Andrew Ryce visits one of the best queer parties in Asia.
Up on the fourth floor, in a dark, industrial-looking passageway, was a drag queen and a spinning wheel laid out with phrases and tasks. The wheel determines who gets in—and who doesn't—at Medusa, Elevator's monthly gay party. You spin the wheel and you do what it says: fellate a banana, subject yourself to a glitter bomb, get on your knees and bark like a dog. If you refuse, you have to turn around and leave. The wheel is a cheeky nod to the door policy of many infamous nightclubs, as well as a safeguard and an icebreaker. If you want to go to Medusa, you have to know what to expect.
Though it was founded by two Americans, Medusa is one of China's essential queer parties. Its music policy—queer music played by queer DJs—has a sense of history and purpose, celebrating the community it creates. It's found a niche in Shanghai, offering cozy vibes in a cool venue with more artistic integrity than most gay parties in the city. It's also made connections with the ascendant gay underground scene in the US, booking DJs like Chris Cruse and the New York duo The Carry Nation, who were playing the night I went.
"Medusa is an ANCIENT QUEEN BITCH with SNAKES FOR HAIR and a GAZE THAT TURNS MEN TO STONE," the promotions for each event say. "CAN YOU FEEL HER?"
"TRANSPORT YOURSELF TO A PLACE WHERE FANTASY BECOMES REALITY AND REALITY GETS NASTY."
Medusa's flyers have outrageous graphics. One flyer depicted guys exchanging mysterious bodily fluids, while another, for a Thanksgiving party, showed a leather daddy fisting a turkey. Using phrases like "Ecstatic Exploring," "Polysexual Fireworks" and "Pansexual Realness," Medusa also owes something to A Club Called Rhonda in Los Angeles, whose campy glam is carried over into the glittery costumes and bright clothing worn by DJs and regulars.
When I first walked in that night, things were pretty subdued. It was around 10:30 PM on Saturday, and the soundsystem was so quiet that a cocktail shaker drowned out the music. The promoters had received a warning that authorities were out measuring noise levels. (In China, noise complaints are a surefire way to get a club shut down.) A few cops—dubbed "noise police"—finally arrived around 11 PM, shining flashlights and poking their faces into the speakers. They left without hassle, and the music was turned up.
Medusa residents Mau Mau and Michael Cignarale played an opening DJ set that started out slow but quickly dove into diva decadence, as Cignarale, face caked in a thick layer of glitter, wailed out improvised lyrics over the tracks. By the time The Carry Nation came on around 1 AM, the club was heaving with a mix of locals and expats. A dusting of glitter covered the floor. A Kunming transplant named NY ran the visuals, a psychedelic mix of projections that hinted at queer sexuality without ever touching on anything explicit. Her approach is a good example of how artists express themselves in a country with a government as conservative and authoritarian as China's.
The feel of Medusa reminded me of the wave of gay parties that have popped up in the last few years: events that effortlessly mix music, sexuality and inclusivity into something artistic and expressive. These days Shanghai has a healthy and generally open gay nightlife, but there still aren't many gay events that focus on anything other than mainstream music—or that focus on music in any capacity, really.
Shanghai's gay scene, like so many around the world, is dominated by what are commonly known as circuit parties: an archetypal gay party with a mix of Top 40 remixes and unimaginative house music, marketed to men with perfect bodies who are willing to spend a bit of money. This crowd is what you'll encounter at the average mainstream gay club almost anywhere in the world, and Shanghai is no different. Medusa is so far removed from these events that Cignarale and Which don't see themselves as competition, or even existing in the same scene.
But Medusa wasn't the first party of its kind. An older club called 390, run by an American expat named DJ Sacco, brought queer artists from around the world to Shanghai. They were shut down by the police under mysterious circumstances in 2014. These are the risks of running a nightclub in China, where the rules can change without warning or reason, and the police can do pretty much whatever they want.
When 390 reopened in the spring of 2015, it had rebranded as Lucca 390, moving away from its role as a nightclub and live house (the local term for a music venue) into a more generic lounge. Sacco, though still a DJ, has since moved on. He runs several record stores—no small feat given the cost of imported goods in China.
I learned all this during a week in March that I spent with Mau Mau, Cignarale and The Carry Nation DJs (AKA Will Automagic and Nita Aviance). A few days before Medusa, over a lunch of xiao long bao, or soup dumplings, one of Shanghai’s most famous dishes, Cignarale joked with The Carry Nation guys about what kind of music they were allowed to play: gay, but not too gay, because Medusa had already moved on from its early phase of playing outrageously gay music.
