Bats Day: The Afternoon a Crowded Street Parted

Bats Day is a community event. It’s been running since 1999, it draws people who like dark aesthetics, and it’s organized by the people who show up and not by any company. That last point matters and gets lost constantly. It’s unofficial, independent, and always has been.

I went on 20 August 2006, with a friend and a camera. I dressed for it, after a fashion. Black clothes with some red trim. That’s about as goth as I’ve ever managed, and it was enough to fit in without pretending I belonged to the aesthetic.

The Moment Main Street Parted

We spent a while wandering, then went to the small park in the middle of the resort, the one with the statue of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse that looks out toward the castle. We were waiting for our friend Marjhani.

She came down Main Street toward us and I watched it all happen. Her outfit was outrageous. Leather, all black, the red hair, every piece of it right. She must have spent all day getting into it and a fortune assembling it. She was gothic anyway, so none of it was costume for her. That’s why it worked in a way that effort alone doesn’t produce.

She had two friends with her, one on each side, and they were playing her attendants. They were holding her cape off the ground behind her. Marjhani was playing the queen and doing it completely straight. And Main Street parted. A packed street on a Sunday afternoon, and people moved aside to let her through, the way a crowd does when it collectively decides somebody is important. She reached us, dropped all of it instantly, and gave us both an enormous hug.

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What That Was a Lesson In

Marjhani loved being the center of attention, and she was very good at it. But the crowd didn’t part because of the clothes. Plenty of people that day were spectacularly dressed and nobody moved for them.

The crowd parted because she’d decided, entirely, what she was doing. There was no hedging in it, no checking whether it was landing, no apologetic half-version. She committed and everybody else adjusted around her.

I think about that constantly when I read manuscripts. The commonest failure in a first draft is a writer who hasn’t decided. The prose hedges, the voice keeps checking whether it’s allowed, and the reader feels the uncertainty and doesn’t move aside.

A page that’s decided what it’s will part a crowd. One that’s still asking permission won’t, no matter how well constructed.

What a Community Event Looks Like From Inside

Away from that one moment, the day was mostly ordinary in the best sense.

The photographs are of people who spent real effort on what they were wearing. Corsetry, boots, hair that took hours, makeup done with a steadiness I couldn’t manage on my best day. Somebody looking at those images from outside sees costume. What you notice standing in it is how much of it is craft.

That’s the same feeling I know from renaissance faires. That’s where most of my photography life has been spent. Different aesthetic entirely, same underlying thing. A group of people who have agreed to take something seriously that the wider world finds silly, and who are visibly happier for it.

The Thing Everybody Gets Wrong About Subcultures

The outside view of any subculture is that the aesthetic is the point. Black clothes, therefore dark personality. That’s what a stranger reads off a photograph and it’s close to always wrong. The people I spent that day around were friendly, funny, and largely occupied with practical concerns about heat, feet and where to eat. August in that part of California is punishing and a full outfit in black is a commitment. There was a great deal of comparing notes about survivable footwear.

What I took from it, and what I’ve used since, is that the surface of a group tells you what it values. It tells you very little about what its members are like, and people conflate the two constantly.

Why This Matters When You Write About People

I’ve written a hundred and thirteen books under my own name and fifty-four more for other people, and a recurring job in that work is writing about a world the reader is outside of. The failure mode is always the same. A writer describes the surface accurately and gets the interior wrong, because they only saw the surface. You end up with prose that’s technically correct about the clothes and completely wrong about the people. The fix isn’t research. You can research an aesthetic in an afternoon. The fix is having been there long enough for the novelty to wear off, at which point you stop noticing the costumes and start noticing that somebody is worried about their kid’s school. Every group has an ordinary layer underneath the visible one. If your writing doesn’t have it, you weren’t there long enough.

Photographing a Group You Belong To

There’s a practical difference between photographing a community from inside and from outside, and it shows in the pictures. From outside you get portraits of strangers who are aware of the camera. From inside you get people mid-sentence. The second kind is harder to obtain and it’s the only kind worth much.

The entry price is participation. Turn up in your ordinary clothes with a long lens and you’ll get one set of photographs. Turn up dressed, spend the day, and you get a different set, because the people in front of you’ve decided you’re one of them.

Writing works the same way, and I don’t mean that as a metaphor. The access is the same access.

I’m also in the group photo that year, somewhere among four thousand people.

There were several exposures and I eventually found myself off to one side, a dot. That’s the correct scale for it. The photograph is of a community and I was one pixel of it. That’s what turning up gets you and what watching from outside doesn’t.

Twenty Years On

The gathering has kept going. That isn’t nothing for something with no corporate backing and no obligation to exist.

Events like that survive on somebody caring enough to organize them year after year with very little reward. Most don’t survive. The ones that do usually have one person behind them who decided it should keep happening. I think about that whenever somebody tells me their community project is too small to write down. The record of a thing like this exists because participants photographed it and wrote about it. There’s no institutional archive. There’s what the people who were there kept.

How do you spend Bats Day?

If you go, go dressed and plan for the heat. That’s the advice everybody gives and half of everybody ignores.

If you don’t go but you belong to a community of your own, the transferable point is the record. Photograph your people. Write down what a year looked like. Nobody else is doing it and in twenty years it’ll be the only account there is.

So that’s the whole of what I’d say about it. I have a set of pictures from one Sunday in August 2006 and they’re worth considerably more to me now than they were the week I took them.

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