Neither a premature oral history nor a coffee-table photo tome of dancefloor shots, Andrew Durbin’s debut novel, MacArthur Park, is a snapshot of New York’s thriving queer dance-music world in real time. Opening in 2012 just as Hurricane Sandy hit, the book follows a rootless poet named Nick Fowler who, in between endless nights in dance clubs and days spent “fiddling with sex apps,” is writing a book about the impending climate disaster. But really, MacArthur Park centers around a real-life illegal nightclub housed in a former strip club, known as the Spectrum in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. From 2011 to 2016, the self-described queer safe space was home to some of the city’s best parties. It was the kind of place that was full of surprises every night: If you were lucky, Arca would be behind the boards, or world-famous art photographer Wolfgang Tillmans would take your picture.

Durbin’s writing spares no detail capturing the club’s crowded, sweaty dancefloors. In one indelible scene, he rhapsodizes about how certain songs—in this case the novel’s namesake, Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park”—become like a “fluid space” that emotions, drugs, and whatever else the night offers can dissolve into. Reading the way he lovingly describes the queer power of disco and house, and the unflinching detail with which he discusses New York clubs, I thought he’d have interesting thoughts on music and NYC’s nightlife crackdowns. I caught up with Durbin recently by phone to discuss those topics, and how he came to be a favorite writer of Frank Ocean’s.

Pitchfork: Your protagonist’s main musical interests are house and disco, and he spends a lot of time dissecting the queerness of the genres, both historically and personally. Did you grow up with house and disco?

Andrew Durbin: I didn’t grow up with disco or house music, and that’s a really sad thing for me. I guess I was indoctrinated, not by my parents, but by the culture at large, that disco and house—particularly disco—was an awful thing. It was easily caricatured and represented the excess of the 1970s. I realized later that the backlash against disco was essentially an anti-POC, homophobic desire to stamp out music that was doing something different.

My friend Matt [Wolf], who made that documentary about Arthur Russell [Wild Combination], had a section in the film about Russell's disco music, and his song “Is it All Over My Face” totally enthralled me. I didn’t really know how to begin listening to this kind of music—and in many ways I still don’t—but I found different disco playlists online. I discovered Frankie Knuckles that way, and I’ve never fallen in love with music the way I fell in love with him. Discovering house and disco was like discovering a gay side of myself that had been suppressed, unbeknownst to me by mainstream culture. It was like relearning a kind of queer history.

The novel spends a lot of time at the Spectrum, which has become a pretty storied place in ’10s NYC nightlife lore since its original incarnation closed. What did that club mean to you?

I had spent a lot of time there, more by chance than anything because I lived three blocks from there. For me, the Spectrum was like a funny watering hole because everyone I wanted to see and cared about in the world would end up there on Saturday nights. It made New York feel small, and that’s what really mattered to me—the intimacy that it created between my own community. Its loss has fragmented that intimacy. The great thing about nightlife, particularly queer nightlife, is that it really creates a space for trans people, gay people, people of color, especially when it’s off the grid like the Spectrum was.

It was interesting that your descriptions of clubbing are so unglamorous, and Nick almost never seems to be dancing or be listening in any of those scenes.

What mattered most to me was everything that was happening on the sidelines of the Spectrum. People were dancing, but that was always the given. I was more interested in what you didn't quite expect, whether it was Wolfgang Tillmans turning up or whatever else. The hard part about writing about nightlife is that it exists so temporarily, and a club or a party is about all these ephemeral, natural human interactions.