[yasr_overall_rating]
A review of the wild New York City nightlife of the 90s. The cast of characters who made up the infamous Club Kids speak candidly about that era, culminating with Alig’s release from incarceration.
New York City has long been considered the quintessential American metropolis. It is the heart of the global financial industry and the transatlantic cultural capital. As Jay-Z wrote, “If you make it here, you can make it anywhere.” New York is the American experience writ small: try, fall flat on your face, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, and try again. Despite its early role as America’s most cosmopolitan city, and its current iteration as the proverbial “shining city on a hill”, the Big Apple also used to be a very rotten one. In the 1980s, New York descended into a steep decline marked by rampant crime, collapsing infrastructure, fiscal disaster, and ineffective civil institutions. Against this backdrop of urban decay thrived Michael Alig and the “Party Kids”, the subjects of the documentary “Glory Daze.”
Michael Alig did not have an easy childhood. He grew up in the deeply conservative Midwestern hamlet of South Bend, Indiana as a young gay man. Alig had the singular misfortune of growing up homosexual in a time when the redoubts of Middle America were not yet ready to accept someone of his orientation. It is thus unsurprising that as an adult, he would seek his fortune in the socially liberal New York City. It is here that “Glory Daze” truly begins, and where it becomes clear that Alig’s meteoric rise to the top of the city’s social scene was greatly assisted by its growing status as a moral cesspool.
The central conceit of “Glory Daze” is simple enough: it is a rather low-budget, “E! True Hollywood Story” type documentary chronicling Michael Alig’s transformation from a Fordham University student to lynchpin of New York City’s party scene and, ultimately, to unintentional murderer. The cast of interviewees is, to put it mildly, colorful. They exemplify the powerful culture of artists and LGBT folks that exercised strong influence over an unsanitized version of New York City. One man, an Italian immigrant, comments that in the 1980s it was impossible for him to find a restaurant that served cappuccino, but that he knew of twenty BDSM clubs in the immediate vicinity. Alig quickly found a home with others like himself – misfits in certain corners of America, but wholly at home in a city where anything went. His path is not unpredictable: he rose to become an A-list clubber and party promoter, with a recognizable entourage that New York Magazine dubbed “the Club Kids.” As is wont to happen, Alig and his friends fell victim to the vices of their fame and social power, spiraling into a cycle of heavy drug use.
The most unexpected part of the documentary, at least for me – being born after the heyday of Alig and the Club Kids – was the revelation that Alig’s downfall came when he was convicted of first degree manslaughter inadvertently causing the death of his drug dealer, Angel. The circumstances of the death are a little unclear, though Alig freely admits to his responsibility in bringing it about: he and a friend, Freeze, got into an argument with Angel that quickly became physical, resulting in his accidental death and an ensuing cover-up. The candid way that Alig and the other subjects deal with everything, from Angel’s death to the idiosyncrasies of being a gay club promoter in 1980s New York is what puts “Glory Daze” in a tier above average documentaries.
It is endlessly fascinating to watch as various people or events are brought up, and each interviewee remembers them differently. Alig is described as being a genius, or utterly amoral, or just a regular suburban kid – or sometimes all three. Some of his closer cohorts seem like they feel vaguely guilty about their drug use and association with a man in prison for manslaughter, and also seem eager to avoid culpability. Oftentimes, they lament a time before New York City was gentrified or “Disneyfied,” and they were able to push the boundaries of art, creativity, sexuality, and gender. “Glory Daze” feels like a frayed connection to a vision of America’s greatest city that existed in a fever dream, tangible to only a very few – and perhaps they too are trying to convince themselves that the complicated gradient from art to avarice was real.
Alig’s fabulous, contradictory version of New York City was eventually driven to extinction by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his promotion of “broken windows” policing. In a city seeking to be everything to everybody, it ironically led to the collapse of the very unique culture of LGBT clubbers and creatives. Alig was sentenced in 1997 to ten to twenty years in prison for first degree manslaughter (he was released in 2014). His legacy is complicated, and not just because of Angel’s death. Did the Club Kids help mainstream gay culture, thus leading to growing acceptance of the LGBT community down the road? Was their refusal to be marginalized and categorized what planted the seeds for a movement that culminated in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage in the United States? Or were they amoral drug abusers and, in some cases, selfish criminals? “Glory Daze” makes no bones about its subjects existing in a morally gray area that we all have a claim to being a part of. This is what makes the documentary a strong addition to the genre, if a bit lacking in polish and suffering from a weak second hour.
Available on VOD August 16th
