In Steve Adelman’s nightlife memoir Nocturnal Admissions, we get an inside look into the generation of dance culture on the rise at the dawn of the millennium, just before 9/11 would alter the course of our culture’s history. Embedded in these stories are anecdotes about how attitudes around queerness, dance music, and celebrity have intertwined for a generation. In its pages, we see vintage photos of today’s icons entranced in the bohemia of yesteryear, during a time before the internet, smartphones, and TikTok. In the pictures, as well as in the chapter on the biggest party of all, New Year’s Eve 2000, excerpted below, a sense of the sensual appeal of the dancefloor shines through.
Fear Factor
“Drink and dance and laugh and lie / Love, the reeling midnight through, / For tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)”
—Dorothy Parker
This was the elevated mood in…
