The first time she hit me, all 118 pounds of me flew across the ring and onto the hard wet ground. It was just past 3 AM on the third night of my first Gathering of the Juggalos, and I was boxing blindfolded in a makeshift ring with a woman who outweighed me by maybe 30 pounds and wore a T-shirt that said “Kill Yourself” on the back.
I groped for her shape, hungering to feel my density collide with hers. Every anger, sadness, and anxiety funneled into my fists as I swung, and when I didn’t connect with her, I felt off-kilter. My gloves kissed her skin only a few times, with tenderness in every blow. But she was faster, tougher, stronger. Every time she sent my body heaving into the ropes or onto the ground—once, my shoulders chased each other as I rolled right out of the ring—I felt a spasming ecstasy amid the pain and fear, and it said, “Let it go. The angels will carry it the rest of the way.”
The Gathering of the Juggalos is an annual music festival founded by Detroit rap duo the Insane Clown Posse in 2000. It’s grown into a four-day dark carnival for Faygo freaks of all kinds, currently held at a historic rock venue called Legend Valley in Thornville, Ohio. On the evening of my bout, the entertainment included a bewildering array of simultaneous events: an electric cage match, a foam party, a concert by Dallas rapper Lardi B, a fire-dancing circle (beside a fire-breathing laser harp!), a haunted house, an air-conditioned movie screening, a UFO-themed hayride with the members of ICP that was described as an “alien probe adventure” (I’m pretty sure chromed dildos were involved), and of course blindfolded boxing. We were the final competitors, and our prize was free acid.
For more than a decade, the event’s sensational aspects have been the subject of innumerable Vice articles, YouTube documentaries, and the like. In 2013 a journalist for Chicagoist reported on meeting a man at the Gathering who publicly cut off his nipple for a guy who wanted to buy it and sew it to his hat. Longtime attendees describe it as a family reunion—a common outlook in subcultures that hold any kind of annual gathering. But this subculture was built in the 90s by rust-belt freaks, heads, and hillbillies, so it combines the midwestern spirit of generosity, the ask-a-punk DIY mentality, and a welcoming embrace of the outcast or marginalized, whether poor, disabled, queer, or just too strange for straight society.
Without corporate sponsorship, supported entirely by its audience, the Gathering endures in its raucous, joyful spirit of unkillable self-sufficiency, which laughs in the face of danger. Survivors of industrial downturns—as people from the rust belt but especially low-wage earners tend to be—have always been good at finding ways to laugh it off.
At the start of the boxing match—a pop-up activity arranged by festival attendees—the announcer had me and my opponent take corners. Two men reminded me I could stop at any point. A third gripped the back of my neck and spoke into my ear like you’d see a coach do in a boxing movie: My opponent had come mad, he warned. She’d been preparing for this. Such head games from this guy! I figured he had to make sure I gave the crowd a good show.
One man gloved my hands. Another draped a scarf across my face, and the first guy crowned me with a padded helmet. In the darkness, I was alone with every feeling that had led me to this moment. Most prominent were resentment, rage, and heartache—all sweetened by an Iggy Pop–style lust for life. Iggy came up in a collapsing Detroit, just like ICP, and his dogged, lunatic recklessness is intimately understood by every midwestern weirdo.
In the popular imagination, the fall of the Motor City symbolizes the scars left throughout the midwest by environmental racism and corporate entitlement. Detroit was already in its third decade of decline in 1990, when the members of ICP cut their first tracks as “Inner City Posse,” reputedly using home karaoke machines. Techno, industrial, and hip-hop were simultaneously peaking in the region, and an influential subset of the rust-belt underground exported an attitude of “laugh now, cry later.”
ICP cofounders Violent J (Joseph Bruce) and Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler) grew up in Oak Park, Michigan, a poor suburb of Detroit where white people like them are now the minority. As kids, Violent J and his brother, Robert, started a bike gang called the Floobs, who transformed their poverty into a source of pride—they all got their clothes from rummage sales, but they sought out specific brands or designs to give their group a common identity. Shaggy became a chosen brother, and in junior high, he and Violent J taught themselves to wrestle. Eventually they started a league and put on shows—like their bike gang, an early exercise in showmanship that brought people together.
