Venus X Talks About the NYC Party That’s ‘Black, White, Gay, Straight, Trans, Thoroughly Lawless’

By Jamilah King Jun 25, 2013

Venus X has been one of the most talked about New York City DJ’s since a high-profile Twitter beef with Diplo about the latter’s rumored exploitation of artists of color put her on folks’ radars a couple years ago.  A twenty-something, queer, Dominican DJ from Washington Heights, she’s mostly known for the party she helped start back in 2009 called GHE20G0TH1KIn a recent interview with Sex Magazine, Venus X reminisces about the party’s beginnings, and how it became a melting pot of queer and sexy.

So you were kind of rebelling against hip hop culture?
It didn’t even coincide with what I was learning. I was learning about militancy, gender, feminism. I was learning about all these things that were basically saying hip hop is whack. So I was a little punk girl. I wore Doc Martens and baby doll dresses. I wore a big jean jacket that my grandma had from the ’80s. I wouldn’t have fit in at any hip hop venues.

Who was going to GHE20G0TH1K at the beginning?
It was just a mix of all the people I was hanging out with already:Radical black lesbians from Bed-Stuy who I went to school with; skaters that I knew from being a teenager in Union Square; art students I knew from Cooper Union and from New School; downtown kids from the LES. It was a hodgepodge of people. We invited everybody.

Read the rest over at Sex Magazine.