Dirty Magazine has always played with themes of intimacy, desire, and subversion—how does Valentine’s Day fit into the Dirty ethos, and how do you challenge or reimagine the glossy, consumer-driven narratives of love and lust that dominate this time of year?
We’re suckers for Valentine’s Day. We love love, so how could we resist a whole day celebrating it? It’s true that some people’s idea of love is very commercialized, but to us love is revolutionary, like the Situationists in 60s Paris who threw bricks and wrote poetry with the same hands. (We hear they were also great in the sack.)
If Dirty Magazine had to curate the ultimate anti-cliché Valentine’s Day experience at The Standard, High Line, what would it look like?
February 14 from 10pm-4am we’re throwing a riotous sexy love-fest at Le Bain at The Standard, High Line called Army of Love with DJs Dada Cozmic, Donatella LeRoc, DJ Thank You, and Lethal Trip as well as a live performance from Diet Rave Star. We have a very special exhibition in collaboration with Le Bain that will be hung around the club and in the restrooms too, which is wild, and we’re really lucky for that opportunity! At our event you can expect beautiful and kind heads, New York legends, make-out sessions in the pool, grinding on the dance floor and a special activation in one of the hotel rooms you’ll have to look out for as well…
Both Dirty Magazine and The Standard celebrate desire without shame. Why do you think spaces like these are important, especially in today’s cultural climate?
Shame is why we don’t have more spaces where we can celebrate our desires. If people don’t get a chance to express who they really are and what they really want, they start to hate themselves for it. Then they start hating the people who do get to express and be those things. Hence the state of the country right now.
The Standard has long been a home for counterculture, nightlife, and the creative class—including many in the sex work community. How can hotels play a better role in harm prevention and safety for those in the industry?
We’d love to see more harm reduction materials like condoms, lubricant, Narcan and fentanyl test strips in the rooms or made accessible without barriers, since safer sex and safer drug testing supplies should be made available to all, regardless of their job or really just generally whatever kind of hotel guest they are. Hotels could also give sex workers and other guests a way to get personal and medical assistance without fear of law enforcement getting involved. But what we really dream of is the hotel and hospitality industry—along with other industries that benefit from sex workers’ dollars—getting behind the effort to decriminalize consensual sex work.
Your ethos seems quite analog—hosting in-person events and producing print-only issues. Is this driven by a desire to limit online censorship, or is it more about fostering physical connection and tangible touch?
It’s both. There are so many forces in the world right now trying to squeeze us into smaller and smaller bubbles and limit what we can see from them. They want us cut off from each other. For us to be able to create beautiful art that the tech overlords can’t censor, or to create spaces where people can reach outside their bubble and encounter people different from themselves face to face or body to body on the dance floor, that’s real freedom.
You’ve thrown a bunch of amazing parties in Le Bain. If you had to describe the community you’ve cultivated in five words, what would they be? For someone unfamiliar with Dirty, what do you want them to know, and how should they feel walking into one of your events?
Five words would have to be: Sweethearts, DTF, intergenerational, revolutionary, and generous. I think a lot of times people expect the crowd to be too-cool, but when you show up to a Dirty party, there’s no drama. We are extremely accepting. We want everyone to feel seen. We are about expanding our definitions of joy. Some of us engage in drinking and stuff, many of us are sober and still love to go out. We also believe you don’t have to be having lots of sex with many different people to have a fun, sexy, beautiful, joyful life! You can if you want to though! There’s really something for everyone at Dirty and we want people to feel that when they’re at our events.
Do you have a favorite love story you’ve ever shared through Dirty?
When we collaborated on a magazine with MSCHF we had a brainstorming meeting with both teams where we somehow landed on an idea for a photo piece about a man falling in love with his anime waifu body pillow, which would have a real person inside the pillowcase. We loved it because the concept seemed so silly and kind of dumb, but our photographer Max and the models we cast to play the man and pillow magically turned that relationship into something super tender and heartfelt. But our favorite are the stories about real-life love affairs, relationships, and hookups that started out at Dirty events, the best one being when our 76-year-old friend came to one of our parties and left with a new lover.
We’re always excited to say that Dirty has a new issue coming out! It’s going to be filled with grifters, OG Lower East Side legends, assassins, graffiti artists, skateboarders, lots of laughs and lots of smut, some epic artists and photographers talking about their experiences navigating censorship and how they’re fighting back, and of course, some obligatory shit-talking about the Mayor. More than ever we’re stoked to be at the cutting-edge of bringing levity, pranks, magic and smut back into publishing like our predecessors of Mad magazine, Black Mask magazine and Hustler!