The man standing in front of me on the dance floor of the sprawling 24-hour queer sex club was wearing nothing but flip-flops and a white towel wrapped around his waist. He looked 40s-ish, a little chubby, a few inches shorter than me in my platform Crocs. He was cis and straightseeming, with a short, conservative haircut and neatly trimmed mustache that gave “boring cybersecurity analyst,” although his presence at a trans-centric noise show in a queer sex club—as well as the tall, beautiful woman beside him, also wearing only a towel—made me wonder how boring he really was.

I was fully clothed, or close to it, but my girlfriend had my tight black stretch miniskirt pulled up almost to my waist as I ground my ass into her crotch, and my tits were starting to work their way out of my corset top. An artist I’d never heard before named wOOdy was playing a live set of transcendent, clubby breakcore that constantly modulated between complex time signatures like a race-car driver shifting through a series of tight, hilly curves. But behind the fractal rhythms there was a steady bounce that you could shake ass to, so we were. All around us, topless neurodivergent trans puppygirls leaned into the chaos, twitching around in arrhythmic ecstasy.

The man in the towel turned around and unabashedly ogled my girlfriend and me, his eyes lingering on her hand cupped over my crotch. He savored the view for a moment, then reached out and, without a word, ran his index finger lightly, delicately down my torso. It was a clear violation of the consent code posted around the venue, but the moment was so unexpected, and unexpectedly hot, that I didn’t say anything. He gave me a friendly, appreciative smile, then turned around to watch the rest of wOOdy’s set. I was finally ready to admit that I’d been wrong about Pittsburgh.

Historically, I’ve never liked Pittsburgh, and the feeling’s been mutual. Before this, I’d only ever been there on tour, playing shows that felt designed to bring out a crowd that would hate whatever I was playing at the time: a stacked bill of anhedonic straight-edge brocore when I was in an extremely stoned psychedelic emo band, atavistic pigfuck sludge rock when I was in an unabashedly poppy garage quartet. On the few occasions when we connected with locals, the most fun they had to show us was drinking cheap beer under a bridge. Not quite Northeastern, not quite Midwestern, not quite Appalachian, the city seemed to mix together the worst, saddest qualities of each. Like all Rust Belt towns, the locals seemed to consider the joylessness and ugliness to be a point of pride, something that made them strong and morally superior.

Then, about a year prior, I was researching a story about avant-garde DIY parfumeurs making extreme fragrances when I noticed that there were a couple of them based out of Pittsburgh. One made a fragrance called Pouf Extreme: Eau de Poufum by La Mort Homosexuel that was meant to evoke the smell of gay sex. (“A fragrance reminiscent of men and their nastiness,” according to the website copy.) Digging further, I realized that the creator was a queer noise musician named Gay Death, working in collaboration with a label called Cleaner Tapes that put out cassettes by queer and trans noise artists, each accompanied by uniquely fragranced isobutyl “tape cleaners,” in blends like bergamot, lavender, and myrrh, or Russian leather and bourbon—artisanal poppers.

It seemed like a funny, smart idea, so I interviewed the pair behind the project, Alyx Ill and Claire Withal, for an issue of Dirty, the magazine I edit and creative-direct. Before we met, I assumed that the whole thing was an extended conceptual project and that they made a tiny run of the final product just to land the joke, but they surprised me by saying that they were doing real numbers selling to the city’s alt queers, and that they had just started being stocked at Club Pittsburgh, the oldest and most venerable gay club in the city, with a dance club on one floor and a bathhouse above. On top of asking the pair to design an exclusive custom fragrance to be sold on site, the club had also invited them to throw a show there. Alyx and Claire had decided to name it Misophonia, after the technical term for a strong negative psychological reaction to sound.

Nine months later, I was standing in a gravel parking lot in an unremarkable part of Pittsburgh’s unremarkable downtown, staring up at an unassuming brick building with a bail bondsman on the first floor and five stories above that a gay fuckfest that’s been going on, almost uninterrupted, for more than two decades. We entered up a flight of stairs into the second floor, where there was a small dance floor with an overpowered sound system being run by a topless woman in a striped miniskirt and vintage Baltimore Orioles baseball cap. Next to it was a hangout room with a wall-mounted TV playing a video I recognized of the iconic trans porn star Bailey Jay sucking two guys’ dicks. Between them, at a small booth, two bartenders dispensed seltzers, juice, and what I was told were extremely weak mixed drinks, all for free, which is how the club evades licensing issues so they can host members around the clock. Every surface was covered by years’ worth of accumulated matteblack paint, like a well-worn rock club. The waterproof removable cushions on the benches looked easy to wipe down.

