On Friday, the weather is set to hit 90 degrees; in Bushwick, the hot summer air will be filled with the latest iteration of what organizers have fashioned into one of the more adventurous music festivals that dot the summer landscape. 

“We don’t say you have to be gay to be there, but it helps,” says Rayne Baron, a party promoter who goes by the moniker Ladyfag and is described in the New York Times as host of the city’s “Rave of the Future.” (writes the Times: “She rolls her eyes whenever someone objects to her use of the derogatory word, saying that she is appropriating it as a sign of affinity with gay men.”) Baron runs a small empire of club events around the city and describes herself constantly in a state of partying or party-planning. The most popular of these are her Battle Hymn parties that take place on Sundays in Chelsea, eventually namechecked by Brock Colyar in New York’s party column. Another project are these LadyLand festivals that take place at Bushwick’s Mirage every year and have been making quiet waves of their own in the queer dance scene, she told me. The inaugural lineup featured who else but the late hyperpop icon SOPHIE and Kim Petras, still riding the high of “I Don’t Want It at All.” The one last year reached a certain zenith of pop appeal, with Christina Aguilera topping the bill with her first show in New York in years. Landing at the tail end of the first wave of the ongoing pandemic, the set was a strangely illuminating pop smash, interspersed with interludes performed by drag queens. “She’s always been a big supporter of the gay community,” she explains.

The list this year is subdued, but kinetically inspired. The L.A. singer Tinashe had caught the Aguilera show and decided she wanted to do that herself. The festival immediately obliged. Says Baron about the act of organizing a party: “A lot of these artists are people who are either my friends or in my friends’ sphere.”