At 3am on Saturday I got on a train headed for DC. My band had just played and I was wired from the horrifying 5 hour energy and rum cocktail I down 20 minutes before I play a show. I didn’t sleep a wink on the train. It was 7am when I arrived. I ended up getting about 90 minutes of sleep before heading down to the Lincoln Memorial for Juggalo March on Washington.

I have been photographing juggalos since 2010 and in that time I have grown very protective of them. Juggalos are the most mocked subculture on the planet but if you spend a day with a bunch of juggalos you will come away with a completely different opinion of them. They are the nicest, most accepting, down to earth people you could possibly meet and every journalist I have met covering juggalos comes away with the exact same feeling.

So in 2011 when the FBI classified juggalos as a gang I was mystified. It made no fucking sense to me. Yeah of course some juggalos commit crimes but so do fans of every genre of music. The Insane Clown Posse is a horror movie in music form. Should we be locking up the millions of people who watched IT last weekend?

At the Gathering of the Juggalos in 2012 ICP held a talk to discuss the FBI designation. They had their lawyer come out and talk as well. They then set up an area of the festival where people could come and tell their stories about how this bullshit designation had fucked up their lives. Here’s how I covered it at the time.

Eventually the ACLU got involved and it seemed like this was such an easy to fix mistake but the mistake was never fixed. ICP had their lawsuit thrown out two times and even though they won an appeal in 2015 the lawsuit doesn’t even start until October! It’s been 6 years since this started and they still haven’t had their day in court.

When the Juggalo March on Washington was announced it was met with mostly mockery and not much else. Just a couple months ago when I was at the Gathering of the Juggalos even juggalos didn’t seem to be taking it that seriously. It was sort of an attitude of “this won’t change anything”. It wasn’t until the blog Metal Sucks wrote about the Juggalo March being held at the same time as a pro-Trump rally called the Mother of All Rallies (MOAR) that people started paying attention.

Once the Metal Sucks blog came out I saw people on Twitter making joke after joke about juggalos fighting nazis and these (truthfully hilarious) memes about some sort of progressive mob of juggalos rising up and murdering nazis with hatchets in league with Antifa. People kept Tweeting me about these things over and over because they know me as the juggalo photographer, but I wanted to take this seriously.

At the Gathering fellow juggalo journalist Camille Dodero and I were talking about how we thought leftist groups should really get behind the juggalos because it’s a civil rights issue. This FBI think is such bullshit and this feels very important even if you don’t care about juggalos. So when people started making juggalo antifa memes I figured I had to explain to my followers why juggalos were actually marching. They weren’t fighting nazis or protesting Trump… they wanted the FBI (and local law enforcement) to leave them the fuck alone.

I started a thread of Tweets that got a few likes and then nothing, but whenever I would see memes I would respond and link them to my Twitter thread. A couple days later as I was going to bed someone retweeted them, and then a few more and when I woke up my phone had exploded and thousands of people were liking and RTing them. People from both sides of the political aisle were retweeting them and it actually became an official Twitter Moment. It was pretty crazy for me, but the really surprising thing was that the responses were overwhelmingly positive.

For the first time in the history of the Insane Clown Posse people were on their side. (Side note: I am not taking credit for this, I just wanted to talk about my small part in it.) Article after article came out about ICP and editors started assigning the march to journalists. Playboy reached out to me about covering it and DCist interviewed me for a story. Former juggalo clients of mine like Vice and Rolling Stone sent teams of people instead. Time and the Guardian and the Washington Post took notice. People started paying attention to this travesty of justice.

So that brings us to the march and me on 90 minutes of sleep getting out of an Uber 100 yards from the Lincoln Memorial. I get out of the car and see hundreds of juggalos gathering around the stage set up in front of the Reflecting Pool on the Mall. The event hadn’t even started yet and there were juggalos everywhere intermingling with tourists.

