Night Class

May 29, 2017
In this scattershot hybrid memoir and cultural history, sociologist Corona researches the New York City club scene circa 2011 while describing his own metamorphosis from earnest academic nerd into glittering creature of the night. Born in Mexico and raised in Westchester, N.Y., Corona struggled in his youth with his sexuality and outsider status, finding temporary havens in radical politics and academia. Only after his first forays to nightclubs did he realize that his true path required detours to the gym and cosmetics counter. His activities lead him in the book to discussions about a parade of eccentric clubgoers, including Lady Gaga (whom he caught glimpses of) and the alumni of Warhol’s Factory. Corona had stints as an assistant for the club-kid Caligula as well as for Michael Alig, who was convicted in the 1996 murder of fellow clubgoer Andre Melendez. Corona’s story of his journey has fascinating elements, above all the Alig encounters, but falls short of its potential. The lack of an overview or historical outline blurs his subjects into a bewildering montage, a problem further exacerbated by the inclusion of dozens of detailed interviews that do nothing to move the narrative. Although Corona can be an engaging narrator, the personal material at the narrative core comes across as flat and rushed.

May 15, 2017
An engaging, if unlikely, memoir of a scholar by day, club hopper by night.Corona is many things: a sociologist at NYU, a dreamer (in the sense of both having parents who were illegal immigrants from Mexico and having large ambitions), a gay Latino, and both a worshiper and student of celebrity. He combines all these interests and attributes in this spry memoir of New York nightlife, the bouncer-at-the-gate demimonde of loud discos and flowing drink and drug. As he writes, he is almost alone in chronicling the scene as a scholar: there have been a few who have parachuted in for a quick look and just a couple of other participant observers, including a former runway model who "accessed situations and had conversations that a big-nosed, non-white queer man like me simply couldn't." Inspired to come to NYC by the antics of the so-called Club Kids movement of the early 1990s, a whirlwind of outrageous behavior and costumes that ended in a morass of pharmaceuticals and murder, Corona exults in "the eventual education I would get downtown: the complicated yet very malleable nature of human identity." Put on a costume or a wig, that is, and you become a different person--but in the club scene, you are who you want to be, whatever personality or gender you wish, and by Corona's account, no one is particularly interested in the truth. Though written by a scholar, there are only a few nods to academic niceties here. The only obligatory moment seems to be a somewhat glancing history of the club scene as refracted through the pioneers at Andy Warhol's Factory, whose escapades are well-documented elsewhere. Yet even Corona's nods to those pioneers are lively, as with his homage to Susanne Bartsch, whose "pronounced Swiss German accent is a harsh flourish that only adds dramatic bite to her already expressive character, one that incarnates fabulousness." Sociology taken to the streets and basements, yielding a well-wrought introduction to a scene little known--and perhaps little imagined--to outsiders.

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