Staying alive (in the 90's)

Trigger warning. This is a candid and honest reflection on life, including recreational drug use, in the Sydney club scene in the 90's. If you're feeling like getting judgy, do yourself a favour and don't read it. 

For me, a decade-long dance-fuelled odyssey along Oxford St and its satellite sisters was a long slow shattering of innocence. It wasn’t all hearts and flowers, but I wouldn’t change a thing.

It started when I was 21 with a certain ridiculously gorgeous, well-hewn lad who was, shall we say, an entrepeneur of the endorphin procurement variety, (yes, you… you know who you are), sorting me out with my first ever party favours. With a hammering heart and all sorts of belly fluttering anticipation… will I turn into a drug addict? (uh, probably, but by that point you won’t care) I dived in, turned inside out and upside down, discovered god (is a DJ), holy-shit, sign me up… and found a home.

​The speed and eccies definitely helped me get fit, but the fitness helped me not need many chemicals, and became its own purring joy. Very quickly I dropped about 6 kilos and discovered that underneath my post-adolescence awkwardness I had the body of an athlete, fluid and fit and muscled, and fuck me, did I enjoy being in that body. Everything felt smooth, walking was like prowling, dancing was almost better than sex. Almost. I could climb mountains, run like I had wings under my heels, dance all night. I found my groove, found the dirtiness in my hips, chased bass-dropping DJ’s like they were lovers, and every night on myriad dancefloors their music fucked me to god. Can you sing hallelujah, my fine party brothers and sisters… hallelujah and a-fucking-men. Cos I did.

Ecstasy was the predominant flavour of the scene, and blurred the edges of the permissible. Those tiny heart-opening love bombs meant that a sweet intimacy was everywhere, knots of people like sweaty happy otters, delicious tingly tangles of arms and legs and massages and long pashes with all your friends, D&Ms that lasted hours, relationships that began and ended on dance floors. This was before the ice and GHB scene-fucking extinction events arrived, the chemical asteroids that killed the dinosaurs. People on pills are largely just… nice. They are their best selves, for a while. The problems don’t really kick in for a few years, when you’ve exhausted your natural serotonin production mechanisms and the proper crashes begin. But I’ll get to that.

I didn’t hang out with straights unless I ran into them at gay venues or at the big parties, or at DCM. Sure, every now and then I’d swim into those fishtanks, but my world was very firmly entrenched in the place where I found the most acceptance. With gay men. In those days, bi chicks copped a lot of flak from lesbians, so I didn’t have too many dyke mates. (Sadly, my loss). So my viewpoint of the 90s is largely from the inside of a community that was being ravaged by AIDS, and beneath the parties and good times, was in an MMA fight for rights and acceptance and simple human freedoms.

Visiting friends in hospital who had been terribly beaten up in a back street by a gang of men, one of whom had a crowbar. Going to the funeral of another friend who was beaten to death. Holding the hand of a weeping bestie who had just gotten the HIV diagnosis, and in those days, with so many beautiful men wasting away, it was a death sentence. Sitting in someone’s house sewing sequins onto endless Mardi Gras outfits. Putting together the Ken's Camper float with my best friends, and being the solo female for that float, a platinum-wig-wearing pink-baby-doll-strutting barbie perched on a lurching campervan covered in pink tulle while eighty gay men marched in gorgeous choreography with their held-high barbies in the third float to the blaring soundtrack of 'I'm Your Barbie Girl.' Receiving mindboggling lessons on how to give the best blowjobs on a banana (thank you Stephen, watching from whatever cloud you're on: I have never forgotten. Nor have my lovers). Dancing in a river of sweat on the raised back section at the Shift, watching men who belonged on magazine covers kiss and caress in heart-stoppingly beautiful displays of merging skin, under a shimmering rage of strobing lasers. Taking 90 minutes to get from one end of the RHI to the other, because every 30 seconds I’d stop to hug someone whose face lit up when they saw me… ‘Gina! Girlfriend! You look faaaaabulous.’ And I loved them all. It’s not the drugs, but… I love you. And you. And you.

For me, some tribal memory encoded in my DNA uncoiled and made itself true in my body at those parties. It felt like cheating, being able to access this. I knew it was teaching me things I would take decades to unpack. I made smoothies and chugged vitamins, real ones, to counter the chemical nasties. Went on picnics and pool parties and adventures to the mountains on strawberry trips and mescalin, Fair Day, Andrew Boy Charlton, Harbour Party, various camping trips with a bunch of queens in amazing outfits, danced in shows at the big parties and the small, went to after parties, sex parties, subculture parties, kink parties, fetish parties, queer parties, all-girl play parties. It’s so bizarre, writing all this now. At the time it was just life. Now I’m wondering how on earth I sustained that for a decade. Youth, I guess.

In the beginning, like a passionate new affair, the scene was shiny and delicious. All the good times. And then over the years, the cracks showed. I saw things I could not un-see. I did things I could not un-do. I made choices with the tools I had, and I was young and naiive so my toolkit was not what it is now. Now I am a grizzled veteran of Life, with the silver feathers and the bone-deep scars to prove it. Back then, I was invincible. And stupid and foolish. Young. Sooooo young.

Life... Ha. Nobody gets out of it alive. Humans are run through with fractures and fault lines, and when the times are good we can pretend they aren’t there, or we just haven’t found them yet. And then when things start to go sideways, those cracks open up and the only way we ever really learn a lesson is to fall into it, all the way, and have to figure things out from inside the jagged maw of our own fickle fate.