Both these pursuits were also outlets for the frantic energy that often emerges in kids subjected to chaotic environments. Before Violent J turned three, his father had abandoned his mother, leaving her to raise three kids on a janitor’s income. When she remarried, in large part for economic stability, her second husband sexually abused both sons. Shaggy was also one of three children raised by a single mom. She worked as a Taco Bell manager, and Shaggy has described her as a “big-time hippie” into drug culture. By 18, Violent J and Shaggy were both dropouts. Violent J had a police record, and Shaggy was struggling with addiction.
The Inner City Posse’s first professional release, made as a trio with Shaggy’s older brother, John, was a 1991 EP called Dog Beats. It samples Rod Stewart, George Clinton, and The Wizard of Oz, but it was styled after gangster rappers such as N.W.A.
ICP weren’t real gangsters, but they knew (and tussled with) plenty. They also weren’t part of the local hip-hop battle scene that famously forged Eminem. They had punk hustle. They fucked girls who worked in print shops to get free flyers, a technique also favored by upstart hair-metal bands.
The way they painted their faces was all their own, but it would’ve reminded their midwestern fans of Alice Cooper and Kiss, the latter of whom broke out with a 1975 live album recorded partly in Detroit. “It’s fun to paint your face and hide behind that,” Violent J says in an interview in the 2021 documentary The United States of Insanity (currently streaming free on Tubi). “You already expect me to do something stupid because I’ve got clown paint on. I can fuck up now!”
After some experimenting with their sound and style, ICP took a cue from Esham, one of Detroit’s first hip-hop artists. They began using cartoonishly violent, horror-inspired imagery to build on the foundation of what Esham called “acid rap”—a midwestern subgenre of horrorcore he’d devised as a teenager in the late 80s. In 1991, Violent J had a dream about a clown running around his neighborhood and another where spirits in a traveling carnival spoke to him. Both these things inspired a change in the group’s name and provided a foundation for their Dark Carnival mythology.
By 1992, John had left, and the duo released their first record as the Insane Clown Posse, Carnival of Carnage. Its cover, a menacing pink-and-blue clown in an ocean of black, screams “Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine for Jokers.” It was the first in their initial Joker’s Card series—six concept albums, each connected to a spirit of the Dark Carnival. These spirits gather souls intended for hell, then tell them stories that show them their own wickedness, thus inviting them to decide their own fates. Carnival of Carnage describes brutal punishments that await the wealthy and the government for ignoring the needs of working-class people like those the duo grew up around.
Since then, ICP have released 15 studio albums and dozens of EPs and singles—all through their independent record label, Psychopathic Records, founded in 1991, which also launched the careers of performers such as Twiztid and Blaze Ya Dead Homie. (Psychopathic signed Esham in 2002.) In 1999 the duo started the independent wrestling company Juggalo Championship Wrestling, and they’ve made several direct-to-DVD movies.
ICP’s business model has always been rooted in being as accessible to fans as possible—until recently, Violent J and Shaggy often wandered the Gathering like anybody else. ICP make and sell their own merch, so they can cater directly to the experiences and desires of people who want to get rowdy and have fun but also look out for one another.
And one thing ICP know about their fans is that they value unmediated experiences and stuff they can hold in their hands. In another United States of Insanity interview, Violent J said, “You can’t download a thong.”
At the Gathering this year, I saw a man pantomime taking a photo as he passed an elaborately dressed group. “Get an actual picture!” a woman yelled. “It’ll last longer!”
“Why the fuck would I be on my phone?” the man shot back, laughing. “I’m at the Gathering!”
The Gathering started as a two-day event in Novi, Michigan, and bounced around the midwest as it grew. From 2007 till 2013, it was held at Cave-in-Rock in Illinois, but ongoing tensions with locals, several bounced checks to vendors, and increased insurance premiums (thanks to the FBI classifying juggalos as a gang) pushed the festival to move to Legend Valley. The Ohio venue is a 230-acre expanse of green in the middle of nowhere, punctuated by stages and life-size dinosaur sculptures. When I arrived on Wednesday, July 5 (the Gathering ended at noon sharp on Sunday), the setting immediately brought me back to my days as a teenager working the Ohio Renaissance Festival near Harveysburg, Ohio, an hour and a half to the southwest.
