Night Class: A Downtown Memoir

by Victor Corona

Overview

The playground of the rich and the beautiful, downtown New York’s nightlife spectacles and power of self-invention incubated pop icons from Andy Warhol to Lady Gaga. NYU sociologist Victor P. Corona sought a new education, where night classes held in galleries, nightclubs, bars, apartments, stoops, and all-night diners taught him about love, loss, and the living possibilities of identity. Transforming himself from dowdy professor to glitzy clubgoer, Victor immerses himself among downtown’s dazzling tribes of artists and performers hungry for fame.


Night Class: A Downtown Memoir investigates the glamour of New York nightlife. In interviews and outings with clubland revelers and influencers, including Party Monster and convicted killer Michael Alig, Night Class exposes downtown’s perilous trappings of drugs, ambition, and power. From closeted, undocumented Mexican boy to Ivy League graduate to nightlife writer, Corona shares in Night Class the thrill and tragedy of downtown and how dramatically identities can change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619029392
Publisher:	Soft Skull Press, Inc.
Publication date:	07/11/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., is a sociologist at New York University. He has been mentioned in The New York Times, New York Post, The Times (London), Glamour, Town & Country, BlackBook, Daily Beast, and The Washington Post. Born in Mexico City, Victor grew up in the New York suburb of White Plains. He now lives in Harlem.

Table of Contents

Pregame 3

Chapter 1 Stef Infection 13

Chapter 2 Up There 61

Chapter 3 The Death of the Party 110

Chapter 4 The Kids Are All Right 154

Chapter 5 Midnight Matriarchies 201

Chapter 6 Boxed In 241

Epilogue: A Professor of the Night 275

Acknowledgments 301

Sources 305

Editorial Reviews

05/29/2017
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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Night Class



"What happens when a khaki-clad academic sociologist goes gaga? Find the answer to that question and many others in Night Class, a wholly original memoir about Victor Corona’s transformation from nerd to NYU’s celebrated ‘professor of nightlife.’ It’s also an inspired cultural history and a passionate ethnographic exploration of New York nightlife and the very concept of self." —Wednesday Martin, author of #1 New York Times bestseller Primates of Park Avenue and Stepmonster


"An engaging, if unlikely, memoir of a scholar by day, club hopper by night… Sociology taken to the streets and basements, yielding a well-wrought introduction to a scene little known—and perhaps little imagined—to outsiders."—Kirkus Reviews


"Readers interested in the glamorous and dangerous world of downtown New York will appreciate Corona’s rich descriptions and deep research."—Booklist


"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... Corona's story of his journey has fascinating elements...Corona... [is] an engaging narrator..."—Publishers Weekly


"In our elsewhere world of emoji-mediated electronic communication and shared cat videos, Victor Corona reminds us of the power and primal immediacy of real, live night life. There is no better urban guidebook to the alive-and-well social scene that is downtown New York City. If you are nostalgic for Studio 54, Danceteria, CBGB, or even Desperately Seeking Susan, sigh no more: Night Class is the book for you."
—Dalton Conley, Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology, Princeton University, and author of Honky and You May Ask Yourself: An Introduction to Thinking Like a Sociologist



"Corona has been carving out the terrain of this sociological frontier for years now, making his way into the downtown nightlife scene with a curiosity skewed more toward the philosophical than the pragmatic." —Casey Gilfoil, Columbia Daily Spectator


"Zeroing in on the seductive magic of the downtown club scene—and the fabulous weirdos who flock there—Night Class offers a totally absorbing portrayal of nightlife, creativity, and self-transformation that’s as personal as it is juicy. And yes, scalding hot tea is definitely spilled! A sociologist who pumped from the bargain bin to the velvet rope, Victor Corona is a Warholian pop critic who would go to the opening of an envelope, and if I were you, I’d go with him! One of the most important books about New York City you will ever read." —Madison Moore, cultural critic, artist, and research associate, Department of English, King’s College London


"Instead of maintaining a critical, anthropological distance, Corona centers his own experience both within and outside of clubs. Part-memoir, part-oral history, part-academic analysis, Night Class, in its intimacy, illustrates the attraction of nightlife, particularly the possibility of self-fashioned identities within the darkened walls of clubs and parties. Positioned somewhere between a nightlife insider and outsider—more insider than out at this point, though Corona does take us on his early cringe-inducing attempts to get into parties—he examines the drive to 'make it' in these small subcultural scenes, articulating the heights and the pitfalls of this fame game . . . Corona’s Night Class takes readers through the dazzling, determined and sometimes, demented characters that populate Downtown nightlife." —Filthy Dreams

From the Publisher

2017-04-30
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.

Kirkus Reviews

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