But it wasn’t just tourists, there were random punk kids and a sprinkling of Antifa (I didn’t shoot them because they had journalists interviewing them at all times).  I met middle aged people wearing juggalo march shirts who didn’t know anything about juggalos but wanted to support. A big group of Democratic Socialists were out handing out flyers and Faygo Not Fascism signs. There were all sorts of people who were just there to back up the juggalo cause.

As far as the juggalos, I saw so many people I knew from Gatherings and ICP events. There were juggalos from every type of background, color and age. There were babies and old men in wheelchairs and veterans and priests and even cthulhu. I met people from all over the country and everyone was hugging everyone, meeting strangers and having a blast.

After everyone gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial the speeches started. We heard from juggalos across the country who had their lives turned upside down from this FBI gang designation. There was woman who had lost her job as a parole officer and a woman who had been kicked out of the military. It was just story after story of completely unfair consequences all because of this absurd gang list. ICP’s lawyer spoke and read a letter from the ACLU and a bunch of my fellow juggalo journalists spoke. Camille spoke, as did Mitchell Sunderland, Nathan Rabin, Steve Miller and Scottie D. Mitchell has covered juggalos for Vice and Broadly and Nathan and Steve have both written books about juggalos. Scottie is the founder of Faygo Luvers the biggest juggalo blog on the planet and someone who has always spread the word about my juggalo photos.

Finally ICP got on stage. They gave an impassioned speech about the gang designation and brought their families and friends out. The stage was packed with everyone from Psychopathic records and their families. After getting the crowd going they had everyone assemble and we begun to march.

I took a ton of photos as we walked around the mall but at some point I just got really into it. I have spent years of my life trying to explain juggalos to the world and this seemed like this really magical moment where people were actually listening. Random onlookers seemed really interested in what was going on and everyone I talked to seemed to support what the juggalos were doing. I even started leading chants and getting involved in the protesting as much as the documenting.

At some point during the march I ran into Anna Merlan a journalist I know (her work on conspiracy theorists is incredible) and she had left the MOAR event because it was completely pointless and decided to check out the Juggalo March. She said it was a couple hundred people and a total bust which made me really happy. As the day went on I heard more and more about how pathetic the MOAR event was and that contrast with the really successful Juggalo March made the juggalos look even better. It was perfect.

This article is getting really long and I feel like I have so much to say but let me just pause to mention that I grew up in DC going to protests and the DC Police are so good at crowd control and not letting things get out of hand. I have seen protests in other cities go haywire so quickly, but in DC the cops know exactly what they are doing. And I point this out because there were almost no cops at all at the juggalo march. There were a few spread out mostly blocking traffic. They clearly understood what was going on with the march and just left everyone alone. I didn’t see a single police interaction or any negative event at all to be honest.

As the march wrapped up back at the Lincoln Memorial I was pretty much destroyed. I was running all around the route trying to capture everything on 90 minutes of sleep the day after my band had played a show where I had beat the hell out of myself. I chugged a gatorade and chased it with a bottle of water and walked around the Lincoln Memorial with some punk girls I met when we both happened to notice that Ian MacKaye was watching the juggalos. One of them gave me a bunch of stickers with her boobs on them which I appreciated.

As we walked around some bands played and I took it easy waiting until ICP would finally headline the post march concert. After the girls dipped I talked to some more journalists and juggalos and ate some cold McDonald’s cheeseburgers that Psychopathic TV had laying around backstage. All I could think about was passing out but I couldn’t miss this set. Finally around 9PM, more than 8 hours after I got there ICP started to play. I tell everyone who hasn’t seen them that no matter what you think of their music you need to see one of their shows. They put on this wild set and it’s like a religious experience to their fans. That combination makes for an incredible moment even if you don’t like their music, but after all the shows I have seen, it was still surreal to watch them with the Lincoln Memorial on one side and the Washington Monument on the other.

When I finally got back to my parents apartment I was just done with being alive but I had to send images to my clients that night. I dumped the images and took a bath and washed the Faygo, sweat and sunblock off me while they transferred. One of my old friends came over and he and his girlfriend hung out while I edited. He and I liked ICP back in the 90’s when we were kids so it was cool to hang out with him while I worked. I finally finished editing around 3am and got a couple hours of sleep before I headed back to NYC for a hurricane Irma fundraiser I had to host in the afternoon. That night I slept for 10 hours. It was a hell of a weekend.