Renaissance workers (“Rennies”) are basically carnies, and they’re likewise familiar with or even drawn to a culture of spectacle and transience. When these events are held in rural areas, working at one is like being stranded on an island—except it’s your job to help people maintain the fleeting facade that the island has somehow traveled to the 16th century.
Such circumstances quickly foster camaraderie. Gossip networks and after-hours rituals emerge, and insiders and diehards develop both an implied and an expressed language to separate themselves from dilettantes who are just passing through. Guests, performers, and vendors alike start every day parking in open fields, then enduring underserviced portable toilets, extreme temperatures, and nutritionally bankrupt food. Many also wear chafing, sweaty costumes. It’s both an unrestrained marketplace and a temporary autonomous zone, and it takes a specific kind of maniac to not only survive it but also enjoy it.
The Gathering is like that, except with LSD in the water. Everywhere you look, the tissue of social and legal sanction is stretched so thin that open drug sales, fan-organized mayhem, and bootleg merch coexist comfortably with uniformed police, approved vendors, and the thicket of permits necessary to mount such an event.
To be an ICP fan requires a lot of commitment to the bit, and not just because the Gathering can wear your ass out. You’ve also got to be able to put up with the fact that almost every other fandom has decided juggalos are idiots and losers. Even ICP themselves, as big and established as they’ve become, are far from rich. Violent J and Shaggy are pretty comfortable, but they’re constantly working multiple hustles to keep their families and their empire afloat. It can’t help that they’ve been punch lines for decades, just like their audience.
Around the turn of the century, ICP releases appeared on USA Today’s “worst albums of the year” list two years in a row. Spin called the group a modern minstrel act. In 2003, Blender named them the worst artist of all time, and in 2013, GQ ranked them the worst rappers ever.
Every time the band has signed to a major label, the deal has eventually collapsed—most dramatically in 1997, when they put out The Great Milenko through Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records. Within hours of going on sale, the record was pulled. The group was unceremoniously dropped, and their 25-city tour was canceled.
“When the lyrics of the Insane Clown Posse album were brought to the attention of senior management, the decision was made that they were inappropriate for a product released under any label of our company,” Hollywood said in a statement. After ICP released the album again through Island a few weeks later, it went platinum.
In 1999, Sharon Osbourne bet ICP $50,000 that their upcoming release, the Island double album Bizzar/Bizaar, wouldn’t sell 200,000 copies. It sold more than 500,000 and was certified gold. Obsourne still hasn’t paid, though ICP have said they’d be happy to see her donate the money to a charity in their name. During its TRL days, MTV refused to dignify ICP with airplay, and in 2000, when around 100 juggalos gathered outside the show’s New York studio to support a planned barrage of phone and email requests, Viacom had them removed.
After the FBI included juggalos in its National Gang Threat Assessment in 2011—a decision apparently based largely on small-town news items connecting juggalos with local crimes—Hot Topic stopped carrying ICP merchandise. The documentary The United States of Insanity details how, among other things, juggalos began losing jobs, custody battles, and security clearances. ICP provided a lawyer at the Gathering that year, to help fans document problems that the gang classification had created for them. The band also started a website (now defunct) to collect such testimonies.
These efforts fed into multiple unsuccessful attempts to overturn the classification. ICP lost a 2014 suit against the FBI, brought with the help of the Michigan branch of the ACLU, when a district court ruled that the gang watch list is simply information provided to local law enforcement, and that the bureau can’t be held responsible if police departments use it to harass juggalos.
At the 2017 Juggalo March on Washington, around 1,500 ICP fans rallied for free speech (dwarfing a simultaneous Trump rally). Later that year, though, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit delivered ICP another defeat, leaving only the Supreme Court untried. Juggalos remain on the gang list.
In 2018, Consequence of Sound reviewed a declassified 2011 FBI report in which the agency drew such outlandishly stupid conclusions about juggalos that many of them felt vindicated—the gang classification was obviously misguided at best. But to this day, juggalos describe being hurt by it. Camera surveillance is vastly more ubiquitous now than it was in 2011, but luckily, juggalo face paint turns out to frustrate facial recognition software. To be a juggalo is to be able to take a hit—many hits—and still come back swinging.