I was lucky. I never stuck a needle in my arm, some blessed wise part of me stopped me from sliding down that particular slippery slope. I didn’t hang out with the true gangsters, those glitter-dark predators swirling through the scene, dorsal fins surfacing every now and then, then submerging back into the depths. Some part of me knew I wasn’t the right temperament to survive there, even though I was curious. But I did dive deeply into the human zoo, always fascinated by people, and by the shadier edges of things. I started seeking out the shadows. I soared into the chemical wilds, and the scientist/researcher in me trapped and tracked like there would be no consequences. I was my own human experiment, my body was a petrie dish and I got cocky, skated right up to the edges of cliffs, and learned the hard way that falling is fun until you hit the ground. And then it’s a long long way back up that cliff hanging on by your fingernails.

In 97, after close to a decade in the scene, I broke myself, utterly, falling in love with a pretty, muscly, narcissist sociopath city-gym ‘roid-boy who was also a con. He faked a brain tumour and I believed him (o stupid, foolish girl), and he showed me how to scam a loan from the bank, and then I supported him with it so his last 6 months of life would be some kind of comfortable. I’d drop him to the hospital for chemo. He’d have coffee out the back until I came to pick him up. He read my naturopathy textbooks and faked symptoms every time I started to wise up. I wanted to believe his words so badly I overrode my instincts. I took myself into my own private hell, and went down flaming.

I borrowed from people to pay people to borrow from people to pay people, spiralling further and further. He was a wannabe gangster (but not a real one, he talked the talk like he was a hard man but the time I saw a well known hitman look at him sideways he went white and melted away and I didn’t see him for a week. Said he was visiting his sister. He didn’t have a sister. Little shit was cowering in a hole somewhere). He was a small time crook, a shiny-grin shyster at best. Anyway one day he said, I need to borrow your phone, and I didn’t ask, and gave it to him, all the Bonnie and Clyde bullshit, and later that day he turned up furious because the job he’d just done rolling over a guy who was taking the cash from a nightclub to the bank had gone south when his partner had run off with the money. I remember looking at him and wondering how the fuck I had got here. I knew the guy they’d rolled, he was a sweetheart. And to my shame, I didn’t leave, did nothing. I don’t hate myself for many things, but that one has hooks and still gets me on inky nights.

Things got dark. I remember a lot of back rooms, cigarette smoke, bad comedowns, crawling around the carpet looking for any crumbs of weed. I still went out, but everything about the scene had changed; ice and GHB had replaced pills (although I never went there), there were turf wars on Oxford street, shootings and violence. For a couple of years I was stoned from first light til bed. Conman long gone and me with my name on everything and no way to pay it all off, wandering around with a debt equivalent to 150K (these days) at 29 years old, going o fuck i’m fucked, a thousand times a day. Wondering how I was going to get out of my epic financial fuckup. Wondering how I was going to get off the weed. Wondering how I was going to get over the anguish and heart-tearing grief of realising I had been conned, that it was never real with that guy, and that I had done it all to myself. Wondering who the fuck I even was.

I did get out of it all, by the way, paid all the money back, resurrected my life with interest. But that’s a story for another time.

Getting out of the scene was the first part. And it happened, like most things don’t, all at once, 1999.

It was a standard night. I was out alone. I ‘came to’ at 3am, in my body, on a podium in good old DCM, now long past its heyday, like an ageing supermodel who's hit the booze and spent too many years in the sun. It was like aliens had dropped me into my body and I was seeing everything for the first time. I remember it, clear as day. Looking down at myself in dazed wonder, and thinking… what the fuck am I wearing? Then around the space. And what the fuck is this place? There were about 50 people shuffling desultorily around the dance floor. The acrid stink of amyl stinging my eyes. An older woman we used to call the Eccy Monster shuffling by talking to herself. Condensation fell from the ceiling, cold on my skin. Jaysus fuck, what the fuck is this music? I jumped off and wandered out to the back bar. A couple of regular divas were holding court. I saw with new eyes. Everyone here who is under 30 looks 20. And everyone who is over 30 looks 50. I was 29.

In that moment I knew I was done. Just like that, the switch flicked.

I walked out of DCM and never went back, rang everyone I knew and said, ‘I’m out, don’t invite me to things’. It was hard for the first couple of months, every weekend, seeing the posters for parties and events, hearing the music washing out from doorways, seeing people I knew on their way to some fabulous night. All the FOMO.

I white knuckled it through a few weekends, ditched all the numbers of dealers out of my phone. I learned what Sunday looked like. I hadn’t seen one for close to a decade. Now I was the one walking out after a good night’s sleep seeing the people spilling onto the sidewalk because the club had closed. It took a while to learn how to be a regular human. I’m not sure I ever have, to be honest.

I still went to Mardi Gras, Sleaze and Inquisition for a few more years, but that was the moment when I realised I’d learned whatever I needed to know from the scene and life had other plans for me. And it was time to get my shit in a pile and fix the almighty fuckup I had made of myself. And fixing the fuckup, digging myself out of the colossal hole I had dug, shattering the parts of my personality that no longer served me.. teaching myself how to make wise choices; these things are the foundation for everything that is strong and good in my life now. Those 10 years toughened me, wisened me, smashed and rebuilt me.

So much of the work I do in the world comes from those days. I still love to dance. Became a global travelling facilitator, a 5rhythms teacher, and now I DJ for conscious dance events, helping people open to music and movement without any chemicals bar the ones our own bodies make. It’s awesome. I fly a lot slower these days, but my body still remembers. And I have those years and all of you to thank. I remember it all with gratitude, and marvel at our resilience, all of us, the ones who survived. We made it. Holy shitballs, what a ride.



Pic.. jewellery photo shoot, mid 90's, by Mazz of Mazz Image.

​All I see is the naiive innocence on my face. Bless.