Michael Alig was the darling of the New York club scene, a magnet for misfits and a lightning rod for conservative outrage. Then he killed a friend. On his release from prison, Emma Brockes unravels a story of our times

For a year or so before he left prison, Michael Alig was phoning in tweets to a friend on the outside, who updated his account with aperçus from the exercise yard and cute observations about daytime TV. How did Justin Bieber get his hair to stand up like that? Why was everyone so mean to Madonna? After almost two decades inside, Alig's persona seemed little changed from the 1990s, when his fame as the king of the New York club scene rested on a combination of low humour, high camp and the laboriously outrageous (one of his signature moves was to urinate in people's drinks). "I just look ADORABLE in my mess-hall whites & hair-net," ran a typical tweet from earlier this year. "Where are the paparazzi when you need them?"

Since the 48-year-old's release last month, it's a tone that has jarred with expectations of what remorse looks like, and Alig has had to temper his adorableness with lots of qualifiers about how sorry he is, an effort undermined by those of his friends who turned up at the prison gates to greet him. As the media waited, and Alig emerged looking slight and sober, a group of ageing ex-club kids giddy on Red Bull and vodka bounced around laughing and screaming, as if serving 17 years for manslaughter were just another of Alig's inventive, satirical breaks with convention. "I wouldn't go so far as to say I'd have thrown them out," he says now, "but they probably weren't people I would have invited." He does his best to look chastened.

No matter how disagreeable the crime or the perpetrator, a celebrity felon is protected from the full force of public condemnation by the buffer of his fame. Someone who has it all and squanders it should, if anything, incur less sympathy than a regular criminal, but they don't. The height of the fall is so great, and the public humiliation so widespread, that any show of contrition is received as the satisfying end to a well-wrought story (I'm thinking primarily of Jonathan Aitken here).

And so it has been with Alig, whose US publicity blitz in the few weeks after his release has reasserted him as a celebrity first, convicted killer second. We are sitting in the sun outside a restaurant in Manhattan, where Alig is rushing around between meetings, he says, setting up "projects". He is broke, living with a friend in the Bronx and learning to do all the things one has to relearn after prison; on his daily to-do list he has to write down "take a shower" and "have lunch", or else he finds himself waiting for the next bell.

"I'm still getting used to being with civilised people," he says demurely. Alig is slight, boyish, prone to giggling nervously and pained by the extent to which he is misunderstood. "It was wrong and inappropriate," he says of the friends who turned up at the prison. "And not caring about what Angel's family and friends would think." Angel Melendez was friends with Alig before they got into a fight over drugs in 1996, and Alig killed and later dismembered him. "But also, what about me? If you don't care about anything else, at least care about how this is going to be perceived. I already have that reputation: that I don't care."

Alig (right) and fellow clubber ‘Genetalia’ at the Tunnel Club in New York in 1995, the year before his arrest for the murder of Angel Melendez. Photograph: Steve Eichner/Getty Images

Twenty years ago, Alig's celebrity was based on precisely this assumption; that there was nothing he wouldn't say or do in pursuit of fun or disrupting the order of things. When he arrived in Manhattan in the early 80s, he was a 17-year-old nobody from Indiana, fleeing a childhood marred by homophobic bullying, his parents' divorce and a disapproving and remote father. A few years later, through sheer force of personality, he was the main club promoter and public face for nightclub owner Peter Gatien, drumming up trade for Gatien's clubs downtown and cofounding his own mini-movement of partygoers, Club Kids.

It is hard to recapture just how famous Alig was in the late 80s and early 90s, a parochial fame based on middle America's preoccupation with the sinful goings-on in New York's nightclub scene, but a no less potent celebrity for that. Alig, often done up like Boy George and sporting a heavily sardonic manner, was wheeled out on every talkshow in the land to "defend" his lifestyle and provoke a reaction from conservative columnists. In downtown New York, meanwhile, his fame inside the small, intense circle of the city's self-appointed cool people rose steadily in proportion to his scandalous antics. At his height, Alig was effectively responsible for the allure of a club empire that, Gatien boasted, employed 900 people.

If that had been it, Alig would, like Gatien, be a footnote in New York's social history at a time when it exploded in rebellion against Reagan-era values. His experience mirrored the boom and bust of the age, and Alig's excesses – his rampant me-me-me-ism; the sometimes bullying, exclusive edge to the scene he created – had more in common with the conservative mainstream, or with high-school politics, than he perhaps likes to admit.

"I was in that circle where anything was tolerated," he says. "You could say just the worst things about people, nobody was ever offended." It's the alibi of the terminal teenager – never take anything seriously; disparage as "intolerant" anyone who has the gall to complain – which Alig maintained even after the killing, when he appeared on TV and made a joke about killing Melendez. And while it's an approach that many of his friends from that era apparently still cling to, Alig insists he's moved on. What does it take to snap out of that mentality? "I'll tell you what it takes. It takes going to prison for 17 years and going through extensive therapy, then having to face what you are and how you behaved. Because while you're on drugs, you're not facing anything."

