Mike Brunstedt Interview, 12 July 2023

Abstract

Mike Brunstedt (b. 1964) was born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and grew up in Macedonia. Mike discusses coming out as a gay man in the 1980s while attending Case Western Reserve University and his subsequent discovery of the Cleveland's underground gay and straight club scenes in the 1980s. He discusses attending various gay and straight clubs in Cleveland's Flats district in the 1980s and 1990s, including his participation in Cleveland's underground Club Kid and rave scenes. Brunstedt discusses moving from Cleveland to Houston, Texas, where he lived from 1993 to 2000 before returning to Cleveland. He discusses various changes in Cleveland's underground club scene between the 1980s and 2020s. He also reflects on the evolution of Cleveland's LGBTQ+ communities since the 1980s, including the impact of the AIDS crisis on the underground club scene and gay communities and his efforts to preserve Cleveland's LGBTQ+ history.

Interviewee

Brunstedt, Mike (interviewee)

Interviewer

Habyl, Riley (interviewer)

Project

LGBTQ+ Cleveland

Date

7-12-2023

Document Type

Oral History

Duration

87 minutes

Recommended Citation

"Mike Brunstedt Interview, 12 July 2023" (2023). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 701002.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/1271

Transcript

Riley Habyl [00:00:01] Okay. Today's date is July 12, 2023. This is Riley Habyl with the LGBTQ+ Cleveland Voices Oral History Project. I am with Mike Brunstedt at his home in Cleveland. So, thank you for speaking with me, Mike. To begin, can you please state your name for the record?

Mike Brunstedt [00:00:19] Sure. Like you said, my name is Mike Brunstedt and I have a home on the West Side in Cleveland.

Riley Habyl [00:00:28] So when and where were you born, Mike?

Mike Brunstedt [00:00:30] I was actually born at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in 1964. Then I contracted double pneumonia—so they left the Marine base and came out here. And I've been in Cleveland from 1965 to 1993, and then I came back in 2000 to the present.

Riley Habyl [00:01:01] So what year did you—. I should say—. So, growing up in Cleveland—what was the experience like living in Cleveland as a child?

Mike Brunstedt [00:01:12] Well, I think most of us loved the city. I actually did grow up in the suburbs, and on TV you would always hear people say bad things. But as you're living here you think, "I don't know, it seems kind of nice." Then when you get a car and you have a chance to drive around the country, you realize that it's just mostly a misperception. It's a wonderful place to live.

Riley Habyl [00:01:45] What is your current occupation?

Mike Brunstedt [00:01:47] My husband and I, we have a printing business [Full Color Printing] and we mostly just deal with files, and then we sub out the print jobs to what are called trade printers. And they—. They're printers that don't want to deal with the public and we get a discount, so it's a good setup. We have, you know, vendors, clients in all over the world, and we also have clients all over the world. Well, we actually—. Most of our clients are in Canada or the U.S., but more of our business is outside of Cleveland.

Riley Habyl [00:02:26] What year was your business established?

Mike Brunstedt [00:02:28] Originally, I st—. I—. Actually, my ex started it [Full Color Printing] in 1997. When we moved up here in 2000 and we broke up. I carried the business through 2010 until I met my husband. He was laid off during the financial crisis—so I actually met him around 2009—because he was in architecture, and after the financial crisis nobody needed an architect. So then we decided to take the business more seriously and we put up all kinds of websites, and we joined Plexus—our local Chamber of Commerce—and the NGLCC. So, it's going very well. We are lucky to have a lot of Pride business because for traditional print businesses June is a slow month. So it's all working out well. And then we take vacations in July.

Riley Habyl [00:03:40] That's fantastic.

Mike Brunstedt [00:03:42] Yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:03:42] So, what is your level of education and where did you go to school?

