It turns out that Mint-known diurnally as Matt-has a cushy position with Cisco Systems. He saves his real "living" for the nocturnal hours when he dons the flamingo get-up and glitter. Mint is not a drag queen, a circus performer, or even sexually confused. He is one of the many "respectable" members of society that I've encountered at raves.
Not all of them dress in typical rave fashion: gangster-gone-girly, flowing pants, visor, body glitter, plastic beaded necklaces, pacifiers, spiked, Sonic-style hair and colors not intended for subtlety. The costume is part of the ritual of transformation. The rave becomes the escape for those who feel suffocated by the rat race and company protocol. It is their mode of subversion, a nightly tabula rasa on which they can draw a new identity. But while the repressed adults have a very strong presence, most of the ravers are teenagers and fast-fading 20-somethings.
I was part of the rave scene in the Bay Area from 1998 to 2003. I knew it was time to go when I would walk into a party, think, "Wow, I'm old," and feel like I was in a daycare center catering to hyperactive teens. I watched the scene blow up, from the early days of covert e-mail chains telling of secret warehouse locations to the current "massives" held in stadiums and attracting tens of thousands of people. It used to be that you could only spot a raver by the accidental glowstick tumbling out of a glove compartment or certain spastic movements hinting their body was tuned to the beats of electronica. Now they're everywhere, flaunting pacifiers-once strictly avoided by many because they would label you as one of those "gay ravers"-and anything that glows under a blacklight.
But most of the scene's intensity came from its relative secrecy. Ravers could invent a haven, a truly open space where anything goes, except for negativity. You were not judged based on what you wore or how you danced. The music effaced tendencies to label or to stereotype, and people could connect on the most elementary level. It had the social openness of kindergarten, albeit without lights and with toys inappropriate for the pre-Kindergarten set. This may sound cheesy and infantile, but imagine for a second how liberating such a space could be, and how appealing to people-most of us-who are continually defined and restricted by others.
I won't pretend that drugs were not part of the scene. They definitely were, but when the scene was smaller, the drug-users were well-informed and used them in moderation. The exploding popularity of the rave attracted the wrong kinds of people: those who came to turn this space into their ecstasy-laced playground. They came only to use drugs, not to dance. The media has done a stellar job of vilifying raves, painting them as hedonistic and depraved drug dens. One reporter said, "They're like neo-hippies, but with money and no political agenda." And perhaps, now, the media is partially correct. The last time I went, I saw hordes of pre-teens-who somehow all looked like Avril Lavigne-giddily high on amphetamines. While I may whine about how much the scene has declined, certain indelible things remain: the perfect moment when the sun rises on a throbbing crowd dancing on a beach or keeping in touch with Matt, even if he has retired "Mint" and the pink pants.
Coming to Amherst, I shed a lot of the "raver" part of me. The body glitter and pacifier stayed in California. Other things weren't so easy to discard: the tendency to bounce to any discernible beat, the reputation of listening to "music without words." I conformed-with loud reservations-becoming a peacoat-wearer extraordinaire and J. Crew clone. We like to complain about how we're all the same, but we're not. All of us have a part we left at home: the punk-rock safety pins, the board shorts, the half-mullet, maybe the glowsticks.