The dance floor was half full for an opening set by a local artist named Farrah Faucet, who self-describes on IG as “radiantly vulnerable power electronics from everyone’s (least) favorite disabled queer ghosty goddess.” This installment of Misophonia, the seventh, was jokingly themed as a battle of the bands between Pittsburgh and New York. Nude and wrapped in cling wrap, with an amplified mouth spreader holding her lips open in a rictus grin while creating a horrific inhuman noise through the PA, Farrah was taking the home team to an early lead.

The “bath house upstairs” that Claire and Alyx had told me about turned out to be a multistory complex featuring a spa with steam rooms and oversize hot tubs, a gym, private rooms, dark rooms for anonymized play among a group, a smoking area on the rooftop deck with a fuck swing in the middle, and a counter with a selection of merch, lube, and poppers. You can have sex pretty much anywhere. (The gym is apparently a popular spot.) For a place that’s had so many people fucking in it for so long, it was remarkably clean and well-maintained.

Except for Thursday nights and on special occasions, Club Pittsburgh is only open to cis men and trans people, but it hosts a wide range of sexual identities, not only because it’s so welcoming toward trans people (unlike many sex-centric spaces with a big cis gay male clientele), but because Pittsburgh is full of trade: men who present or even identify as straight but also readily have sex with men and trans girls. This used to be a lot more common in America, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries when its cities filled up with unmarried, foreign-born men in working-class jobs, until a post-WWII gay panic—too many farm boys discovering things about themselves in the bunk of a troop carrier—birthed “straight” and “gay” as impermeable, mutually exclusive identities. Now, despite our supposedly sexually progressive times, straight men’s straightness is closely policed by both cis-hetero men and women, and trade is a rarity in most places.

“One of the really special, interesting things to me about Pittsburgh in general and Club Pittsburgh specifically is that there’s a lot of trade,” Dade Eemansky, a Misophonia bartender who’s also an amateur historian of queer Pittsburgh, told me later. They credited not only the largely male workforce who’ve worked in the area’s steel mills and coal mines, but the subsequent collapse of those industries and the city around them. “Men living in a city whose own crumbling infrastructure gives a certain permission for gender failure. And out of that actually comes a population of straight men who are pretty willing to get their dicks sucked by some fags or trans people.” I could tell. I got cruised, casually and not at all uncomfortably, by nearly every straight-presenting cis guy I met at Club Pitt.

It’s not just that Pittsburgh has more trade. I had noticed a couple of leather pup masks when I walked in, and saw another one the first time I poked my head into the hangout room. Eventually there were at least a half dozen in the crowd. My girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend showed up with his boyfriend at the time, both recent transplants to the city and both into pup play. They told me that Pittsburgh, which has hosted the world’s largest furry convention, Anthrocon, every year since 2006, has a pup scene that dwarfs other cities many times its size, with enough participants to have developed distinctive sub-scenes and social rivalries. And while nightlife in bigger cities can feel strangely sexless, even in queer clubs (too much ketamine, too much status anxiety), the one there is notoriously sleaze-forward, with the long-running Hot Mass party held at Club Pittsburgh, and its gay-centric offshoot Honcho, which every summer morphs into a weekend-long festival in the woods that’s half forest rave and half mega-orgy.

The party had started at 7 p.m., and by 11 it peaked out at a few dozen attendees, nearly all of them some sort of gender nonconforming and/ or queer. While it wasn’t exactly what most people picture when they hear the term “safe space” (the super-aggro New York artist coi_n threw lit cigarettes at the audience during their set, while Brooklyn’s How I Quit Ketamine had a whole comedy bit that hinged on scathing, ironically homophobic in-jokes about the life of edgy Bushwick queers), the air was full of the bubbly joy that accrues when a bunch of trans people can let their guard down together, mixed with the crackle from a bunch of neurodivergent people stimming en masse. (“The most autistic dance floor I’ve ever seen,” I tapped into my notes app.) Girls had their tits out and asses showing not just because we were in a sex club, but because it was a rare chance to have them admired by a roomful of people who know exactly what we had to go through to get them.