On the ground of the boxing ring after the first time I went down, I felt hands helping me up.
“Are you OK?” a man asked. “Do you want to continue?”
“How many rounds?” I said, my head swirling with adrenaline.
“You can stop whenever you want,” he reminded me.
“Let’s go,” I said, and I let him guide me until I felt my gloves touch my opponent’s. Someone gave us the start, and then I took a hit to the jaw so hard that my bottom teeth jolted what felt like several inches left of the top row. After two more rounds—the final one ending with me on the ground, one elbow scraped raw—my opponent was declared the victor.
As one of the men helped me remove my helmet, he said, “You can really take a punch!”
“You’re scrappy!” another said, clapping me on the back. “She was coming in hard, but you really got in there!”
I fought the urge to say something corny (“Only thing that breaks about me is my heart”). Instead I laughed and said thanks. For me, this public display of aggression had been surprisingly intimate. I felt affirmed in my masculinity and my vulnerability, and I felt alive—exhilarated by the reminder that my body can be broken and will die.
I’d been a journalist for four or five years when I changed my social handles to @JuggaloReporter—I can’t remember exactly when I adopted the persona, but I think it was sometime around when I started testosterone. I’d always felt like something of a gender bootleg—an imposter of a girl but still not quite a man. It’s a fact those closest to me have understood, some for more than two decades, but it didn’t become important to me for others to acknowledge until I started hormone replacement therapy.
Being trans and being a juggalo have important things in common—you’re subject to ridicule and abuse from people you don’t know, your government is out to get you, and you probably struggle against systemic discrimination in several areas of your life. I get to argue with doctors and insurance companies for the right to rub gel all over my stomach every morning, rather than fight cops and bosses for the right to party to the music of my choice, but we can understand each other.
I grew up as the youngest of five girls, and I never fit in with the others. I have an ethnically ambiguous name that could belong to someone of any gender. I’ve often wondered: Was I born this way, or did I choose this life? To be honest, the question has started to bore me. Whether I have a choice in the matter or not, I still think it’s fun to write and rewrite the text of my body like an evolving document of procedures, interventions, and circumstances. I’m just out here vibing, same as anyone, and this flesh feels like the only thing that’s really mine.
I was born in the bathtub of a Homearama house in Mason, Ohio, across the highway from an amusement park called Kings Island. (Coincidentally, it has shared haunted-house actors with the Gathering.) My family couldn’t afford to go, but every summer the sky over our backyard would rupture with fireworks at the exact same time each night to signal the close of another day of adventures.
When my oldest sisters finally got old enough to land summer jobs at Kings Island, we were suddenly rich with free tickets. When I was 11 or 12, the next youngest and I would get dropped at the park to waste afternoons on roller coasters. At the time, it was Paramount’s Kings Island. Now it belongs to Cedar Fair.
My last trip to Kings Island, when I was 24, was also the only time I registered how the transfer of intellectual property rights had disrupted my memories of the park. I knew certain rides by several names. Phantoms of vanished signs or features haunted the manicured landscape—a shadow where a letter had been removed from a wall, maybe, or the Scooby-Doo gang’s Mystery Machine rebranded as some other van.
Looking back, I can see how even a site earmarked for joy was deformed by the imperatives of capital and the unpredictable, often violent change that it forces on whatever it touches. It takes imagination to maintain any kind of identity in that system.
I’m now largely estranged from my family. As a kid, I modeled but never saw any of the money, and my home life was chaotic, abusive, and violent. In middle school, I got in trouble for fighting, and in high school, I skipped a lot, got suspended, and eventually dropped out because the bank took our house. I spent the summer of my 16th year couch surfing, then moved in with a sister. In 2009, when I left Ohio for college at 22, I was sleeping on a couch in someone’s living room. I was doing nude modeling, and I’d been working at a tattoo shop for years.
At 19, deep in my green anarchist phase, I got a sleeve of bombed-out buildings with plants growing out of them. I thought of it then as nature rising above civilization, but now I see it as beauty triumphing over decay. CPTSD has rearranged my emotional interior to feel like an industrial wasteland, but I constantly push myself to find ways of encouraging patches of green. Fresh growth. New meaning. Beauty—or simply jokes!—amid disaster. There’s nothing I love more than laughing.