The best part of this whole thing was that nearly all the press coverage was super positive. I really think this is a big moment for juggalos. Maybe people will finally respect them a little bit or at least just leave them alone. So before I get to my coverage I wanna share with you a couple videos I thought were particularly good. Both of them feature my friend Chris AKA Mankini who to be honest is the perfect subject for a video about the march. He’s from the area so he let dozens of people stay with him, he is super nice and of course he’s a giant dude who wears a bikini all the time. You can’t beat that. So check out the Reason video about the march and then check out the Guardian video which I am actually in the background of a couple of times.

Now finally we get to my coverage…

First check out my Playboy article. I wrote the (heavily edited) intro, and interviewed juggalos and took all the photos. It’s almost as if I am an actual journalist.

I also did a big gallery for Voice Media Group who I always shoot juggalos for. Here’s just the LA Weekly gallery since they are all the same even though it was published via a bunch of alt weeklies.

And now finally here’s my huge gallery:

Click here for all my photos from the Juggalo March On Washington!

I haven’t updated the site in a minute and I got some stuff to sell you and some stuff to tell you and maybe a couple photos and figured we could do it all in some random update with all the things. Where should we start?

My band is playing at Lucky 13 tomorrow night at 9pm and right after it’s over I am somehow driving to DC for the Juggalo March on Washington. I don’t know if you saw but I had a Twitter Moment about it and it went crazy viral and that was a whole thing so now I am photographing it for Playboy and LA Weekly and a bunch of other alt-weeklies and a documentary filmmaker is gonna follow me around for part of it which is a whole thing. As soon as that’s over I gotta drive right back so I can throw a Miami Dolphins watch party and help raise money for people affected by Hurricane Irma. I probably won’t sleep at all but it should be interesting if nothing else.

Next up let me sell you guys some stuff really quickly. I finally shipped out all the Instaxxx books to the people who donated to my Kickstarter. I had to create a smaller international edition so that I could ship it for a reasonable price and it still cost me $8 more shipping than I charged so that was fun. The good news is I made about 75 extra copies so that if you live outside the US you can get the smaller version of the book.  Plus on top of that I also created a bundle with the companion zine NOT SAFE so you can buy them both together and save some money.

Speaking of Instaxxx and selling you things I had wonderful human and famous porn babe Stoya sign copies of Instaxxx so if you want one signed by her (and me!) you should buy one ASAP since I sold a few of them before I even made them available to the public. They will sell out quickly.

The last thing I have to try and sell you is a t-shirt of Giselle Palmer. I made Instaxxx shirts through TeeSpring of Charlotte Sartre and people seemed to really like that so I wanted to make another one. I had people vote on Twitter and they picked Giselle Palmer. She is such a babe and I have a feeling she’s gonna be one of the biggest names in the adult industry soon but I am pretty sure people voted for it because of her sweet X-Files poster.

Continuing on with this insane post I recently updated my blog 2000 Words. I told the story about the time I was in Philly and some drunk guy was passed out in my car when I came back from watching a movie. It was inexplicably weird. I need to remind myself to update 2000 Words more often. If you don’t know about it, the idea is that I pick a photo (or photos) from my archives and write a story about it. If a picture is worth 1000 words, here’s 2000. You get it right? Check out out already. Oh, and here’s the photo I wrote about this time. What the hell man?

And lastly here’s some photos for you to look at. I shot a corporate happy hour thing for my friend Fatou who was working for an internet advertising company called SintecMedia. It was actually her last day amazingly. I didn’t want to do a whole update about it because no one comes here to look at corporate events but it was on the roof of the Arlo NoMad hotel at this new bar called The Heights. It was an amazing view and  they have this insane overlook that you can walk out on and look down at the city. I recently developed a fear of heights that I am trying to rid myself of so it was really something to just stand there. Plus I actually love shooting events like this so I figured I would at least put a few of them on the site. I seriously do love shooting corporate stuff like this, so hey hire me already.