Cignarale, an American, works a day job in marketing and has been living in Shanghai for a couple of years, where he moved to be with a girlfriend. That didn't last long, but Cignarale stuck around and now lives with his boyfriend, Sky, who has been a crucial link between Medusa and the more conservative side of China's gay scene. Cignarale is fiercely flamboyant. His voice boomed through the quiet Yunnanese restaurant where we met for the first time, becoming more boisterous with each shot of baijiu.
Mau Mau is Cignarale's more reserved partner. He's been living in China for almost a decade, moving from Maine to Shanghai, visiting Chengdu often for clubbing. He eats, breathes and sleeps dance music. Mau Mau spends his days running the Elevator nightclub with his Chinese colleagues, and he spends his nights there, too. He lives with Medusa's VJ, NY, in a sprawling high-rise apartment, filled with strange art and two pets: a French bulldog called Bruce and a ginger kitten, RuPaws, who do not get along.
Mau Mau and Cignarale, along with a crew of local friends who support the party behind the scenes, are the Shanghai gay scene's best hopes after 390. The pair met at a "crappy club," as Mau Mau recalls, before realizing they had similar taste in music. Though they sometimes seem inseparable, they're also an odd couple. When they met, Mau Mau had only dipped his toes into queer nightlife, throwing events geared towards a mixed audience. Cignarale gave him the push he needed.
"Me and my friend, [art critic] Alvin Li, were trying to do a drag ball but it got really complicated," Cignarale told me. "We ended up just doing our own party, a weekly called Therapy, and we made a strong effort to promote something queer-oriented. It was successful, but it fizzled out because a weekly party is a lot of work and we weren't up for the challenge. But then Sam and I wouldn't go out to any gay parties anymore because the music sucked. We were like that scene in Party Monster, when Michael Alig walks in and is like, 'I wanna do a night tonight!'"
Around the same time, Cignarale was working on music, and had come up with a remix of RuPaul's "Supermodel (You Better Work)," which caught the attention of local producers and promoters, including Mau Mau.
"We found out that Michael was a classically trained singer and a big diva," Mau Mau said, laughing. But he was a reluctant diva. "He had never sang over his own music," Mau Mau added. "So we just bullied him into it."
"I would do ten or 15 minutes of [live singing], which felt amazing for someone who was just trying to be a DJ," Cignarale said. "I got bookings doing that, and it was very gay. I would come up with all the glitter, I would get on the mic and be like, 'Mama! Doo doo doo! Yass yass yass!' I would do diva vocals. And we had a small little gay following. So we thought, 'Why not do a queer party at Elevator?' I had tried and failed with queer parties, but I deeply wanted to do it. I needed to take this live show into gay clubs."
For their first party, in August 2016, Cignarale covered his entire body in glitter. ("Not even the thick glitter—the kind that comes off and leaves sandy pieces everywhere," he said.) From the beginning, it was important to Cignarale and Mau Mau to stand out in what had become a vanilla scene.
"One of my friends here—he's older—we would listen to him tell stories about what gay clubs were like," Cignarale explained. "They're so cookie-cutter now. They just don't push envelopes. They don't have that next-level excitement or subversiveness... or they're afraid to have it. He would tell us stories about 'big cock night,' or people getting pissed on—like, stuff you'd see at Berghain, but before Berghain was an institution. It was just part of the party."
Medusa's version of subversion is a little more understated (and, crucially, legal). The door game is a big part of what makes Medusa unique in the city, and the way Cignarale talked about it reminded me of the infamous Chicago promoter Ace Pabey talking about his experiences getting people to open up at some of the earlier Men's Room parties there. (His tactics, which included forcing people to take off their clothes, were a lot more aggressive.)
"The door game has been really critical," said Cignarale. "It's about reminding people that it's not about them. You have to check yourself at the door. There has to be a weird, almost dare element to it—you can't come in unless you did something ridiculous, either sexual or degrading. Something fun. There's a joke in it, a sick joke that we can all laugh at. If you turn it down then we don't wanna let you in. Because why would I want you at our party if you don't get the joke?"
