This Is The Story of How An Alternative Nightclub Changed My Life

An 18-year-old, a 39-year-old, and a 46-year-old walk into a goth bar called ManRay.

It was 1995, and I was eighteen, on the afternoon of my first day of orientation at Boston University’s College of Communication, and all of my freshmen peers seemed to have already formed friend groups – at the time I would have said “cliques,” and if you knew anything about me as a teenager, you would know how much I disdained a clique. I felt left out and isolated, and so I had sat myself on the ground under a tree on the lawn outside the COM building; that tree is still there, as I just consulted Google Maps, but it is now surrounded by comfortable-looking adirondack chairs and thoughtful landscaping. I was reading a book about artificial intelligence – “fuzzy logic,” at the time – and trying to be okay with my circumstances, trying not to wonder if my college experience would be marked by the same feelings of being an outsider that my high school years had been, when another freshman suddenly appeared, and sat down next to me, and asked, with no preamble, what kind of music I listened to.

This meeting would direct the course of the next five years, as that person (I will call her AS) would become my best, most intimate friend and truly one of the great platonic loves of my life. We were 18, but both of us more adult than we ought to have been, each for our own unique and complicated reasons, and we shared little patience for what we understood as the childish naivete of our fellow students, many of whom were living in a sizeable city for the very first time. But we were here, now, in search of recognition, community, a place where we felt seen and accepted without judgment, and possibly most of all, somewhere we could dance.

It was not long before we found out about ManRay, by then already an infamous alternative nightclub across the river in Cambridge. Boston University had very strong goth representation in that era, and while I’d spent most of my high school years cultivating a deep and broad knowledge of industrial music both iconic and obscure, I lacked the self confidence (and, as a fat kid, the requisite clothing) to feel comfortable approaching anyone who looked the part of the subculture I wanted to explore. AS did not have the same imposter syndrome, and so she actively befriended everyone we met who wore tall boots, fishnet sleeves, and elaborate eyeliner. We kept hearing, “Have you been to ManRay yet?” And so we went.

We took the subway to Central Square. AS knew how to dress; I had limited options, and I didn’t even wear makeup at the time, but I had one long black skirt, and Doc Marten boots, and a lot of t-shirts for industrial bands I liked. I remember being nervous and excited on the train. I had never been to a goth club. We were carded at the door – we paid the cover. We went inside.

ManRay had three distinct rooms on its main floor, two of which had their own DJs. The front room was just inside and to the right, and I spent little time there; the music just didn’t connect with me as much. There was a lounge area on the left, with a bar and seating and also a pool table, as I recall. There was the back room, also known as the cage, due to the metalwork that surrounded the half of the dancefloor that was elevated a good 3 feet off the ground. That was where AS and I went, and where we stayed a few nights a week for the next five or so years.

Entering ManRay was like walking into a movie I’d written and filmed inside my head a thousand times. It felt surreal, otherworldly, but also inexplicably like home. Over the years ManRay had developed a reputation as an at best unconventional, at worst bizarre place, but it felt warm and welcoming to me from my first steps inside. AS and I started at Crypt (goth night) but soon added Campus (gay night), the occasional Fantasy Factory (fetish night), as well as 80s night (the original name of which I forget now) and special occasions like the monthly themed goth event Hell to our regular rotation. I came to know the inside of ManRay as well as I knew my own room. 

AS and I became regular fixtures, always together, always inseparable, to the extent that people would sometimes confuse our names. When we weren’t dancing, we sat on the steps to the side of the cage, or sometimes on the sofa in the corner, and eventually took up residence at the end of the bar along the far wall, our home base varying by the night. AS was like a sister, or maybe like a twin, we were photo negatives of each other, wildly different in some ways but nearly identical in others, we understood one another without speaking, one of us had a thought just before the other spoke it aloud, we communicated in song lyrics and inside jokes, we literally finished each other’s sentences. Leaving aside the codependence and overwhelming intensity of it, with the benefit of many years of hindsight I remember this relationship with fondness, while also never wanting to revisit that kind of all-consuming attachment again. 

There was a period where I was at ManRay four nights a week, taking the subway to Cambridge at 9pm and then walking back to Boston across the Massachusetts Avenue bridge (measured in Smoots) after closing at 1am or 2am, because the trains stopped running at midnight. It was a walk of about two miles, and spanning the river in frigid wind chills in negative double digits, I probably took my life in my hands more than once, but we didn’t have money for cabs. We didn’t drink. We barely had money for the cover charge. But going to this club to dance was absolutely everything. When ManRay raised their age for admission to 19 and we were still 18, we panicked until we realized they’d just stopped carding us. The first time I got waved through without paying cover, I nearly wept with gratitude. I was seen. I was a part of this place. I had a home.