Everyone in Ohio grows up knowing juggalos, but the first one who made me curious about the culture was a man named Stevie. He and his brother would regularly get tattoos from India, the woman who’d done my sleeve, in the shop where I worked. They brought her fresh vegetables from their garden and other treats, whether they were getting ink or just saying hi.
Stevie worked as a school bus driver for special-needs children. He knew all of the kids’ accommodations and would start every school day greeting each one by name as the bus door accordioned open. At Christmastime, Stevie’s mother would bring the shop homemade cookies. India says she still drops off cookies every winter, even though she’s had an accident that’s left her largely unable to walk.
Stevie’s middle finger had been fucked up by an accident, and at ICP shows, he liked to push to the front and wave it at the band to announce his presence. When he decided to tattoo the words FUCK YOU on his mangled digit so it would stand out even more, he paid for it with $12, some homemade moonshine, and a gallon bucket of sugar cookies.
More than 15 years later, I look back on Stevie as one of the warmest, gentlest people I’ve ever met. It made for a funny contrast whenever he and his brother would get to talking about their love of the Insane Clown Posse. If a show or Gathering was on the horizon, they’d let their anticipation reveal a different side of them: wild, indulgent, ecstatic, free. It seemed as though the outlet ICP provided—a designated time and place to go absolutely insane with people of similar backgrounds and desires—allowed them to show up to their regular lives with more kindness and openness.
When people notice my @JuggaloReporter handles, they always want to know if I’m a juggalo who’s a reporter or a reporter for juggalos. I always smile and dodge the question.
If I don’t know all the words to a single ICP song and only just attended my first Gathering this summer, can I be a juggalo? How many juggalos need to read one of my articles before I can consider them my “audience”?
Much as I wonder how one recognizes a man or a woman and when I get to be which, I wonder how anyone recognizes a juggalo. In their song “What Is a Juggalo,” ICP explain, “Oh, he gets butt naked / And then he walks through the streets, winking at the freaks / With a two-liter stuck in his butt cheeks / What is a juggalo? He just don’t care (don’t care) / He might try to put a weave in his nut hair / ’Cause he could give a fuck less what a bitch thinks / He tell her that her butt stinks and all that.”
Attending the Gathering was the first time I’d set foot in Ohio since 2019, but right away I felt a sense of homecoming stronger than I would’ve gotten from visiting my actual family.
The experience is not for the faint of heart. It’s all camping, no generators, and there’s never not something to react to, whether it’s a sign on a portable toilet that says “No dumping allowed under penalty of law” or a man lighting bottle rockets in his butt.
There are official rules—only approved vendors, for instance, are allowed to sell in the designated areas, and they can only sell ICP-licensed merchandise. And then there are the understood rules—everyone can host their own little pop-up shops in the camp areas, and ICP bootlegs abound in those. Many attendees work as entertainers—in sideshows or strip clubs, as circus acts, on OnlyFans—but at the Gathering they performed for free, wherever and whenever they felt like it, as an offering to friends.
Drugs, nudity, and sex abound, and if that’s not a vibe you’re comfortable with, the Gathering is not for you. Several women told me that if I wanted to have the best sex of my life, I should fuck a juggalo. “They’re not afraid of what they like,” one said. “They just let it all out,” added another.
The Gathering is so big and multifaceted that it’s easy to move away from anything you’re not into toward something that you are. Alcoholics Anonymous meetings happen multiple times a day, and certain areas are designated as sober spaces. You can find quiet if you need it, in places with games to play or movies showing—the Gathering’s equivalent of destimulation rooms. Harm-reduction sites offer fentanyl test strips, Narcan, and more, and volunteer Narcan Ninjas wander the fest in gear that identifies them as carrying and able to administer the lifesaving nasal spray.
I found a lot of spent nitrous cartridges and used condoms, but I also saw a bunch of unattended books about anti-racism arranged in a circle—a reading group left on pause. Free boxes overflowed with clothes, games, books, and even unopened sex toys.