The mood was euphoric, and as the sounds shifted from harsh noise to atmospheric post-glitchcore and into wOOdy’s performance, and the heady chemical scent of poppers filled the air, the party brushed against the state of zero-gravity transcendence that we’re chasing every time we go out. But by midnight, the crowd had already begun to thin and the moment started to dissipate. Some of them had work in the morning. Others I ran into upstairs while Alyx was giving me a tour of the club, getting dressed out of lockers or poking their heads out of the cubicle-like private rental rooms. In New York, it can be agonizingly hard to get people to unwind enough to try anything actively horny in a semi-public setting—I even went to a supposed sex party at a queer club in Berlin last year where only a handful of people out of a crowd of hundreds were doing anything even remotely sexual—but she assured me that wasn’t the case with the Misophonia crowd, many of whom were full club members who visited outside of events and were enthusiastically received by the more veteran crowd.

It’s hard to imagine something like Misophonia happening in New York or L.A. in 2023, or Portland or Austin or Chicago or anywhere else that’s supposedly more desirable to live in than Pittsburgh. Those cities used to have distinct identities, but over the past couple decades they’ve all become more blandly identical, as their formerly unique characteristics have been gentrified, commodified, spun into chains, sold off, and then resold back to themselves until they’ve become an undifferentiated blur of fourth-wave coffee shops, elevated streetfood restaurants, and curated vintage. They’re safer places to live than they were 20 years ago, but also less fun, less likely to surprise you with something you haven’t seen before, less alive overall. Everything has become Instagram-optimized and edgeless. Even Detroit has pour-over coffee now, and a Shake Shack downtown.

The only places left in America with any real flavor are the ones that no one in “better” towns thinks about, and which haven’t sold themselves out for the chance to become the next It City. But those are getting rarer every day. Tech has already established a foothold in Pittsburgh, in the form of Duolingo and Uber, and tech workers—who love the urban lifestyle aesthetic but hate the messiness and unpredictability that makes cities feel alive—are already starting to transform the place. On top of performing, wOOdy also holds non-talent jobs in nightlife. “I work all kinds of shows,” they told me, “and I’m seeing IDs from Ohio, West Virginia, New York. Pittsburgh is definitely becoming a hub for the Midwest.” They didn’t sound very enthusiastic about it.

Relationships between people and, by extension, communities and scenes that happen when a bunch of relationships coalesce are ephemeral. So are people. Three months later, as this piece gets ready to go to press, Alyx has split from Cleaner Tapes amidst the type of drama that can only develop in a queer arts collective. In just the past week, three separate people associated with the label and Misophonia— including Sian Austin of How I Quit Ketamine—have died. Who knows how long Pittsburgh’s avant-queer scene can sustain this state of grace, both brilliant and blissfully ignored? Hopefully for a long time. But subcultural history is full of niche communities like this that turned out to be transient blips in the broader timeline. However, it’s also shown us that even small scenes that came together for only a brief, blessed moment under the radar—Cleveland proto-punk, post-9/11 electroclash, early-’90s Olympia, Washington, indie—can radiate an influence powerful enough to shift the paradigm at the highest levels of popular culture.

The morning after the party, we woke up before dawn to catch the early Greyhound bus home. In the couple of hours we were asleep, a low bank of clouds had rolled in and filled the air with superfine droplets of water so light that they almost floated in place, somewhere between a dense fog and a pissy rain. Driving downtown in the soft breaking light, the city looked damply melancholy. The wetness made overgrown lots a deeper green and rust turn almost black. The rocky hills were slick and wet, and the stony architecture from the bygone glory days of Pittsburgh’s coal and steel empires felt almost funerary in the haze. I savored the fading buzz from the night before—and also the pang of sadness that it was already fading. It felt like leaving town after a really hot hookup in a city you were only visiting.

After a long delay, we got on a bus back to our lives in—according to many people—the world capital of culture, art, and freaky lifestyles. It felt like a long commute to a job I wasn’t happy to go to. As we rolled out of Pittsburgh, I turned around in my seat and snapped a pic of Pittsburgh’s modest downtown skyline. “Farewell, City of Bridges,” I captioned it as I posted to my story. “I take back everything I said about you.”