Click here to see the photos from the SintecMedia happy hour and I am gonna go do something else now. See you guys when I get back from DC…

I figured I needed to get some photos up before the long weekend and when I started looking for photos to edit I realized I still had the shots I recently took of Audrey Noir on my computer and I didn’t even have to walk into my livingroom to get a hard drive. Fantastic.

Audrey had talked to me on Twitter a few times over the years but recently she hit me up asking to shoot. I told her I would hit her up next time I was in LA because she is really cool looking. She looks like she belongs in a Tim Burton movie which is appropriate because she showed up wearing Beetlejuice underwear.

So yeah, I am in LA in July for my Instaxxx book release party (buy my book!) and I had to go over to Superchief LA to talk about the set up for the party and I figured I could kill two birds with one stone and shoot there. It’s a great space and I already shot Ivy Diamond there when they first opened and Raven Rockette on the roof.

Audrey and I went out back to where a building had been partially torn down and there was just an insane rubble pile. Audrey fucking rules and was all about it and just jumped into the ruins even though it smelled like human feces because we were in the middle of downtown LA and it was a hobo toilet as much as it was a rubble pile.

We took a ton of photos as quickly as we could because Audrey could be seen easily from the street and homeless people kept shouting things at her. She didn’t seem to mind and we got some really fun stuff. Plus we got milkshakes so that was cool too.

After the shoot we took some more photos in the back of Superchief (and in one of their bathrooms) but I figured I would save those for Girls of Driven By Boredom. Speaking of, all these photos have been on Girls of DBB in high resolution since yesterday. Just saying…

Click here to see the NSFW photos of Audrey Noir in a pile of rubble behind Superchief LA.

Meet Nicolette. You might know her as Stevie Foxx but she’s not that person anymore.

It seems crazy that these photos were taken less than a year ago. I took them the day after I met Nicolette for the first time. I feel like we have gone through a ton since then (We got stuck in an elevator just minutes before midnight on New Years Eve!) and I now consider her a really good friend. That’s the best part of this job. I get to meet so many amazing people and Nicolette and I hit it off right way.

When we shot these photos Nicolette was drinking a lot. I saw her drink a bottle of whiskey to herself the night before and she was halfway through a bottle while we were shooting these. I can only remember a couple times I was with her when she wasn’t swigging from a bottle of Jameson.

I don’t drink very often and one of the main reasons is because I have seen alcohol destroy so many of my friends. I lost a grandfather to it and a best friend. So when I Nicolette and I became better friends her drinking started to worry me a lot. She was so nice and fun and creative and it killed me to see her drinking that much. She honestly could handle it pretty well but she would flake on shit or wake up wondering what the hell happened to her missing fingernail.

Fortunately, she recognized the problem and got help. She moved to Florida and got the fuck away from the bullshit in her life and has been reborn. She stopped drinking and started getting healthy and I am so fucking happy for her. I know it’s going to be hard but I am pretty confident she’s gonna be okay.

I haven’t seen her since she left New York but she’s back coming up next month and I can’t wait to see her and take some new photos from her new life. Next time I post her photos I won’t even mention Stevie Foxx again because that’s not who she is anymore. I can’t wait to meet Nicolette.

Click here to see all the photos of Nicolette on our friend Ari’s old roof in Brooklyn.

Ps. There are a some more explicit high res photos of her on Girls of Driven By Boredom plus exclusive mini set of her and American Cassidy that I took while I was shooting for my NOT SAFE ZINE and my Instaxxx book.

On Saturday I went to a party/show/classic motorcycle rally. My friends at Sailor Jerry were sponsoring the event in the Broadway Stages parkinglot in Greenpoint and asked me to come by. A bunch of bands were playing and there were some solid food trucks and a ton of vintage motorcycles. Seemed like a good time.

