Every creative has experienced the euphoria of discovering a subcultural space for the first time, and it is a profoundly validating experience. After a lifetime of feeling misunderstood or judged for simply trying to express yourself through your creations, to one day find out that you were never alone in that fight is not just liberating, it’s life-changing. It is the fire that has fueled countless marginalized and artistic movements throughout human history. So when far-right regimes and institutions led by the ultra-wealthy and the politicians they pay for threaten the safety and the rights of marginalized peoples, they are directly hurting the entire creative community as a whole, let alone anyone who considers themselves remotely subcultural and alternative.

A work that epitomizes this idea is the Kander & Ebb musical Cabaret. First premiering in 1966, Cabaret tells the story of the eclectic artists, writers, and performers that make their way each night to the Kit Kat Club, a burlesque nightclub and a staple in the underground Berlin nightlife scene. These people include Sally Bowles, a singer at the club, Cliff Bradshaw, an American transplant who moved to Berlin to finish his novel, and the Emcee, the host of the Kit Kat Club and who acts as the narrator of the story. It follows their experiences and the changes they must endure as the Nazi Party rises into prominence, targeting the marginalized artists and creatives that once found sanctuary in the Berlin nightlife scene. The musical, despite being written in the 1960s, is profoundly relevant to this day and elucidates the importance of the marginalized and the alternative experience, and the moral responsibilities of anyone who aligns themselves with that lifestyle.

The ensemble of expat artists, writers, and performers that orbit the Kit Kat Club want the same thing that creatives of any era have ever wanted—the opportunity to realize the world they envision and the liberty to embody it through their art and their lives. Sally Bowles knows in her heart that she’s meant to perform, even if her only paying role was as a vedette in a divey nightclub. Cliff Bradshaw knows he’s meant to be a writer, even though he’s only produced one novel that according to critics, “showed promise”. They had hardly anything to show for it, yet they took the first chance they could to get out of their hometown and flocked to the Berlin underground for the community, the platform, and the freedom to hone their craft and truly make something of themselves. It's a tale as old as time for underground subcultures throughout history from Cabaret’s Berlin burlesque scene of the 30s, to the worldwide disco explosion in the 70s, to the New York Club Kids of the 90s, to the rise of indie sleaze and internet subcultures in the 2000s and 2010s. Millions of creatives, past and present, migrate thousands of miles in pursuit of a single goal: to kill the person they are to become who they want to be.

The subcultural mentality hasn’t changed much since the era of Cabaret, but what has changed is the nature of subcultural spaces themselves. For the subcultures I’ve previously mentioned—the burlesque community of Weimar Germany, the disco kids, the club kids—the most important qualifying rule of being involved with the community was that you simply had to be there. If you were queer or creative, you learned of these spaces from the people you knew in your city. There were no party flyers on social media, no faceless promoter account you had to dm on Instagram—you needed to be in a community with people and experience the subculture firsthand to know about the fashion, music, and art that the scene produces. Now, well into the social media age, subcultural contributions have never been more accessible. There is a huge demand throughout the art, music, and entertainment industries for culture and aesthetics born from the underground. We've watched in recent years as alternative and queer subcultures accumulate unprecedented mainstream attention. House music, rave culture, drag performance, ballroom, punk and DIY fashion, the resurgence of zines, and the outcry for physical media. Social media has made subculture endlessly more accessible than it once was, for better or worse. On one hand, it has allowed a lot of people to foster subcultural communities in smaller, less commercial areas. It has made it so staying in your hometown was no longer a matter of life and death for a queer person—you can now access your community virtually anywhere across the United States. It has provided the platform for so many fresh, diverse perspectives to come to give nationwide attention.

On the other hand, however, in its newfound accessibility social media has diluted the ideology of subcultural spaces. It’s no longer about being involved with a certain community or being bonded by common ideals—what’s become most important is simply dressing and acting the part. People from outside of the community flock to these subcultural spaces that have acted as sanctuaries for alternative communities for decades, and treat them as if they were a part of some immersive wildlife excursion. People whose only relationship to a given scene is whatever Tiktok or Pinterest managed to consolidate into a neatly reductive, easily digestible “core”. There is no connection to history, no acknowledgment of the struggle to get to where they are now, no roots in community, no common morals. Of course, as always, there are talented, authentic, unabashedly queer, and alternative people who aim to carry on the rightful legacy of these cultural spaces and those who came before them. Only now, they face the acute dilemma of having to determine who is with them for the right reasons versus who is simply here because it makes for entertaining content.

Despite it becoming harder and harder to tell who is engaging with a scene authentically, history has a way of bringing the true intentions of a community to light. Being a part of a subculture doesn’t merely boil down to who you are in the early hours of the morning, in a darkly light nightclub—it is a matter of how you live your life and who you choose to share your life with. Most particularly, what actions are you willing to take when you see your community in danger of violent oppression? This is the thematic core of Cabaret—that to be authentically subcultural is to be political, your work as an artist to fight the status quo, and there is no fight more important than fighting alongside the marginalized and the politically suppressed because we are as only as strong as our most vulnerable. Watching Donald Trump and his administration seize power and immediately target America’s most marginalized and vulnerable communities—from trans people to immigrants to student protesters—I can so clearly see the connections between our modern America and the collapse of Weimar Germany as seen in Cabaret. It’s that hauntingly familiar feeling amongst queer people–the powerlessness and despair that comes from watching the only spaces in the world you’ve experienced true belonging collapse around you, of years of hard-fought progress being disintegrated in an instant by fascism.

Nowadays in subcultural and alternative spaces, it feels as though there is a tremendous emphasis on looking the part more so than acting the part, when acting the part is what truly defines any person who considers themselves alternative. It is so important to remember that art is not inherently radical—it is the duty of a good artist to reflect their time and challenge the institutions in power, but at the end of the day it is up to the artist to choose to do those things. We see this in Sally Bowles’ final performance at the Kit Kat Club where she performs the song Cabaret—her declaration to commit herself to ignorance and refuse to take the very dire world circumstances seriously. Her life is falling apart at the seams after her traumatic abortion procedure, many of her friends at the club have been abducted by Nazis (eerily similar to the Trump Administration's inhumane ICE Raids, displacing innocent people in barbaric concentration camps), and amid all this suffering she sings of how everything is fine, how a human being should live entirely carefree, that “life is a cabaret”. Sally made her choice, and before she knew it, everyone she had grown to love in the subculture she had found sanctuary in had been abducted for being Jewish, queer, a person of color, or simply anyone who spoke up in defense of any of these marginalized peoples. Soon, all the people who had built this space from the ground up were replaced with Nazis—a safe haven for marginalized peoples simply reduced to entertainment for the footsoldiers of one of the most despicable fascist regimes in history. As America is hurtling down that exact same direction, it is imperative that every one of us, especially in the subcultural space, make that choice to be radical. To speak out through our actions, through our work, through fighting alongside those at the front lines of the attack on people’s human rights. There is no subculture without the sanctuary of marginalized peoples, especially our trans and queer brothers, sisters, and siblings. There is no sanctuary in a society hellbent on only providing for the wealthiest and most protected few. When the only ones being provided for are our wealthy oligarchs, we must fight for the rights of all people. If we fail to fight for the rights of all, we've been successfully numbed and distracted by the neverending spectacle of late-stage capitalist propaganda. There is no virtue in succumbing to the numbness of spectacle; life is not a cabaret, and there is no encore for the end of the world.