Bronx Emo Nite!

By Seline Liz

As you enter The Bronx Brewery, you see an emptied backroom decorated with skulls, roses, retro arcade games, and a stage ready to be conquered.  A very diverse crowd of people enter sporting their leather jackets, lacy gowns, bold makeup, and most importantly, an eagerness to celebrate one thing. Welcome to the Bronx Emo Nite.

“Emo Nite” is a night with DJ’s playing music in the emo genre, catering to those who enjoy the genre, and subculture. Started in an LA dive bar, emo nites have begun to spread around in other communities, trying to create more spaces for like-minded emo lovers to unite and enjoy themselves. Emo nights have been held in NYC in the past, but holding an event in the Bronx was a newer experience.

The event “PROMNITE”  on February 15 was held by BX Emo Nite in The Bronx Brewery & Empanology. It invited people of the Bronx to come together to celebrate an emo prom, enjoy drinks, and a karaoke night featuring popular songs from emo bands and artists alike. A karaoke night which ended on the very fitting “Bulls In The Bronx” By Pierce the Veil. BX Emo Nite consists of four individuals, Zulie Tiburcio, Alexandra Lisbeth Zepeda, Fern Alvarez, and Mel Gonzalez, all coming together to bring back the emo nights they used to celebrate in The Bronx. This is the second event they have organized in this venue, and they plan to continue hosting more.

Tiburcio, who hosted these kinds of events in the past, shared her experience. “I’ve been to emo nights in Brooklyn before,” she said, “and they just didn’t feel the way that this one feels with our, like, direct community with people that we grew up with. So we wanted to bring that back because that was very lacking.”

Kit Fornier, an attendee who dressed in their best Gerard Way apparel, shared their eagerness to attend a new venue for emo night, having experienced them in the past.  “Everyone kinda has, like, a camaraderie, of togetherness” they said. “There’s elder emos, there’s people who just got into it, and people just all share the same love of the same music…I feel like in my experience there definitely can be gatekeeping and elitism but I feel like overall from my experience meeting people in the scene, people are really nice, and welcoming too.”

The event was indeed welcoming, and the gatekeeping they mentioned was one of the motivators for BX Emo Nite to host its events in The Bronx. If you imagined the most stereotypical emo music fan, you’d probably picture early 2000s neon hair, corpse white makeup, and choppy layered haircuts. While it definitely described a popular majority of those who enjoyed the music, it didn’t paint the full picture of who participated in the sub-culture.

“You’ll always find some kind of emo night, but specifically for people like us from the Bronx and from other parts of the city, I don’t think there was anything specifically catered to us that was being promoted like that,” Zepeda said. “And when we say people like us, I mean, like, BIPOC people. You know? A lot of these spaces are very white centered. And while fun, for us, it’s even more comfortable and fun when we see someone that looks like us.”

As Lewis, another attendee of the event, puts it, “I think the thing about being a Bronx emo is like, you never really fit in, but you fit in sometimes.”