Cignarale credits visual artist NY with helping Medusa connect with its intended audience. Her dazzling and often abstract cut-ups of gay imagery gave audiences something to look at, something to focus on—something identifiably queer. There was one moment in particular, when NY was playing with a clip from Alyssa's Secret—a YouTube show from one-time RuPaul's Drag Race contestant Alyssa Edwards—when someone in the back screamed, "Oh my god! It's Alyssa Edwards!"
At this point in the story, Cignarale had a big smile on his face. "I was like... 'gotcha!'"
Mau Mau offered a less sensational account. "There was a time about six months ago when we noticed there was more of a gay crowd that would usually go to the circuit events that were starting to come here. They'd be on the edges of the dance floor first, and they wouldn't recognize the music's lyrics—but then you'd see them half an hour later in the middle of the dance floor, freaking out."
Sure enough, when I was there, the crowd was mixed. Chinese, Chinese-Americans and Brits; bears, twinks and all kinds of in-between; straight people and gay people, along with some that were harder to read. There's an almost adorably small bottle service section, a whiff of Shanghai nightlife's flashy predilection for spending money, which even extends to dance music's underground communities. But there was also plenty that felt universal, like the way a dedicated crew of regulars—including one who referred to himself only as "Egg"—stayed until 6 AM and then stood outside the club after, smoking and trying to figure out what to do next.
As smoothly as that night went, there are challenges and risks to throwing events like these. Even Elevator, a club that has had remarkably little trouble so far, still has to contend with a bureaucracy that is both mind-numbingly vast and capricious.
I was in Shanghai for the tail end of China's 2018 meeting of the National People's Congress—where president Xi Jinping was essentially made leader for life, among other changes—the kind of national event that sees the government clamp down on almost everything. Several clubs in Beijing and elsewhere had been closed (a less extreme version of the mass venue closures during the 19th Communist Party Congress in 2017), and despite some nervous whispers in Shanghai, nightlife there seemed untouched by it all.
"There are times when curfews go up and no one knows how long they'll last," Mau Mau said. "It's not the most relaxing place to run a venue. But you just hope that if there are changes, they'll be gradual and you can deal with them. You'd have to hope that or you'd go completely crazy. But you usually don't know what the changes will be before they happen."
For now, Medusa is on the up. Cignarale and Mau Mau are able to keep the party alive without booking many out-of-town guests, which says a lot about their established identity and popularity—having Cignarale hamming it up over their DJ set is an attraction in itself. It's a tight-knit party with a crew that represents the motley mix of people that is Shanghai's creative scene in 2018: straights, gays, white expats, transplants from around China chasing big city dreams, and locals who have been navigating the city's underbelly for decades. The result is something special that couldn't exist anywhere else, though its ethos is beginning to spread across China and the rest of Asia. With a record label and live-streaming platform on the way, the party's reach will only become more global.
Like-minded events around Asia that are picking up steam in conjunction with Medusa—Mau Mau mentioned Snug at Sauvage in Hanoi, Elephant in Mania, Shade in Seoul, Adult Game Club in Taipei and Yum Yum Disco Dong in Singapore—could eventually foster its own "anti-circuit circuit," like the one that has popped up in the US around events like Wrecked, Honcho and Gays Hate Techno.
Cignarale admits they were partly inspired by those American parties—in general, he's very aware of what came before. He calls himself a "gay history buff," and takes that approach with the crowd at Medusa. He prefers to play older tracks—stuff like '90s New Jersey house, and at one point disco, with lots of diva vocals. ("We had this policy, 'Eight hallelujahs,'" he told me. "We couldn't finish a night unless the word 'hallelujah' came up eight times in at least one set.") But Cignarale and Mau Mau aren't trying to reenact gay history. Like their peers in the US, they're trying to add a new chapter.
"Everyone talks about trying to emulate Paradise Garage," Cignarale said. "And then people like Daniel Wang say, 'Why do you want to emulate a party you had nothing to do with? Do your own party.' That always kind of stuck with me. At first, we copied a lot of other DJs we respected. Or we were like, 'Oh, this is gay, we'll play it.' We would get so high on the fact that we could play these tracks, like Ultra Nate or Murk, and have a positive reception. But our sound has gotten a little more Sound Factory, a little more blended, deeper, darker, more sexual. It's easier for people to like disco. You hear disco, you love it. That was a good start for this room. But when we started to dig deeper into how people wanted to party and where we could take the party, we got a lot harder and sexier. But I still don't play a lot of tracks from, like, after 2002."
Cignarale grinned. "It's special. It's a history lesson for the children. They don't realize that we're teaching gay history."
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