The People of Vans Warped Tour: You Were Them Once
by Village Voice
On Saturday, July 13th, the durable Vans Warped Tour cruised into the Nassau Coliseum for an all-day festival spread over seven stages. You went to it in high school, so you know what was going down.
“For almost 20 years, Sylvester has been an icon of San Francisco nightlife: outrageous, bold, proud. Today, he is a symbol of a totally different San Francisco — a gay man struggling to stay alive”
“For the first five years that I was writing for The New Yorker,” says a longtime contributor, “the closest I ever got to a person of color was a young white fact-checker with dreads.”
“Given that black folks make art and market it within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, none of us can ignore the reality that any black person who wants to create a product with mass crossover appeal must do some serious soul-searching”
“The sophisticated audience that had turned out to put down the art that was not on display provided a chilling touch of surrealism worthy of Buñuel or Fellini”
“It is a party, and Václav is The Good King: relaxed, smothered in kisses and well-wishes ... the only president in living history who, in one breath, can quote John Lennon, Samuel Beckett, and Immanuel Kant”