Mike Brunstedt [00:03:46] All right, so I have a Ph.D. in polymer science. That's basically plastics and rubbers. But I decided to slant that more towards the biomedical side of things. I went to Case Western [Reserve University] for undergrad, and then I went to Akron for—the University of Akron for a while, and came back to Case and finished up my Masters and Ph.D. And then I—. You know, I was disappointed to find out that most of the jobs that I had studied for weren't located here. So I had no choice, but I left Cleveland for about seven years, and then I finally just decided to make a career change and come back to Cleveland. So that's how it happened.

Riley Habyl [00:04:40] Is that when you left between 1993 and 2000?

Mike Brunstedt [00:04:42] Correct, yes, mhm. I went to Dallas and I really didn't care for it.

Riley Habyl [00:04:48] Why is that?

Mike Brunstedt [00:04:49] Well, it—. And this was when it was only half the size. It just doesn't have the amenities it should have for the amount of traffic there is, and so I—. I just didn't like it. The weather is terrible. It's cold in the winter and it's hot in the summer. And my whole—. All my relatives are up here, so, you know, I knew I wasn't going to be there forever. Some people do stay there, but that's for them.

Riley Habyl [00:05:29] Can you tell me a bit about your childhood and family background?

Mike Brunstedt [00:05:32] Sure. I'm the first child. I'm two and a half years older than my sister. We—. Well, I was born in Bedford, Ohio, and then we moved to Oakwood Village, and then we moved after that to Macedonia, where I spent all the way through, basically, until I started college. So most of my life is, um—I grew up in Macedonia with my sister. My parents divorced. My dad is in Tampa, or Clearwater, or something—and my mom's still up here. And, I don't know. I mean, as far as my childhood goes, as far as being gay—. I knew I was jealous of other boys in maybe second or third grade—more like first or second. But I was a serious student so I really didn't think anything sexually at all until maybe three years into college. Yeah, so, I was pretty I was in the dark about it all. And then I don't know if you're ready for the next question, but I can fill in the rest of that later.

Riley Habyl [00:07:09] Sure, we can go where—.whatever direction you'd like to go. We could always come back to things too.

Mike Brunstedt [00:07:13] Well let's—. What's the next question?

Riley Habyl [00:07:16] Actually, about—. When did you first meet other gay people, and when did you first start thinking about your identity, and—

Mike Brunstedt [00:07:27] Okay, well, that's—. (laughs) That's what we would do next anyways, right? Okay, so—. The way this all happened. The way I pried myself away from books was largely in the summer. Back then everyone used to go dancing, so—. I mean, there were even dance clubs 10 minutes from our house. Everyone was dancing all the time, so we started doing that in the summer. And of course, we only went to straight clubs because I didn't even know there were gay clubs, and I wasn't telling anybody that I was thinking I was gay or anything. So we start out there, and then, you know—. When you do that regularly—which a lot of us did—you're always looking for something different. So the first time that I was truly exhilarated in a nightclub was in—. Around 1984, when I was about 20. We went to the Nine of Clubs [1273 W. 9th St.], and it was an underground club. I didn't know it at the time but most of the men were gay—because nobody was talking about that—and most of the ladies were just underground types. I don't know. They could have been lesbians. I don't know. But it was a place where it was dark. You didn't have to pick up a girl to go dance, so we were all just doing our own thing. And then you kind of start to get—you kind of start to get sucked into this whole underground nightlife thing. You know, one weekend on Memorial Day on Sunday night, somebody says—. One of my friends says, "Oh my God, there's this huge party at this place called the Ritz." So I'm like, okay, let's go there. When we got there—I mean, the line was like three blocks long, and so I went, "Well, you know, we only have till 2:30," but we got in—and it was a gay club. My straight friends took me to a gay club. I think they knew more about my sexuality than I had time to think about back then. So here we are in this gay club, and of course what I did was, I said, "Oh, this is a gay club! Let's go back to the", um, where were we—"Let's go back to the Beach Club and the Flats." So we went back to the Beach Club. And then as soon as I got rid of all of them I went back to the Ritz [1021 Sumner Ave.]. And I stayed until 7 a.m. And boy, it was an eye-opening experience. I saw—. I mean, I saw two people actually have sex in the balcony, which is like—. It's not like a little corridor, there were—. It was like a VIP lounge, and these two guys just started having sex, and then—. So then, on the way out they had all these publications. So I picked those up and I was just stunned that there was a list of 25 gay bars that I didn't even know anything about. So I started going to those, and I also went to the underground clubs. And it was a fun time. It was stressful, too, because Case is not easy. It's not easy to graduate from Case Western. Especially grad school. Well, all of it. So unfortunately, the career path I chose then led me to a degree where you kind of had to move to—. I was too specialized, so I kind of had to move. So I moved to Dallas. And then I looked for years for another job and I found one in Fort Worth, which is right next to Dallas. So that I was like, you know, you only live once. Let's just chuck it all and live where I want to live. So we came back up here.

