We Used To Be Tall

A woman is lining up shots of liquor on the DJ booth. I don’t know her role exactly—hype person, location manager, or production assistant—but she’s methodical about it, shot after shot. When she’s done, she leaves the bottle behind. The stage lights dim, then turn red.

We’re four people deep from the stage, standing in the general admission pen. It’s only half full, and I look from face to face as we wait for the opener before FKA Twigs. The crowd is mostly Gen Z, queer, with a lot of non-binary and gender-fluid twenty-somethings wearing platform boots and stilettos. I’m over six feet, and so is my boyfriend, but I feel like I’m at a concert for giants.

Remember when we used to be tall? I joke to Rafa. He laughs, but my brain won’t let it go. I keep scanning the crowd and running the numbers, trying to figure out what these people were fed as kids and whether it’s time for me to invest in lifts.

When Brutalismus 3000 materializes on stage, the strobe lights hit so hard I can barely see them. The singer is already moving—bouncing, screaming into the mic in German—over punishing high-BPM techno that makes me feel like I’m in a Berlin leather bar at 3 a.m. She jerks to the front of the stage and starts doing the shots, one by one, then dances away with the bottle.

Between songs, the lighting tech keeps flooding the area we’re standing in with bright LED white. Behind us, the stadium is half empty. We’ve been fenced off from the seating area on the floor, and there’s too much space between the GA pen and the seated section. Every time the lights hit, I get a feeling like vertigo, like I’m dancing on the edge of something that hasn’t quite clicked into place yet.

The music is making me see past versions of myself everywhere. The kid who was here in this exact stadium in 1988 with his parents and younger sister, so young he had no idea who was on stage. The 1999 version in some other city, dancing alone in his wide-leg jeans at an industrial warehouse rave. Or, shirtless and newly single during Pride in 2008, in a basement after-hours so hot the ceiling was dripping.

For the past three weeks, my film work has taken everything: weekdays, mornings, evenings, and weekends. I haven’t had time to sit down and write for myself for almost a month. Lately, I’ve been caught up in the impossible math of a creative life, where something always has to give, and it’s usually you.

The thing I keep returning to this morning isn’t the show, which was extraordinary when FKA Twigs finally took over, but that question: remember when we were tall? There is something about standing in a queer crowd in your forties and realizing the generation behind you has grown past you—not metaphorically, literally—that has stayed with me these past few days.

I was feeling it strongly on Friday night, dancing in that pen, watching the lights give away what the darkness was trying to hide.

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