A Year Without a Gathering of the Juggalos
Since I attended my first Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse’s annual festival of art and culture, in 2009, I’ve only missed three. I missed two in 2013 and 2014, when I was working for The Dissolve and another in 2018 when my second son Harris was born. For Juggalos like myself, the Gathering is a tradition bordering on sacred. It’s something we look forward to all year long, and think about constantly. It takes up valuable real estate in our minds, as both a beloved source of memories and something to forever look forward to.
It’s an opportunity to escape the mundanity and banality of the everyday world. Particularly during my first few Gatherings in the desolate Midwestern wasteland of Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, it was a place of pure, terrifying, exhilarating freedom. It was a debauched bacchanal notorious for its drug bridge, an open-air market for pills and powders and concoctions of all kinds where vendors carried handmade signs advertising their wares or yelled patently unsubtle sales pitches through bullhorns.
Nudity, volume and in your face expressions of sexuality and profanity weren’t just allowed at the Gathering of the Juggalos: they were actively encouraged, if not angrily demanded.
The Gathering of the Juggalos is, in other words, the absolute antithesis of our current scary and uncertain cultural moment, when a seemingly limitless number of freedoms have been restricted for the sake not just of order but for our very survival, individually and collectively.
We live in a time of rules and restrictions, codes and social and institutional pressure. We’ve never been more hyper-aware of how our actions and behavior affect others. It’s not just a matter of being polite or considerate: it’s a matter of life and death.
So I was not particularly surprised but I was impressed when Insane Clown Posse decided to cancel the 21st Gathering of the Juggalos once it became apparent to everyone other than Trump, Republicans and a dedicated coalition of strong-willed and wildly miseducated free market, libertarian maroons just how dangerous and deadly COVID-19.
I have devoted a not insubstantial percentage of the last decade to elucidating the dignity and cultural value of Juggalo Nation. So it is always a treat to wake up to people saying nice things about Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse considering that they’ve spent much of the past three decades being one of the most hated and misunderstood fanbases and acts in music history.
It feels incredibly validating when the world comes around to understanding the complicated truth about Juggalos and ICP instead of just the lazy, mocking, dismissive stereotype I have spent a lot of time trying to dismantle.
Insane Clown Posse’s mature and responsible decision to cancel what would have been the 21st Gathering early rather than risk compromising the health and lives of its fanbase illustrates that following social distancing rules isn’t a matter of weakness or cowardice but responsibility and empathy.
It’s the right thing to do morally, of course, but it’s also good business. After all, the short term benefits of opening up for business prematurely are undoubtedly offset by the long term effect of imperiling the lives and health of your best, most loyal and faithful customers.
ICP canceled the Gathering for practical and economic reasons, of course but also because they’re responsible leaders of a subculture that looks to them as unlikely role models, as evidenced by their fight against the FBI gang label that has adversely affected the lives of their fans and their 2017 March on Washington, where I was honored to be one of the speakers.
Over the past decade or so I’ve thought sometimes about what a year without a Gathering of the Juggalos would be like. Would civilization be able to survive such a tragedy?
2020 will be a year without a Gathering, just as it has been a year without so much that it is important, if not essential to us, in no small part because it gives us a sense of continuity and tradition, for both the very best—ICP cares about its fans and does not want to put profit over people and finance over fans—and very worst—this awful pandemic has made Gathering not just ill-advised but positively lethal, on a micro and macro scale—of reasons.
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