I've never seen happier Baby Queers than when I went to The Crib in 2005.
The Crib was an all-ages, 18+ party in San Francisco from the aughts to the early 2010s. Every Thursday, five hundred 18-21-year-old Queer kids packed into a massive club in the SOMA neighborhood, among the leather bars and warehouses. It was a barely-legal frenzy of dry-humping, fueled by hormones and Red Bull. For those too young for The Castro, it was the party. Baby Dykes, baby Gays and their fag hags, non-binary kids (before we used that word), armed with only flip phones, dressed in Abercrombie, frosty spiked hair, puka shell necklaces, plucked eyebrows, lip piercings, and acne, dancing to Destiny's Child, The Pussycat Dolls, Nelly Furtado, and Justin Timberlake.
The Crib was produced by my friend Juan, a handsome frat boy who cooked up themes worthy of Spring Break: underwear karaoke contests, kiddie pool wrestling, proms where boys switched clothes with the girls. It didn’t take much for the crowd to go feral.
The first time I ever felt old was stepping onto the dance floor of The Crib, even though I was only 25. It was my first gig as a club photographer. Every party had one before we all had cameras on our phones. It was good money and free drinks. The next day, I'd meet Juan to get cash in exchange for a burnt CD of photos, which he uploaded to Photobucket. It was a Friday night ritual for the kids to go through hundreds of images and post their favorites to MySpace. A photograph still felt like a treat, not an intrusion, and most of them hammed it up for my lens. This was the infancy of social media and the swan song of tech optimism, when we felt the internet would bring us all closer.
It's hard to imagine a party like The Crib in today’s San Francisco, or any of our Queer meccas. Rents are too high for events to survive on a $15 cover and the sale of Red Bulls and cheap vodka that only a 21-year-old's liver can handle. Ubers from Oakland can cost as much as a flight now. Most importantly, social media live-streaming would hinder even the most free-spirited teens from going this full-tilt crazy. The kind of privacy The Crib provided them is dead now.
It's tempting to lean into 2000s nostalgia. While I felt a twinge of jealousy for high schoolers going to Queer ragers (unimaginable to me as a teen), things were not better for young Queers then. Same-sex marriage was still illegal, homophobia in mainstream media was unhinged and AIDS still loomed large. HIV rates were starting to go the wrong direction for young Queers of color and it would be over a decade before access to PrEP. Activists parked on-site HIV testing vans at the entrance, and placed bowls of lollipops and Tootsie Rolls mixed in with condoms and dental dams.
The Crib was the only safe space many of them had.
Around 2010, researchers and health professionals began to observe a collapse in the mental health of teens. There’s a debate raging now on how the rise of smartphones and social media contributed to this terrifying trend. What everyone seems to agree on is that human interaction and a sense of community is crucial for our development. No viral post can compare to the high of finding acceptance from our peers in the real world. The faces of closeted Baby Queers entering The Crib for their first time was the embodiment of hope.
I wasn't working The Crib when an obscure pop singer named Lady Gaga performed on that dirty, sticky stage. I’ve scoured the internet but could only find one fuzzy image of that evening. Imagine that.
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