub-scene of attendees is just too integral to the success of our party to risk you blowing up (and ruining) yet another one of our parties.”

Because for the entirety of the 2010s, this same producer threw a monthly rave series called [REDACTED] that quite literally had the city in a chokehold and singlehandedly reintroduced underground techno into the nightlife scene. After the producer sealed the fate of his rave by making me the face of it two springs ago, he decided to bury the party in its casket, and launch his newest party series: [REDACTED] And yes, I will be redacting as much as I have to, I refuse to be blacklisted from the greatest party I’ve attended in my lifetime.

Now, merely a few times a year, the party takes over a monster of a warehouse in Brownsville. While the party’s predecessor had a darkness to it like heavy fog, pitch black dance floors with cool white strobe and furious angry techno to match, the new series is the opposite: advanced lighting rigs in purples, blues, yellows and pinks breathe a sense of PLUR into the Best Buy-sized main room. Instead of the previous carnage evoked, [REDACTED’s] focus is camp. Instead of former themes like Death and the Socialism Manifesto, the vibes now surround humorous ketamine-humor’d concepts like the fictitious Brownsville Plaza, a recent addition to the neighborhood that will add a Rainbow-painted helipad, three Equinoxess and a Sweetgreen 2. On the second floor of the rave, the stripped warehouse was dressed into an abandoned office space with cubicles covered in office supplies and asbestos ceiling tiles to match. What makes [REDACTED] such an incredible party is that when the overarching theme is to basically get as fucked up as possible, the entire city’s queer population comes more-than-prepared to do their part: gathering their drugs, serotonin and demons for weeks in advanced... all so that they too can have [REDACTED] (the name is something one can have all of and none of... at the same time.)

To start our 2025 off right, as my New Year’s Kiss To You, I decided to cave in to the countless requests for what we are leaving in 2024 and bringing with us in 2025. An “ins and outs” list, if you will. But the whole point of an ins and outs list is that it has to be what is actually in and out, which is why I asked the most prolific party girls of our time, my readers, to share with me their ins and outs to possibly get a moment in the column. I’ve compiled the best submissions along with my own, and created the First Ever Official Partygirl End of the Year Ins And Outs (According to Linux and her loyal cult of crackheads.)

INS AND OUTS OF 2025 (PARTYGIRL EDITION)

Creative direction and photography: Matt Woodruff
Art direction: Chris Correa
Photo assist: Charles Pierce
Location: The Stranger