You could get all the overpriced carnival food you could afford, but people constantly offered me free water, meals, and snacks—or told me where I could find them if I needed them. Did I need them? People checked often, just in case. On the second day, I got tattooed, and afterward a woman approached me with a large slice of watermelon. “Thought you could use the sugars!” she said, beaming.
During ICP’s set on the first night, I was struck by the patience of the guards from LCS Security Services, the company contracted by Legend Valley. The front rows of the crowd would throw people over the security fence onto the guards in front of the stage. Two-liters of Faygo, inflatable toys, and bottle rockets flew through the air. ICP spray Faygo throughout their shows and toss open two-liters into the audience. Because of the traditional climactic soda shower, known as “Faygo annihilation” or “Faygo armageddon,” many venues won’t even host them.
Watching fans collapse into the guards’ arms was like witnessing a reenactment of Michelangelo’s Pietà. On the third day, I asked a guard if he and his colleagues were given Gathering-specific instructions beforehand (they are not) and how ICP fans compare to other concert crowds at the venue.
“You see a lot more ignorant shit,” he said. But fights, overdoses, and other party fouls happened no more at the Gathering than at any other fest, as far as he could tell—if anything, maybe a hair less at the Gathering. “This audience is a lot wilder for sure, but everyone’s pretty good about trying to be safe,” he said. “We know people come here to have a good time—whatever that looks like to them—so we try to be humane.”
He also described feeling like his fellow guards and behind-the-scenes crew members became his four-day family every year. Even for him, the Gathering was something to look forward to.
I can see why. Right now, I make the most money I’ve ever made, but it’s still not very much. My friends often tell me to find a new job. I’m lucky if I can leave Chicago once a year, and when I travel, my budget is tighter than a corset.
But at the end of four days at the Gathering, I’d spent just over $100 on souvenirs and came home with a large tattoo, an eighth of mushrooms, 600 milligrams of edibles, a tab of acid, a wallet chain, a very silly cup, lots of tchotchkes (juggalos like to exchange them to remember each other by), and two concert tees that each go for more than $400 on eBay.
A man whipped a Nine Inch Nails Self Destruct Tour T-shirt out of a trunk hidden beneath a table after we’d had a long conversation about Pee-wee Herman, just because I “look like someone who’s into industrial music.” About this shirt—if you so much as consider touching it, I will make you regret being born. I didn’t buy it for bragging rights or as an investment; I bought it to remind myself of a time when all my needs were met and all my whims were indulged so well that I could be present, relaxed, and joyful in a way that’s extremely rare for me. I wear the memory like a second skin.
At the end of the match, my opponent asked if she could hug me. Everyone hugged at the end of their matches, and I’d had a good time. I smiled and took her in my arms. As she broke away, she said, “Thank you so much. You don’t know what this means to me. Thank you.”
I laughed. “Aw, honey, I was happy to!” I said. “I had fun!”
“No,” she insisted, “you don’t understand. I’ve had a really bad month.”
“Oh, me too, me too,” I said. “I had some demons to let out.”
“No,” she repeated, “I had a really bad month.” A dam seemed to break inside her, and words started gushing out, first in spurts, then in waves.
The father of her child had tried to murder her, and she’d started learning to box to feel safer and work through some of her anger. She’d even brought her own pink gloves to the Gathering, hoping for a chance to use them. It dawned on me that the man who’d warned me about her at the beginning of the match hadn’t been stoking my imagination to get a good show out of me; he was legitimately trying to prepare me.
I asked her if I could hug her again. This time I held her tighter, my hand on the back of her head and my mouth repeating, “You’re OK now. You’re OK.”
A lot of people show up to the Gathering with some demons to let out—an especially common need if you’ve ever been demonized by others. On the first day, I watched the Mr. Juggalo Pageant, an annual event where the running joke is that the same person wins every year. I was struck by the variety of contestants, especially in the talent portion of the show.
One man performed wheelchair tricks; another sang a very long, sad song in Japanese from his favorite anime; another simply showed hole. One contestant really stood out to me. When asked what being a juggalo meant to him, an Oakland-born juggalo called Spazz said it meant empowerment. He invited the audience to fold their arms across their chests. Then he chanted back and forth with them several times: “Who’s the shit?” The audience answered: “We’s the shit!”