I got there pretty early so I was in time to see Julia Haltigan go on and then I photographed a bunch of the bikes and hung out with the Sailor Jerry crew. They were giving away a hand painted Harley and the had someone live painting a helmet with classic Sailor Jerry flash. I hung out with the homie & SJ brand ambassador Gravy Thomas who never stops moving throwing these SJ events across the country. Every time they do one of these motorcycle events I wanna buy a bike but am 100% sure I would wreck it in a week in NYC traffic.

As the sun started to go down Sharmuffin started playing and they were great. Their front woman got in the crowd and finally turned the block party into a rock show which I appreciated. I was actually supposed to be somewhere else after that but I wanted to stick around for Daddy Long Legs. I shot them at the Beauty Bar 20th anniversary party and they were really fun and I am glad I stuck around.

I did have to leave before Dirty Fences played but the party was 10 hours long and I had to get a bunch of stuff done by Monday (which is why these photos didn’t go up until today.) But I’ve shot them before too and they are really fun. Wish I could have stuck around.

Anyway check out these photos because even if you don’t care about old motorcycles and rock bands you will care about the photos of adorable dogs at the party.

Click here to see all the photos from The Lot vintage motorcycle party!

I was in the middle of writing this post when Trump just gave a press conference where he defended neo-Nazis live on TV. I don’t even know how to fucking deal with that. I was already sick to my stomach after watching the Vice story on Charlottesville and the past few days have had me in just constant depression. All I can do is read about this shit and it’s fucking up my mental health. Honestly.

I was so fucking depressed yesterday so I decided to do something with that and go protest Trump at Trump Tower. It was his first trip back since his January 20th when he was sworn in. There would have been a protest anyway but after Charlottesville it was a completely different mood.

I got there a bit late and it was already dark. I made it about a block from Trump Tower and joined a pen of protesters. I brought my camera but I wasn’t really working. I just figured I should take a couple photos because that’s all I know how to do. There were a lot of people there but it was sort of anti-climatic. I was in a group with a bunch of people with drums singing silly chants about love trumping hate. I have too much anger for that shit. New York Hates You and Fuck Trump were the only chants I could bring myself to join in on.

I need to do more. I have used my platform to talk about this shit but that’s not enough. I wrote about my white privilege for 2000 Words yesterday and made a donation to a tattoo shop that is covering up white power and gang tattoos for people who have turned their lives around. The non-profit I run is non-political but we are making a donation to Life After Hate, an organization that tries to get people to leave a life of white supremacy behind. I listened to a Podcast with the former white power skinhead who runs it and I knew I wanted to do something to help him.

I still don’t really know what to do about any of this, but I need to do something. I need to be more involved. I hope if nothing else this week inspires more people to get involved in activism and fight these Nazi scum one way or another.

Look, these photos aren’t very good. They are mostly just photos of signs, but they are at least an excuse to do a post about this and use this blog to get some of this shit off my chest and maybe get a couple of you to do something to, whatever that may be.

Click here to see my photos from last night’s Trump Tower protest.

Back in January when I was shooting Blair Williams, she introduced me to her friend Belen who was doing her make up. Belen was pretty amazing and I had to take some photos of her too. She didn’t do nude modeling or anything so we didn’t try and make plans for another shoot or anything but when I was out in LA last month hanging out with Blair she came up.

Blair and I got lunch right when I landed in LA. I Tweeted something about killing time before I had to check into my hotel and Blair responded and we met up. I mentioned that I only had the hotel for a few days and she out of nowhere offered to let me stay in her place while she was out of town. I love Blair but we had only hung out a handful of times and it meant so much that she trusted me to take care of her place for a few days. Her only rule was that no one could come over… except Belen.

She knew how hot I thought Belen was and texted her about shooting with me. Belen had never done nude modeling but was down to take photos in her underwear. A few days later Belen met me at Blair’s place and we shot a bunch of photos of her in a bunch of different outfits. Belen was so easy to shoot and we got some really nice photos really quickly.

As much as I loved shooting Belen she also seemed really comfortable with me and actually shot some implied nude stuff which she had never done before. Before the shoot was over she had actually flashed Blair’s entire neighborhood from a fire escape. It was so much fun.