Riley Habyl [00:12:20] If we could go back to your early introduction to the club scene—the friends that you were going with, were those straight friends, or family members, or—?

Mike Brunstedt [00:12:32] Okay, so, the crowd that I ran around with back then, they were straight. I know that now. I just didn't realize that most of the men in the clubs were gay because there really wasn't a lot. Everyone was just interested in dancing. It wasn't about sex. Remember, this was also the, um, the start of the AIDS thing, which really changed a lot of behavior, but—. So my friends were straight, and I think they figured out that I was gay, even though I don't think you can tell by looking. I don't know. But—. So with those people, we spent a lot of time in the underground clubs and they took me to a gay underground club. And then after I found that book, I found like there's all kinds of other gay clubs that are underground. So on any given night of the week, you had at least two good choices where you could actually go and dance. And I would do that for hours until I was drenched every time, yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:13:59] Can you describe the state of the underground club scene in the early eighties?

Mike Brunstedt [00:14:04] Yes, it started out—. It was all driven by the deejays, but it started out mreally as a mix of college kids and streetwise kids that probably went to the Cleveland public schools and skateboarded around, and did crazy things with their hair, and things that I would never think of doing, and it was really just an interesting mix. Some of the things I saw—. All right, here's a few examples. One night at the Nine of Clubs, somebody brought his Raggedy Ann doll, and he set it up against the wall at the dance floor and danced with it. I mean—okay? (laughs) Another person—he tethered a Barbie doll to his belt loop, but the tether was so long that Barbie was bouncing off. (laughs) So I'm like, "Well, that's a bad night for Barbie." And then, you know, late in the evening when it started to clear out—. One day I turn around and two guys and a girl locked in arms and just rolled down the stairs, and rolled right into the middle of the dancefloor. And to me, this was just—. I had never even thought anything like this would ever happen, and it just kept drawing me in and drawing me in. And every club was so different and so big and so nice. I mean, I saw so many national acts, and then as time went on, this was also—. There's kind of a transition, which I realize more now. There were gay bars before I went to the gay bars, and a lot of those actually have 'pig rooms' in the basement. And if you don't know where that is, that's where horny men go to have sex. And I know the guy across the street, he ran one of those. And um, what they did was—on the main level, on the second level, on a third level, it just seemed like a normal place. And in the basement, you would just check your clothes and go have sex, and then at the end of the night they would like, hose it down to get ready for the next day. And they actually had, um, red lights in the basement, and if the police came, the red lights would flash and everyone would stop having sex. Now, I missed all of this. So I told you that—and this is all a couple of years after, well, I told you I was shocked to see people have sex at this nice first gay club I went to. But apparently, it was a lot more common than I thought. So what happened over time was—people were petrified of HIV and AIDS. It never got that bad here. But I can tell you if any of my friends ever went to New York City, I wouldn't be friends with them anymore just because of that. So what happens was, a lot of these original gay clubs—they closed, or closed the pig rooms—and then nobody came and they went out of business. And so this club I'm describing—later, like maybe two years later—opened up as a gay nightclub called Detour [1281 W. 9th St.]. They had video screens—television screens in the floor—and it was paradise. And in that basement, it was all cleaned up and they had pool tables instead. So what really happened then is, as time went on people became less interested in sex and more interested in dancing and watching shows and stuff like that. So, you know, there would be fashion shows or whatever. And there were several clubs—maybe six or seven clubs that were all doing this—and so they were always trying to one-up each other. So, you know, one night some—someone would have their—they bought black lights and so they would have a glow party. Well, all right! So then all of a sudden the kids running around are painting themselves with neon paint and everyone's glowing, and it just kept getting crazier and crazier. And somewhere around probably 1990 was actually the birth of Cleveland's Club Kid scene, which—. A lot of people don't know that we had a Club Kid scene, but I have the pictures, and I always wore a helmet, but I painted it differently every night—sometimes there was a pyramid on top of it. I always put, like, glow things on top of my glasses so I could see through. I remember one kid, he wore a birdcage on his head. Somebody else one night wore a traffic cone with a wig coming out the top. It was pretty crazy. And then—. So then, you know, that started happening in the clubs. Then the deejays were like, okay, we'll throw raves. And then people were staying out forever—all night. And unfortunately then—. I left at this point. Disappointing. But—. So what really happened was the gay c—the gay clubs became less sexual and more underground. It kind of affected the drag scene, too, because people who like to dance don't really want to watch a drag show. So Cleveland's drag scene kind of died, and I don't think it came back until maybe Bounce [2814 Detroit Ave.] had the drag shows that were way too long, and that was around probably maybe 2000? Now drag is huge. And at—. While we were doing all of our Club Kidding here in Cleveland, I'm sure other cities still had their drag scene. But for people here, it was just all about dressing up strangely and dancing all night, so it really wasn't about shows that interrupt the evening. So—.