ManRay gave me my first experience of chosen family. When you grew up feeling like you never belonged anywhere, and then you find a lot of other people who grew up feeling like they never belonged anywhere, that’s a powerful understanding to share. ManRay was the first place I existed in which being queer and/or bisexual was not exactly normalized – because who the fuck wants to be normal? – but was common, ordinary. It was the first place I saw nonmonogamous relationships as a valid option. It was the first place I saw kink as a fun and healthy practice. It was the first place I encountered people who found me attractive not in spite of my fat body, but because of it (this topic is a whole other letter, but for now I’ll extend my apologies to the very first fat fetishist who pursued me devotedly even as I found him terrifying – I’m so sorry it took me a minute to come around on that, but when I did come around, I really came around). ManRay was a place that provided safe harbor to so many people whose interests and desires and passions set them on the margins of mainstream culture, and it gathered them to its abundant corseted bosom with the love of a doting parent. 

Returning to that childish naivete, though – I thought everyone’s college experience was like this. I thought everyone had these magical experiences of subcultural self-exploration in a sacred space of nurturing support. I assumed it was normal to find your community this way. It must happen to everybody, right? I couldn’t possibly have been extraordinarily, unimaginably lucky to be here.

And yes, I was still in college! I worked part time at a convenience store, had a full schedule of classes, and went to the club three to four nights a week. I’m not going to pretend my grades didn’t suffer in freshman and sophomore year, but ManRay felt more important than my coursework as a film student did. The things I was learning about myself were as valuable as anything I was getting from a screenwriting class – and really, was I actually for real ever going to have a job where I would need to know how to write screenplays? Laughable. (Narrator: She would, actually for real.) I was there to experiment with independence and self-expression, and to figure out who I wanted to be.

It seemed impossible that ManRay would ever cease to exist, but in 2005, a decade after I first found it, the club closed its doors. I was no longer a regular by then; I’d moved out of Boston, which had gotten too expensive, and lived in an apartment in a place called Revere, just north of the city. The owners of ManRay’s building had realized the increasing value of the location and would raze the club to build ugly modern apartments in its place (so many times I wondered if someone’s couch or toilet now stood in the place where I once danced to Sisters of Mercy or The Cure). In its final week, ManRay had a series of farewell events; I went to one and almost wished I hadn’t, I was so despondent walking out of the building for the last time. There was talk of relocating, building a new ManRay elsewhere, but years passed, and more years passed, and it seemed like a lost cause.

—

AS and I lost touch in 2008. She had moved back to the Mid-Atlantic state she’d grown up in, and a couple times a year we would make trips to visit each other. By then I was married for several years and already beginning to sense the outlines of my own unhappiness. The last time AS came to visit, I sobbed inconsolably after she left, filled with grief over missing my best friend, the person who had been at my side through some of my most important and formative moments, now so far away. My ex-spouse found me crying on the bed, and leaned over me, his confusion building to anger. 

“Why are you crying?” he demanded. 

“I miss AS,” I wept. 

“Stop it. You’ll see her again.”

“It’s not the same.” I couldn’t explain that I wasn’t just missing AS, but I was missing having deep, intimate friends, missing myself as a free and adventurous person, missing my life ten years before. I couldn’t explain because I didn’t understand it yet myself.

“What,” he said, in a voice brimming over with disgust, “are you in love with her or something?”

His revulsion, unvarnished, unabashed, shocked me into frozen silence. I stopped crying instantly, overpowered by shame. I was and I wasn’t in love with AS. I loved her deeply, and certainly our connection had aspects that bordered on romantic, but it was always a platonic relationship, and I’d never once thought of it any other way. 

I understand now that he was enormously threatened, and had no resources to handle that feeling without making me responsible for it. He, like most of us, had been conditioned by a rigid culture of relationship norms to believe that I should be getting everything I could possibly need from my relationship with him, my spouse. Any other friends I had were merely bonus connections and had to take a secondary role to the primary importance of my marriage. And if I wasn’t finding what I needed there, the problem was me – I needed too much, I should need less. I don’t know if that was why AS and I finally faded from each other’s lives. It might have been.

Looking back, this was the first moment that I started to become suspicious of compulsory monogamy as a relationship standard. Because I’d always had intense, deeply loving friendships. And here I was supposed to give that up, to make my spouse feel safe? Even then that seemed like bullshit to me. But I tried.

In 2016 I gave up.

I had asked for a trial separation, for my spouse to go to his parents’ place for a couple months. He refused, and insisted we could “separate” while living in the same house. Again, I understand now that he was afraid that once he left, he would never be able to come back, and our marriage would be over. He was right to fear that, because that was exactly what would happen, but his choice to stay and attempt to fend it off simply by squatting in the living room for an extra few weeks would have further consequences for us both.

