FEELING EVERYTHING AT THE PERFORMANCE SPACE GALA

Slow-moving, soft-spoken, and sweet, the man beside me had a distinctive, wispy white beard that branched in several directions. He wore a green winter stocking cap, a floral-patterned shirt, a dress coat, and carried a walking stick. “My name’s Samuel, but my real friends call me Chip,” he said. Dinner seating at Performance Space New York’s annual gala had gone very much in my favor. I had been placed next to one of America’s greatest transgressive writers, Samuel R. Delany. His genre-defying Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) transformed the way generations of readers, myself included, understood cruising: from a shameful, illicit sexual activity into a vital subcultural form with its own ethics, kinships, and claims on public space. His presence alone would have justified the evening. But the fetish-themed gala, aptly titled “Feel Everything,” promised more. Last Friday night, the 46-year-old arts institution pulled off a rare feat by gathering three of culture’s most radical figures — Delany, Paul McCarthy, and Michèle Lamy — all now in their eighties.

The choice of honorees structured the night’s programming. Each guest of honor permanently altered their respective fields. Across more than 40 books, Delany reshaped the genre of science fiction, forcing it beyond its old racial and sexual limits. McCarthy spent decades pushing performance to its logical — and frequently grotesque, sometimes perverse — extreme. Lamy, meanwhile, exploded fashion’s conventional beauty standards and turned clothing, furniture, hosting, and persona into one continuous act of world-making. Together, they represented overlapping traditions of creative risk: sexual, aesthetic, and social. Galas usually reward fame and success, but Performance Space’s selection put forth three figures once seen as too radical, who kept creating until the culture caught up.

Performance Space had the good sense to build the room around that lineage. Under the creative direction of playwright — and BDSM devotee — Jordan Tannahill, the Keith Haring Theatre had been remade as something like an 80s fetish cabaret: a dense wash of red, violet, and amber light; neon tubes threaded through exposed scaffolding; wafting clouds of smoke; a jagged video screen flickering with blue-white abstractions; and, most importantly, latex-clad puppies go-go dancing throughout the three-story black box. Tannahill made the evening’s politics explicit, noting that the gala was not only celebrating and supporting Performance Space, but also “uplifting the worlds of kink, fetish, and sex work and the roles they play in shaping culture and politics in our city.” At many institutional fundraisers, the theme is a cosmetic coating, just enough subversion to intrigue the donor class without causing alarm. Here, kink was given the full stage.

Living sculpture Kuby Lin, wearing a self-made gala gown, joked that “the real fundraising of the evening was for New York’s fetish retail sector.” Gala co-chairs Slobodan Randjelović and Thomas Rom had invited guests to interpret a haute kink dress code, and the crowd clearly relished the assignment. There was no shortage of formal fetishwear — harnesses worn with suits — but many of the artists took the prompt into their own territory. K8 Hardy wore a neon-yellow, motocross-inspired dress with trompe l’oeil breasts and a cartoonishly sculpted six-pack. British art dealer Alex Tieghi-Walker proudly showed off the leather kilt he had bought earlier that day at The Leather Man, insisting it was part of his cultural heritage. Whitney Mallett wore a wholesome 1950s party frock remade in semi-transparent pink rubber. Kay Gabriel arrived as her own version of Jessica Rabbit, while her husband, Queer Nightlife Community Center co-founder Seva Granik, appeared in full bondage gear. Later, he told me it was his first gala. “I didn’t realize they could be funny,” he said, sounding genuinely delighted by the night’s offerings. Richie Shazam and Julia Fox served as the evening’s MCs. Fox wore a show-stopping latex dress made to resemble a fully set table and announced that her fetish was food. The actress, who began her career as a dominatrix, was well positioned to articulate the evening’s premise. Shazam recast “Feel Everything” as a call “not to go numb in the face of a bleak newsfeed,” while Fox flirted with donors and introduced fin-dom — the fetish world’s term for financial domination — into the usually more sanitized rituals of arts fundraising.

Pati Hertling, Performance Space’s director, stated the evening’s premise plainly: “Our annual gala is not just a much-needed way for us to raise funds, but also an important expression of who we are, how we can advance our mission to collapse artistic and social norms and bring together our community.” Leather, latex, red light, smoke: all of it could easily have tipped into camp spectacle. What saved the evening from that fate were two things: the sense that the honorees had each, in very different ways, expanded the terms of public life, and the genuine erotic intensity carried by both the atmosphere and the performances.

It was also a night of formidable vocal talent. Yseult, making her U.S. debut, opened the program with genre-blurring, rock-inflected pop. Next came a haunting performance by Arewà Basit, the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and singer-songwriter, who sang before introducing Delany. Later, Moses Sumney, all sculpted muscle and velvet voice, brought the house down with a slowed, impassioned cover of Sylvester’s disco classic “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” offered as a tribute to Michèle Lamy, who appeared by video from Paris.

The vocal sets were uniformly strong, but Alex Tatarsky brought a different kind of energy. The downtown performance artist, whose absurdist, clown-inflected work moves between theater and comedy, arrived onstage dressed as something between a nymph and a jester — only later did it become clear that the costume and persona were channeling a Paul McCarthy sculpture featured in the silent auction. Storming the room, whip in hand lashing at the air, they screamed, “They told me I could do whatever I want!” Tatarsky invited an audience member to whip them onstage, and someone did. From there came a heartfelt monologue about discovering, as a young dance student in Europe struggling to fit in, McCarthy’s large-scale sculpture of a gnome holding a butt plug. “I guess this is what people mean when they talk about having a transcendent experience with art,” Tatarsky screamed. McCarthy himself then took the stage to receive an award shaped like a butt plug, looking uncannily like Delany’s twin in a matching white beard, though with a baseball cap in place of a stocking cap, and said in his scratchy voice, “So I have a beard now. Last year I decided to become Santa Claus…the god of corporate consumer fascism.”

As the performances wore on, Delany was approached every fifteen minutes or so by someone wanting either to thank him or ask him something specific. Telfar Clemens asked whether he was wearing latex under his suit. He declined to answer. Ryan McNamara asked what he thought of queer culture today, prompting Delany to recall that he had once used Scruff and found the app sex weird. Kendall Werts asked if he had watched Heated Rivalry. He had not. Then I asked Delany — Chip, the author of Hogg, a book whose sexual brutality remains difficult even for the most forward-thinking readers — what he made of the evening’s fetish theme. As a glitter bomb exploded over our table from the stage, the 83-year-old looked up and said, “It’s been a little soft for fetish.”

Once dinner ended, word began to spread that the line for the afterparty — held in another room in the same building — wrapped around the block, an unusual sight for a gala and a sure sign of the evening’s success. With the crowd worked up by the night’s events, the afterparty, hosted by Bound, a BDSM-flavored queer nightlife collective, quickly developed its own charge. “I’ve had my eye on you all night,” my friend, a fashion publicist in a suit, told a latex-clad pup, who immediately dropped to his knees, paws up, in eager submission. The masked dog offered us his Instagram handle and invited us both to get in touch if we were interested in training him. Whether you attended the evening or not, the event’s energy extends with Studio Visit, a benefit exhibition at Hauser & Wirth curated by artists Anicka Yi and Josh Kline and on view through April 11.