Riley Habyl [00:21:46] Before we go into a little more detail about changes to the club scene during the HIV/AIDS crisis, and then the evolution of the underground scene—. Can you tell me a bit more about some of the differences that you experienced in the early '80s regarding attending straight clubs and the straight underground dance scene, versus the gay underground dance scene?

Mike Brunstedt [00:22:05] Okay, so we might as well just start with the straight clubs. Cleveland has pretty much—and they're always been certain incidents—. But Cleveland's always been pretty much open to whatever. So, you know, I never had any trouble getting into a straight club—drinking at a straight club—staying at a straight club—but they were never dark enough for me to go out and dance by myself. So there was one club called Noisemakers in the Flats, and they had a little, tiny little section underneath the DJ booth that I would go dance in, 'cause, I don't know (shrugs)—but the whole thing, it just didn't work for me to try to meet a girl and then go dance. I wanted to dance harder than she would anyway, so I had no trouble being in the straight clubs and they had no trouble with me being there, it's just—. Here were clubs where, you know, it was very dark and very easy to do whatever you wanted to. Now, there are—. Okay so, the Nine of Clubs [1273 W. 9th St.] and Aquilon [1575 Merwin Ave.], Lift [1575 Merwin Ave.], and Metropolis [2325 Elm St.], Trilogy [2325 Elm St.]—those were what you might call straight clubs with a lot of underground kids. Most of the men—. Well some of the men, a good portion of the men I know now were homosexual. Then, you know, there were clubs like the Ritz [1021 Sumner Ave.] and U4ia [10630 Berea Rd.] and Detour [1281 W. 9th St.] that had the same deejays, so the serious straight people would come to those. And so it was—. There really wasn't a lot of difference. It's just like, the people who come to watch the fun people in the gay clubs were gay men or women, and the people in the straight clubs were—that came to watch the strange people were straight people, so they were all there to watch the same people. Yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:24:44] Would you say there was a better atmosphere in the gay clubs, as far as you're talking about the lighting in the gay clubs and how there wasn't a lot of—the straight clubs weren't as dark and they didn't have, you know a big LGBT following?

Mike Brunstedt [00:24:56] Okay, well, the underground straight clubs were nice and dark. The underground—. All gay bars were always dark. It was just the traditional straight clubs that were a little too light inside do whatever you wanted to do.

Riley Habyl [00:25:13] That makes sense.

Mike Brunstedt [00:25:13] Yeah. I'm just saying, there was a lot of overlap between the underground in the gay world and the straight world. More, more—. Now I realize more than I knew back then, because we used to have—we still have reunions and you know, Iike, they'll have the Nine of Clubs reunion over Thanksgiving or Christmas. And so now, you know, you notice that the men were gay. I mean how would I—. I never even knew. But we were, I wasn't really interested in sex that much anyway. So, because of AIDS, I mean I was like, well, you know—if I'm going to go to college forever, I mean you might as well kill me when I'm a freshman, not when I'm doing my post-doc work or my doctoral will work. So I was, uh, pretty careful.

Riley Habyl [00:26:12] Mhm. When did your—. In what context did you first start hearing about HIV?

Mike Brunstedt [00:26:17] Oh, I just remember my mother. She would get the Plain Dealer every day and she would say, "God I'm so sick of hearing about AIDS!". Every article. It was an obsession with the newspapers. But, I mean, just like when—just like when there's a recession—when you're in college you don't know. You don't know that there's a recession—you just know you have a lot to do, too much to do. Well, I mean, I knew HIV was out there. In the beginning I don't think it really was in Ohio that much, but it did come. But it was rarely talked about. People just stopped having sex. That's kind of what happened.

Riley Habyl [00:27:12] I know you mentioned that you went with a lot of straight friends to the bars in the early '80s. Did you end up making any friends that were out as gay in the mid-eighties?

Mike Brunstedt [00:27:25] Well, you know, let's call it the mid-eighties, because the early eighties was more when they had the pig rooms and all that, which I missed. Even though I was just a few blocks away at Case Western I didn't even know any of this was happening. So, I'm sorry, what—. What was—. What were we going after here?

Riley Habyl [00:27:48] Sort of thinking about—

Mike Brunstedt [00:27:49] Oh, oh—. I know. I remember. So you wanted to know if—. There's this—. There's this thing called gaydar.

Riley Habyl [00:28:02] Mhm.

Mike Brunstedt [00:28:02] So, you know, from time to time, you could meet a gay person—and if they were interested, in my view, gaydar is just when two man—two men look at each other and don't blink away, because straight men don't look at other men in the eyes. So, in my view, that's what gaydar is. So, you know, if you lock eyes with somebody then it's possible that you might be hooking up. And there was also, I must say, no such thing as long-term relationships for gay men. But I never heard of any of that. In fact, you couldn't even get people to call you back, so there was a lot of hopping around. In fact, before the AIDS crisis, the city—and this is before my time—but the city was gripped by venereal disease outbreaks. And so the city even contacted High Gear—which is one of the publications for the gay community—about putting safe sex notations in—in the publication and articles about how to not spread V.D., and stuff like that but—. So even without AIDS, I mean, all this sex was causing a lot of trouble even before that.

Riley Habyl [00:29:48] So would you say that, around the time that AIDS became something that people were more aware of in Cleveland, did that cause any major changes to the way that people in the community interacted with each other, or that—or the way that relationships were formed?

Mike Brunstedt [00:30:08] Oh, I don't think it's—it was as, is—it was as extreme as some of the things they showed on the news where, like, a town would isolate somebody if they knew they had HIV. It wasn't like that at all. I remember being at U4ia and someone whispering, which was—it was hard to whisper there, but maybe back in the choir somebody whispering some—something about some guy who had HIV. But if, if there was—. The bars I went—. The places I went there just wasn't a lot of sex going on. You know, people just wanted to dance. And I should say, there were all—. There were still seedier gay clubs but I didn't go to those. So I'm sure they were having sex there, but, um, I don't—. I mean, I know people who lost a lot of friends, but they're just a bit older than me. It, it didn't really—. I personally, I only know of—. Well, I'm HIV positive, but I only know of a couple of other people that are HIV positive, and I am like—. Well, let me change that. When I moved to Dallas, they were still having sex down there a lot. That's probably where I ended up contracting it. So there were some funerals down there. It just didn't seem to be that big of a thing in the circles that I was inserting myself in. So we were safer. We were trying to be safer.