“All that shit that’s been holding you back? You’ve been struggling on? Weighing you down?” he shouted. “Let me hear you say, ‘Fuck that shit!’”
As his speech escalated in intensity, he invited the crowd to reflect on the lessons their struggles had taught them. They ate it up, the tent growing louder with each affirmation. When it came time for the talent portion, Spazz did tai chi to a Psychopathic Records track on the tent’s PA.
The next day, I was getting tattooed beneath an awning and saw Spazz greeting the rain in the distance, his face toward the clouds and his eyes closed. He looked like a flower happy to be watered. Eventually, he walked under the awning, and I invited him to talk with me while the tattooer worked.
Spazz was raised in a gang-heavy neighborhood with parents who lived with addiction. He was beaten and raped by his stepfather, and when he told his school, they didn’t believe him. His grandma tried to get custody, but the state found nothing wrong with his parents’ care. From a young age, he believed it was him against the world.
“All that stuff had made me very suicidal, depressed, and confused,” he said, “but then I found ICP. They saved my whole life. They told me the world’s fucked up, and sometimes bad shit happens for no reason. But you can find reasons to laugh anyway. You can find reasons to keep coming back. My childhood was robbed from me, but they gave me a second one. I learned how to be happy again.”
Now 32, Spazz says he left Oakland in his early 20s. Thanks to the FBI gang classification, he’d get profiled by cops at traffic stops and end up dragged to the station where they’d photograph his many juggalo tattoos. Though he continues to get hassled because of his fandom, he meditates daily and is learning about shamanism. Some years ago, he kicked a drug addiction, and while he hasn’t been absolute in his sobriety, he feels like he now has the tools to stay in control of his appetites. At one point, he even got what he calls an exorcism.
I asked him what that was like, and he described being guided to locate where he was holding pain in his body. He was instructed to give it a name, shape, and color, and to ask the pain what it had taught him. Then he used the visualization of the pain to work it out of his body. Similar approaches are employed in trauma-informed color therapy and other PTSD treatments administered by people you need insurance to see.
“Everything has energy,” he said. “Some of us are meant for greatness, and others are great at being mediocre. Does each blade of grass worry how good it is, or can we appreciate the sum of their beauty? . . . If you treat everything as sacred and divine, that’s what it becomes. If you treat everything as nothing and you just, like, cut down a tree to build a birdhouse, you’re not recognizing that that tree already was a birdhouse. It’s your choice what energy you bring and encourage.”
I met Jamie in the marketplace of approved vendors on the first day of the Gathering. This was her fifth Gathering but her first as a business owner. Like Spazz, she’d grown up with parents who struggled with addiction. Coming of age in Dallas, she had an uncle who was into punk and ICP, and he introduced her to a community she was missing at home. At 15, she had a child, so she got a job and an apartment. Now 28, she runs a company called D-Town Jewelers with her soon-to-be-husband, Parker. They’ve grown it from an online-only operation making automotive rims to a storefront making custom grills and jewelry. (They’ve even made grills for ICP.) Parker has been 11 years sober thanks to his juggalo family, and Jamie says she learned the structures and skills necessary for parenting from her juggalo peers.
When Jamie’s son turned 13, he expressed interest in joining her and Parker at the Gathering. She explained to him what happens there, what she’d expect of him, and what she couldn’t protect him from, like nudity or unsavory comments from strangers. Did he still want to go? He thought on it for a few days, then said, “Mom, I don’t think I’m ready.” She’s excited when he is, though, not only to pass on the tradition but also to get him off his phone.
“I haven’t used my phone while I’m out here,” she explained. “The signal’s not strong for everyone out here, and I’m sure plenty of people’s phones have already died. You know where your friends are, and you know where to find things to do, so what do you need the Internet for? It’s a good reset. Also makes you appreciate the good things when you get home—like air-conditioning!”
Kyle was easy to notice at the Gathering. I saw him on the first day, on a stage beside a small tent hosting what I can only call a “competitive endurance hotbox,” because he was wearing an enormous suit of homemade Warhammer-style armor and stilts.