Alig's post-release celebrity is partly a function of his own efforts to remain visible and partly down to prison putting his fame on ice. The crime was sufficiently horrible to ensure a lingering interest – in 2003, a terrible film called Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, was made about it – and there is an unresolved curiosity as to how it happened. Alig, though a heroin addict, had no history of violence. How he came to kill his friend, douse him in bleach and dump him in a bath for a week before hacking off his legs and throwing him in the river is beyond comprehension.

The thing Alig himself still boggles at is not the crime itself, but the fact that such horror and ugliness grew out of something with such promising beginnings. Club Kids had been a benign undertaking, driven by self-promotion, sure, but also by a desire to help "other people who were having a hard time assimilating, like I was when I was growing up. I came to New York and provided an oasis where they could come and be celebrated."

It was a haven for gay kids, drag queens, wearers of fairy wings and chicken suits, who rebelled in creative and at first fairly harmless ways by doing things such as mustering a precursor to the flash mob – impromptu parties in subway carriages and random branches of McDonald's. "And we were completely anti-drug in the beginning," Alig says. "It was a very creative, positive thing: come to New York and join our group, where you'll be celebrated for the thing that makes you kooky or the outcast."

Alig had been beaten up a few times in school, taunted with the word "faggot", and every time ran home crying. He was not a fighter. While his mother was supportive, his father, a salesman, wasn't thrilled with his son's sexuality, and after the divorce, when Alig was five, they had limited contact. "My mum says I was always trying to get my dad's attention. Every time I was in a newspaper or magazine, I'd send it to him and would get no response." In the three weeks since Alig's release, his father has yet to contact him.

Like most people on the club scene, Alig started taking drugs – ecstasy and heroin, coke and ketamine – and, egged on by those around him, his behaviour became more erratic. His mania was a big part of the draw that kept clubs such as Tunnel and Limelight booming, and he was under pressure to keep the outrageousness coming. He was also, he says, suffering from something called "histrionic personality disorder", which sounds like the definition of being a jerk, but has a bona fide clinical diagnosis. "It's very funny, my diagnosis," he says. "If you look it up, you only have to have five or seven [of the symptoms] and I have every single one." He looks thoroughly delighted. "The doctor said I was the most extreme case he'd ever seen. Everything has to be completely over the top and exaggerated. It worked well for my job – I was a promoter."

Alig's self-dramatising became progressively worse until, as the club scene began to wane in the mid-90s, he couldn't see what was becoming plain to a lot of other people: that being transgressive and being obnoxious are not the same thing. One particular story, told in a 1998 documentary about Alig, had him urinating over a club balcony on to the head of a female bartender who was roundly mocked when she burst into tears.

That's not subversive, I say; that's being a dick.

With fellow New York Club Kids in 1994; Alig was regularly wheeled out on talkshows to defend his lifestyle to middle America . Photograph: Steve Eichner/Getty Images

Alig looks contrite. "No. It's awful. I tell you – I don't remember that. I'm not saying it didn't happen, because I was on drugs. But it could have happened. Did I urinate in drinks? I did. At the time, the justification was, this is a performance, there are 50 people watching and this is a show. And I thought, if they're not going to stop me, it must be OK. After a while, I thought, this is what they expect, and if I stop doing it, they'll stop saying how funny I am. They'll stop coming to my parties. And it's part of a histrionic personality."

The killing of Melendez would almost certainly not have happened if Alig and the others in the room at the time had not been on drugs, but Alig is careful to avoid the drugs-made-me-do-it line: a precondition of rehab, and parole, is to take responsibility for your crime. "I was responsible because I made the decision to do drugs," he says. "And when I made that decision I wasn't on drugs."

He was still on drugs in the weeks after the killing, however, when he appeared on TV and said sarcastically of Melendez, "He was a copycat, so we killed him." It was an unfair edit, Alig now says, and should have included his preceding comment: "You want me to say something shocking like he was a copycat, so we killed him."

It's a fairly meaningless distinction given the monstrous jokiness of the tone, which to this day Alig puts down to the "gallows humour" favoured by him and his friends. "It was the 'if you don't laugh, you'll cry' thing," he says. "Otherwise we'd just completely break down – we'd realise how serious and devastating this really is."

They were in denial?

"Complete and utter denial. When we came back to the apartment first of all, we didn't even realise he was dead for eight or nine hours."

The details of the killing have been distorted over the years by errors in the documentary and the film, and by inaccuracies and exaggerations perpetrated by Alig's own circle. "We all have histrionic personality disorder, we all love to gossip and tell the most outrageous stories to each other, and each time we tell a story, it gets bigger. We're not like normal people; it's not soccer moms here."