Anyway, this set isn’t naked or anything but I think you are going to love it anyway. I personally can’t wait to shoot Belen again. Maybe some more of Belen and Blair together.

I want to keep promoting Girls of Driven By Boredom since that’s what this week is all about, but honestly I don’t have anything extra for you from this set. Still you can see all of these in high resolution and you could have seen them yesterday if you had signed up. So sign up.

Oh, and buy my book. Belen and Blair are in it together.

Now click here to see all the photos of Belen in Blair Williams’ apartment!

Arya Fae is great. We had been friends on Instagram for a while and we met in reality at the AVN Awards back in January, but it wasn’t until I was in LA for the LA Art Book Fair that we met in real life. The LAABF trip was a Kickstarter stretch goal for my Instaxxx book. The idea was I would go out there and try to find a good printer or maybe some distribution for my book, but nothing came of it and it just added to me spending way too much money on the book. On the positive side I took a lot of fucking rad photos that week and I think the best of them were of Arya Fae.

I met Arya at her place and we did a shoot in the alley behind her place. There were a ton of people coming in and out of the apartments that connect to the alley so we had to be pretty sneaky. We shot on her steps and in the parking garage and got some good stuff before heading back inside. The idea was to take a few quick photos outside and then shoot more in her bed but I took so many damn photos in both places that I am gonna split this up into two different posts. Sorry.

Anyway, after the shoot Arya and I got food and then we ended up having to drive all over town and then I got stuck at her place at rush hour and we ended up hanging out until I was supposed to shoot Jojo Kiss. Well, it turns out her and Jojo are tight so we went over to Jojo’s place together and met up with my friend Alondra and Arya’s friend Charlotte and we went in the hot tub and partied and we shot a ton of Instax for my book. There’s probably six or 7 pages in Instaxxx taken on this one day in February alone. BUY THE BOOK HERE!

So here’s what you get today. You get the photos from outside on this site. And then if you subscribe to Girls of Driven By Boredom you get all the photos in high resolution, PLUS you get a few more explicit shots from outside AND you get a bunch of random photos from that party we had after the shoot. They are not very good photos technically, but I have a feeling you are gonna really like them anyway.

Not sure when, but I will get up the rest of the shoot on here in the future. I feel like I should hold off a bit and spread out the Arya magic… oh, and did I mention I shot her again a couple weeks ago?

Now click here to see the first round of photos of the amazing Arya Fae!

I have been friends with Eddy Segal for a really long time and pretty much that entire time I have been trying to take photos of her. I did shoot her for collaborative zine ARTS, but it’s been a mostly failed venture but I texted her to invite her to my LA Instaxxx book launch and she ended up coming out. We talked for a bit and she told me that if we made the photo shoot about her artwork she would shoot finally with me.

That was perfect for me me because I love shooting people in their environments. I had this idea in my head about shooting her while she was painting in her underwear or something, but since some of her artwork is wearable we ended up shooting her in her mom’s old wedding dress that she painted, a wearable collage and ended the shoot with a dress she was still working on. In between we shot her in her underwear with some paintings and then with another fabric piece. It ended up being a really cool shoot. Oh, I should mention that Eddy’s spot in Malibu is fucking amazing.

This shoot is noticeably not naked, which is disappointing for everyone of course, but we did shoot a couple nude shots that I might use for book projects in the future. Plus she let me include one and a half nudes on Girls of Driven By Boredom which is what I am trying to convince you to sign up for this week and if seeing Eddy’s butt isn’t worth $7 I don’t know what the fuck is.

Plus! Eddy’s friend Miracle was at the house when we were taking photos and ended up jumping into the shoot. I posted an exclusive set of her to Girls of Driven By Boredom as well. That set has more photos of Eddy in it too because I am a wonderful human.

In conclusion, go look at Eddy’s art, sign up for Girls of DBB, go buy my fucking book and then you can look at photos.

Click here to see all the photos of Eddy Segal with her artwork.