2023 Gathering Of The Juggalos – Part Two
After absolutely killing myself on day two of the Gathering I tried to take it easy a bit on day three. I went out to lunch with a friend who lives in Columbus, Ohio and got down there around 6pm. My back was killing me so I just sort of sat on a rock for a minute, chugged an energy drink and began the day.
Most of the stuff I have to say about day three is about the bands that played, but we will get to all that in the next update. I will also talk later about the insane Queen of the Cheeks event aka the butthole contest, which absolutely broke me, but in the meantime I uploaded all that VERY NSFW content to Girls of Driven By Boredom. You have been warned. Other than that, I just did the normal thing, walked around and photographed juggalos. I did have a good conversation with April O’Neil’s boyfriend who was there working. April is one of my favorite humans and it was great to meet her partner. Also shout out to Wicked Clowns Harm Reduction who gave me Narcan to keep on me during the event and were helping people test their drugs. I did an article for Vice about harm reduction at the Gathering years ago, and it’s great to see a new group continue the practice.
Day four was not a very productive day photographically, but I did a lot of work. I finally came up with an idea for my Daily Beast article and I interviewed Sean Barrett aka Uncle Juff and Psychopathic Record’s artist Ouija Macc for the article. After that I walked around and tried to look for young hip looking juggalos to interview for the article about Gen Z. It was a ton of work, but I hope people enjoyed the article. I was proud of it.
The last day also featured a pretty tame Miss Juggalette Pageant which I will talk about later and of course a bunch of bands. I should at least mention ICP’s set because I got completely soaked and my Gathering ended when I had to run to the car when it started pouring rain. It cleaned the Faygo off me a bit, but had the potential to mess up my camera gear and I had already thrown away my poncho.
Last thing I want to say, is that I minted five new Juggalo NFTs. My plan is to do 17 drops and this was drop number 14 so not too many to go. I know people don’t love NFTs but I thought it would be a good way to raise money for a future juggalo book. It hasn’t really ended up that way, but I still love putting out these things, and I think it’s a good record. Also I have been able to send some juggalos some money in the process which is always nice. In fact, while I was at the Gathering I saw someone who I had sold and NFT of and had no way of contacting. I ran over to him and just gave him all the cash that was in my wallet. He was psyched about it and it felt great to be able to do that. So if for some reason, you are still into NFTs and want to buy one you are supporting me and hopefully getting some juggalos paid. If nothing else, it is a good overview of my 14 years photographing juggalos… and you can always right click save.
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