In his original statement, Robert Riggs, known as Freeze, who was also sentenced for the killing and released in 2010, told police that Alig and Melendez had been fighting in Alig's apartment and that he had intervened to help his friend by hitting Melendez over the head with a hammer. Alig then throttled Melendez, Freeze said, poured detergent into his mouth and taped it up with duct tape. Since Alig has always maintained that the death was accidental, the question arises: at what point did they think they weren't actually killing him?

"OK, first of all, the hammer thing. In the movie and the documentary, they have Freeze hitting him with the metal end of the hammer and blood going everywhere. He hit him with the wooden end of the hammer, not the metal end. And there wasn't even a cut on his head when they did the autopsy. There was bruising. But you hear 'hitting on head with a hammer' and you assume."

What about the Drano?

"He was in the bathtub, he was dead already and had been for almost a day – again, I'm not trying to justify any of this – we put ice on the body and baking soda and Drano. To cover any odours." Alig insists he didn't pour it down Melendez's throat after the attack.

But did he smother him? "I didn't smother him – he died of asphyxiation, but I didn't put something over his face and go like that." He mimics holding down a pillow. "We just thought he was unconscious, which wasn't uncommon for people in my house. So we put him on the couch."

Eventually, they realised he wasn't breathing. "At the time I was still looking at Peter [Gatien] as a father figure, so the first thing I did was call him. And his girlfriend answered the phone." Gatien was being investigated for drug use in his clubs. His girlfriend gave Alig the number of a lawyer.

No one called a lawyer. "The first thing we were thinking was, if we go to jail, we're going to be sick in six hours."

So what did you do?

"We put him in the bathtub and left."

It's an odd fact of the case that the dismemberment of Melendez is harder for people to wrap their heads around than the fact of his killing in the first place. A fight that gets out of control and ends in murder is one thing. But hacking the legs off your former friend in the cold light of day puts Alig beyond reach of most people's compassion or comprehension. While he was in prison and still using drugs, he would have terrible flashbacks to that scene. "My psychiatrist told me it was post-traumatic stress disorder and that I'd continue to flash back until I dealt with it."

Did he vomit while he dismembered the body?

Michael Alig: ‘I thought, if they’re not going to stop me, it must be OK. It’s what they expect – if I stop doing it, they’ll stop saying I’m funny and coming to my parties.’ Photograph: Caroll Taveras for the Guardian

"It seems to me you've never done heroin. You would be surprised at the level of dissociation involved. You use it exactly in order not to feel. It cuts off all feeling, even with something as crazy as that. And we knew that was the only way we'd be able to do something like that. We both felt guilty and were having nightmares."

This was a week or so after the murder. "At that point all of our friends knew and it was difficult to face them." No one went to the police. It was only when the body was discovered floating in the Hudson river months later that the police showed any interest in pursuing what had become an open secret in club circles, with articles in New York magazine and the New York Post openly insinuating Alig's involvement. Alig fled to New Jersey, where he was arrested and, in December 1997, pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter.

In jail, Alig eventually got clean and, he says, faced up to what he had done. "I thought – I'm in jail, but I'm not suffering as much as I should be, because I'm blanketing myself with opiates. So I need to stop using that and suffer." He learned to "love myself" and also "to punish myself for what I have done, instead of getting away with it".

Since his release, Alig has gone to five rehab meetings a week. He will almost certainly sell a memoir, and he has been aggressively pursuing attention. "It sounds so selfish and it is selfish, but who wouldn't enjoy having people around being nice to you and interested in what you're saying?" In the early days of release, he drew up a list of the pros and cons of soliciting attention. Among the pros was offering to a new generation the example of what Club Kids once was, an inspiration for misfits. Among the cons was the fact that, by seeking attention, "I'll feel like I'm perpetuating this idea that I don't care. That I'm a sociopath, that it was all a joke, that I think it's cool to kill somebody."

Melendez's family, for their part, has not made any comment since Alig's release. What does he say to kids who read about him and think he's cool? "I am cool! I mean, what I did before the crime. The kids who are emailing me now, none of them thinks that the crime is cool, in fact most of the emails begin, 'What you did was really horrible…' But then they say what was happening beforehand was just amazing and we're just sick we were born 20 years too late."

Alig seems blind to the fact that you can't separate the two: the killing and its aftermath destroyed the memory of Club Kids and everything it stood for, and exposed Alig and his friends for the frauds they became. "None of us was using drugs to have fun," he says. "It wasn't like, oh, let's do cocaine and go dance! It was more like we need another line of cocaine to never have to face the truth that we were very self-conscious and uncomfortable in our own skins. And the irony is that we were spearheading this youth movement where the tagline was 'love yourself'."

Will he choose better friends now? One of his old cohorts who came to the prison to greet Alig told a waiting reporter he'd wanted to buy a toy hammer to wave, as a hilarious joke. Does Alig have the discipline to cut these people adrift?

"I have a hard time cutting anybody adrift because I have abandonment issues," he says. "So it's one of my big problems. I don't know how to tell anyone no." He looks pained, like someone martyred by the scale of his own sensitivity. "I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings."