Bushwig came to Knockdown Center early in the venue’s existence. In 2016, for their 5th year, Simone and co-founder Horrorchata (Matty Mendoza) approached KDC’s director Tyler Myers with a pitch: two days of drag performances across a full weekend in the middle of September. Specifically, the event was scheduled for September 10th and 11th.
Myers liked the idea, but had some doubts. “Of course we were going to do it. My main anxiety was doing it on Sept 11th. We had recently gotten our liquor license after a two year, very public fight and didn’t have many events under our belt. Is Maspeth going to crucify me for doing a raunchy drag show on Sept 11th?” Simone’s reply sealed the deal: “What better thing to celebrate on Sept 11th than a boundary breaking drag festival?”
The event had been developing since 2011 at DIY venues like Secret Project Robot and the Onderdonk House, a historical landmark on Flushing Ave. Moss & co were consciously building on the legacy of Wigstock, the legendary drag party that had been a community cornerstone for a previous generation of Manhattan queens. “Wigstock was something that I had admired & wished I was a part of before it first ended,” Moss told Forbes in an interview. “Bushwig was partly inspired by the spirit of Wigstock and is a celebration of Brooklyn's drag scene just as Wigstock started as a celebration of Manhattan's drag scene. I think our overall values are very similar, but we have always been very different in our approach.” Moss described her own roots as a mix of “anarco-queer groups, attending DIY queer festivals in Europe and being involved in grassroots activism in London. I wanted Bushwig to have a combination of all of those things. I like to think of Bushwig as gender anarchic.”
In this, she did not fail. The first edition at Knockdown was, more than anything else, anarchic. “It was messy in a way Simone loved,” Myers recalls. “They walked up way more people than we thought. We had one box office person and she sold 1,000 walkup tickets in four hours. The bars got so busy we had to ask two queens who had bartended a little to help us out.” Yet the show ran on schedule, with a feverish, almost manic excitement taking over the whole room. “It was being made collectively, rather than aggressively organized. Alfie DJ’d the main stage. He insisted the queens had their tracks submitted a week in advance and he would sit at the DJ booth and just go. Your track will play at a certain time, on time, whether you were on stage or not. The tempo stayed high and didn’t lag, but it was also zanny and sometimes felt like it was going too fast.”
The braced-for blowback never arrived. Not a word was heard from the community board or any other citizens’ group. And the partnership between Bushwig and the venue was a perfect fit. Knockdown’s sprawling grounds and malleable setups were just what Moss & co. needed for their rapidly expanding vision. As the venue established itself, Bushwig also grew into a landmark annual event, a huge display of talent, community and pride that played with curation in exciting and unique ways. Wolfgang Tillmans DJ’ed outside. Azealia Banks headlined, not without controversy. Last year, Chelsea Manning DJ’ed in a peak time slot. “But that’s where Simone’s interest was,” Myers comments. “Finding lines, making them stretch, making sure the festival stayed relevant beyond its importance as a drag festival.
In response to Moss’ passing, ‘chata and the team have returned to their roots. This year’s programming is focused squarely on the queens, the performers who are at the heart of Bushwig. It will be a party inevitably touched by sorrow. But Bushwig continues forward as a tribute to the explosive queer affirmation and love that Moss brought to everything she did. In her own words: “Bushwig has been a huge gift. It sounds cheesy but growing up as a gender non-conforming person, you're always told in ways that you're a second class citizen. So many of us carry this burden and it takes a long time to unpack and unlearn that feeling. Our goal is to hold space for each other and to show each other how fierce and resilient we queer people are. We aim to create a temporary queer family that has a lasting impact. Bushwig isn’t just a festival or a party, this is a family gathering. But the family is thousands of beautiful queer humans who come to celebrate queer art and all forms of expression.