Riley Habyl [00:32:25] Do you think that was out of a greater sense of awareness of the crisis in Cleveland, or—?

Mike Brunstedt [00:32:33] Well—

Riley Habyl [00:32:33] Where do you think that difference came from?

Mike Brunstedt [00:32:34] I think on the coasts it took people by surprise more, and so maybe they didn't have time to change their behavior. I think that the gay clubs that I went to shared the same deejays as the straight clubs, and when the Flats just blew up into 20,000 people going a night, there was—. That heavily also heavily influenced the gay clubs that I went to because they were—they were trying to attract the same entertainm—entertainers. Alright, let's see. RuPaul. I met RuPaul three times in one weekend. I met her at Aquilon on Friday, which is a straight underground club. I met her some—. I might have—. I saw her at U4ia that same weekend on Saturday—and then I also saw her at the Ritz on Sunday—and so this was pretty common. The same thing would happen with Deee-Lite, Deee-Lite (hums Deee-Lite's "Groove Is In the Heart"). You know that song, "Groove Is in the Heart"? The same thing would happen with them. You would see them at a straight club on Friday—then a gay club on Saturday—then a straight club on Sunday. So they were all sharing and drawing from the same deejays—the same entertainment—so they really weren't all that different. I don't know if I answered your question.

Riley Habyl [00:34:18] Perfectly. No worries.

Mike Brunstedt [00:34:19] [Laughs.] Okay, good. All right, good. This is easy, alright, you just talk. Yeah, I don't know. I think we might be ready for another question.

Riley Habyl [00:34:29] Sure. Did you ever experience any instances of discrimination, or any negative attitudes, within the straight clubs? I know you mentioned that there were some, you know, gay performers that came to the straight clubs and there was a lot of intermingling between the gay and straight clubs.

Mike Brunstedt [00:34:47] There was. Well, the gay and underground clubs. I didn't exp—. I didn't—. I never really saw any incidences of people getting thrown out of a straight club because they were gay. But remember, gay people who—gay people have plenty of their own places to go, so they didn't really need to go there. Everything was cool in and around clubs. The scene was completely seamlessly mixed and in fact, it wasn't—. It was pretty much—. I don't want to say asexual, but it wasn't about sex, so nobody cared.

Riley Habyl [00:35:38] What would you say it was mainly about? Or, what was the main attraction to the underground club scene specifically for you and your friend groups?

Mike Brunstedt [00:35:47] It was the deejays and the dancing and, you know—dancing on boxes—dancing on the bar. It was just dance, dance, dance, sweat, sweat, sweat. It was the music, and the darkness. You go into the dark, yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:36:06] Can you tell me a bit about some of the—. Or I guess, some of your favorite clubs to go to in the '80s?

Mike Brunstedt [00:36:12] Oh, yeah, sure. Well, I already told you about the Nine of Clubs—people rolling down the stairs. There was a place on the fourth floor of a building in the Flats [district] where you took a freight elevator up, and it was—. It had different names on different nights. Its main name was Aquilon—that was the upscale name. And when they opened, what they did was they would have a big band playing from nine to eleven. So 20 people—a 20-piece band playing from nine to eleven—and then from midnight to four, they were playing techno and trance. So they figured out how—. It was very nice. They figured out how to fill the club up from nine until forever. And they also had a lot of fashion shows there, so they, you know—they had built a runway and they left it up so people could dance on the runway and stuff like that. There was U4ia, which was a wonderful place. It had, it—it had a stage where you could dance—had a dance floor—it had boxes that you could dance on. It had three levels where you can watch people dance and a bar that went almost all the way around the entire block, (laughs) so you could dance there or you could drink there too. I'm trying to think, what's the—. My favorite of all time was originally called Metropolis and it alternated names between Trilogy and Metropolis. It was enormous. It had—. Under normal circumstances, they had three deejays because they had two rooms and a VIP room with their own deejay. This place was nuts. One Christmas I walked in—not on Christmas day, but, you know, the weekend—and the place is full of snow—

Riley Habyl [00:38:41] Fake s—?