Nevertheless, by late 2016 I was doing everything I could to be home as little as possible. One of my outside distractions was a sketch writing class I took at ImprovBoston, which at the time had a location in Central Square in Cambridge, not far from where ManRay used to be. It was a comical experience, and not for the obvious reasons – I was already in the Writers Guild and had written sketches for an actual TV show and everyone in the class, including the instructor, was baffled by my presence there. I explained that I’d never actually taken a class in writing comedy, and wanted the foundation I’d missed, instead of telling the room that I just never wanted to go home again.

At the end of the class, our class would perform a table read in which we all got to run through one of the sketches we wrote, live on stage, to a paid audience. This happened at ImprovBoston’s performance space at 40 Prospect Street, in Cambridge. I wrote some heavy-handed ridiculousness about talking back to a fat shamer; I haven’t dug up the script because I know it’ll make me cringe into next week, but as hamfisted as it was, it did have a couple funny lines I was proud of. 

I asked my spouse to come to the final show. I told him I wanted someone to film my sketch, flattering him that I knew he would do a good job; this was true, but it wasn’t the only reason. I was trying, so hard, to give him opportunities to be the partner I needed, despite how hurt and hopeless I felt. I was desperately clinging to the last shreds of my belief that he could be that person. That he could come to this event and just be proud of me. That he could show up for me and be happy and supportive when I had success that didn’t benefit him directly. 

He came, and he was irritated and resentful. He didn’t laugh – we had very different senses of humor – and he didn’t offer congratulations or even a “good job!” afterward. He did take the video of my sketch as promised, and sent it to me immediately, making sure to be clear what an imposition it was. I can’t say that I was heartbroken. I can’t even say that I was surprised. But I felt the finality of it, the certainty that we were not coming back from this, even as I tried to push it away. Is there a way to explain this, to anyone who hasn’t felt it? The moment you see clearly how your life needs to change, and there will be so much carnage in the changing, so much blood, and horror, and pain, but there’s no other way, this is it, this is what needs to happen?

My ex’s behavior that night may have been reasonable in a certain light – given that I was on the cusp of giving up on us for good – if not for the bitter recriminations I would receive later on, that I never gave him “a second chance” to prove he could be the right husband for me. This filled me with a deep, shivering sadness. I gave so many chances, long past the point I should have been focused on taking care of myself first. 

He said, “I didn’t know this was my last chance,” as though I needed to tell him, so he could perform whatever magic trick was necessary to keep me there. You don’t always get a sign identifying every chance you get, in life, you just have to compose yourself truthfully and earnestly, and trust that the right path will come through, even with the opportunities you don’t immediately recognize. He might understand this someday, but he would never learn it from me.

—

As I write this, it is January 17, 2023. Tomorrow, eighteen years after it closed, ManRay will finally reopen its doors in its new space at 40 Prospect Street, in Cambridge, in the former ImprovBoston space where I read my sketch with my ex-spouse in the audience six years ago. ManRay’s revival has been in the works for ages; over the intervening years I’d heard so many rumors that they were close to a resurrection, but nothing certain seemed to stick. I stopped believing it would ever come to pass. But a couple weeks ago I heard that it was real this time. It’s been an emotional ride since then; one of the wildest things about middle age is having so much life behind you to look back on, while also seeing so much still ahead. It seems impossible that ManRay closed eighteen years ago; it seems both ten times that long and only half as much. I was, myself, eighteen years old when I first stepped into the original space and was changed by it forever, and then there is all that has happened since, so many experiences, so many life-altering relationships, so many careers, so much change. 

Still, I look back at Lesley in 1995 and she feels as close and real as she ever did, because I’m still that person, and the powerful confidence and self-knowledge I built by doing something as seemingly inconsequential as dancing at an alternative nightclub is with me today, is partly the reason why I’ve managed to do everything I’ve done. She is the reason I found the strength to destroy my conventional married life when I realized it was suffocating me; she is the reason I have said yes to so many risky but ultimately rewarding opportunities in my life, and she is the reason I know how to take so many chances even now. That ManRay is reopening in the same space where I realized there was no turning back, there was no staying put, that I could only go forward, even though the road looked impossible – that is just one of the strange serendipities I’ve had the luck to notice in my 46 years. 

I don’t plan on going to ManRay’s opening goth night tomorrow. For one, I live in Rhode Island now, and I have a job I need to (virtually) be at in the morning, so trips to Cambridge take a little more advance planning and consideration than they once did. Also, as I mentioned, I turned 46 last week, and while I seem thus far to have dodged a lot of the joint pain and early bedtimes many of my cohorts now must accommodate, my once-vigorous impulsiveness has dulled a little with time. I will, however, go to ManRay some night soon. And I will dance. And whether I manage to precisely hit the spot where I stood when I felt the weight of knowing I was going to change everything – the poetry of dancing on one of the places where my marriage died is irresistible – it won’t matter. I will still be looking forward, and I will still be choosing myself.