Kyle has been coming to the Gathering for 14 years. Initially, he was drawn to the hard partying, but he’s stuck with it for the family elements. In his view, the family started coalescing in 1998, when ICP assembled the supergroup Dark Lotus (originally a five-piece with ICP, Twiztid, and Myzery). Not long after, he was in Philadelphia for a party and got jumped. His traveling companions abandoned him, but some people on their way to a Dark Lotus show noticed.
“They pulled up and were like, ‘You OK? You good?’ They literally saved my ass and offered me a ride home, but they were on the way to a concert. They asked if I wanted to go, and then they bought a ticket for me and decked me out. I had never been welcomed like that. Nobody knew me, but they were treating me like we’d been homies for a very long time. After that, I started noticing all the family elements at the Gathering. I gradually lost interest in the partying.”
Many juggalos feel that the 2017 breakup of the Dark Lotus—and the five years of drama that preceded it, including Twiztid starting their own label, fighting for their masters, and poaching Psychopathic rapper and in-house producer Young Wicked—fractured the family in a way it’s still recovering from. Kyle says he’s noticed an uptick in gatekeeping behavior since then—arguments over what’s “true” juggalo versus juff shit (“juff” means “poser”) and debates about whether people are getting down with the clown in the right way.
Some people claim that true juggalos don’t listen to Twiztid anymore, for example, or insist that a particular year’s Gathering was the last “real” one. In response to all this, last year Kyle made his armor suit from foam and other materials and detailed it with band names, juggalo symbols, and Psychopathic Records references. He added the stilts this year. He calls the character “the Gatekeeper,” but it’s meant to inspire people to use their creativity to serve and entertain their community.
“People are forgetting the older traditions,” Kyle said, “which remind us of the love that we have as a group.”
When I arrived at the Gathering, I already knew who Emily was. I’d been in touch with her before leaving Chicago, because the photographer who worked with me on my International Mr. Leather story in June knew she was going to the Gathering. She’s a journalist too, and she turned out to be camping near Kyle.
“The juggalos are everything punks wish they were,” Emily said. “I got into this in late elementary, early middle school, and then I got into riding freight when I was 20. I never felt like I fit in in the punk scene. I’ve always felt isolated in that scene in some way. I’ve been fat for most of my life. That’s one thing here—fat women here are celebrated, unlike in a lot of other subcultures. But punks stand on things like anarchy, community, mutual aid. . . . That stuff does happen, but I think for juggalos, it happens more naturally because of class stuff. There are a lot of punks who have really sheltered views and haven’t had to think too much about other people’s experiences of the world, but juggalos are the true working class. That’s where mutual-aid movements start. That’s why this group functions as a family.”
The Insane Clown Posse are so dopey, wild, and profane that it’s easy to overlook the things that go right in the community they’ve nurtured. All the persecution and derision have only made the bonds among fans tighter. ICP’s songs are all over the map in tone—“Juggalo Juice” is a goofy ode to Faygo, while “Your Rebel Flag” strenuously disavows the Confederate flag and all racists—but all of them work to reinforce the connections that keep juggalo values strong.
ICP have apologized for homophobic lyrics in their early songs and made a point to celebrate their queer fans. Violent J’s teenage daughter is a furry, and he’s stood up for her in ICP’s Snakebusters videos and gone to a furry convention with her. When ICP hold food drives, they encourage people to donate good food, not just stuff they don’t want. That attitude is part of why, when you look through a free box at the Gathering, you can find an unopened dildo beside a gently loved copy of Peggy Orenstein’s Schoolgirls.
The 2010 video for the ICP song “Miracles” has become a bottomless fount of Internet memes (“Fuckin’ magnets: How do they work?”), but as silly as it is, it’s also sincere. The openness and curiosity it expresses are the same openness and curiosity with which juggalos welcome anyone who comes to them in good faith. They embody a spirit of freedom that combines the anti-authoritarianism of punk and heavy metal with the PLUR philosophy (peace, love, unity, respect) of rave culture. It’s about dropping your inhibitions to free yourself and looking out for other people to help them stay free. In practice, this spirit means that sometimes you’re in a ring trying to punch someone. Other times, you’re taking the punch. In the end, it’s all love—much muthafuckin’ wicked clown love.
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