Mike Brunstedt [00:38:41] Fake snow. But—. I don't know what is going on here! So there's snow everywhere, they had put styrofoam trees up and they had Christmas lights. This is what they would do just to attract people for one weekend to their club. One—. For Halloween they had put the hoods of cars everywhere—and the little gnomes like After the Apocalypse—and a stench in the air. And for—in the summer they had a courtyard outside and they built a lighthouse and put a swimming pool and sand in. So, it the places would spend a lot of money on keeping people interested in coming to their place. Now, another way that they reached different audiences was they would offer different types of music on different nights. So that way, you know, people weren't always going to the same place and people knew where to go. Unless you were from out of town—then you had to research. But, and then there were—there were all the—the acts that came in. At the Ritz one Sunday night, they built a ramp to the second floor of this club through a window so Grace Jones could ride her motorcycle up this ramp and down into the middle of the dance floor. It was like this—. It was like this all the time, it was crazy. So, I mean, I wish all of this was still happening, but unfortunately times change, so—. But that's what a little bit of what it was like. It was—it was crazy, people are wearing strange clothes, and lights. And there was this one guy who I thought, "Oh, this is interesting." He carried around a flower pot, and people said, there—you go buy your drugs from him, but I didn't do drugs. So, the drugs were in the flower pot, and then he had always put a piece of tape over his mouth and put a hole in it so he could smoke and drink (laughs). I know. Where did the strange people go? Love it. Anyway, so, yeah. So I think you can kind of figure out why I went dancing a lot. It was very insane and a lot of fun, yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:41:45] It sounds like it was a world of its own almost.

Mike Brunstedt [00:41:47] Yeah, it was. It was, yeah.

Riley Habyl [00:41:51] Were you a part of any underground subcultures within these clubs? I know you talked about the emergence of the Club Kids in Cleveland. Were you part of the Club kids or—. I'm trying to think of some of the other subcultures that I've read about. I know there was a—. Not sure the term for it, but there was Glow Kids or something like that, I'm not sure if that's—

Mike Brunstedt [00:42:20] I was both of those. I was a Glow Kid. After we were introduced to Club Kids, I was a Club Kid too. So, yeah, I wore the craziest things. I—. Yeah. I had a lot of fun.

Riley Habyl [00:42:43] Could you tell me a bit more about what the Club Kids were and what drew you to them, or how that scene came about within Cleveland specifically?

Mike Brunstedt [00:42:52] Oh, sure. So, well, I already told you about how people were painting themselves in neon paint or blacklight paint. There was progression of craziness. One time somebody brought in a national act—and all it took is one person—but I think one or two people brought a whistle and they were blowing their whistle. And I was like, "I got to get a whistle!" (Riley laughs) And that's what it was—we were all trying to outdo each other. So within two or three weeks, almost everybody had a whistle and one person would blow the whistle and then everybody—. The whole club was just blowing whistles. I remember one night I was—this is a little off-beat, but yeah, I was definitely a Club Kid. We were dancing with our glow shit on, and then three Club Kids came into the club and just sat down on the dance box in the middle of the room, and we're all just, like, staring. What are these people? And then within two or three weeks, we had, you know, our own 25 or 30 Club Kids just running around from club to club—wearing the strangest outfits—going straight to the front of the line. That was one good thing about it. I don't know that—since I was so busy with school I didn't really make fr—great friendships with a lot of these people. And I mean, those are the only, like, subcultures that I recall being a part of.

Riley Habyl [00:44:4

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