Welcome back to Hot Takes and Deep Dives and my next guest is the

writer, director and performer responsible for the seminal Broadway show and film

Hedwig and the angry inch the film short bus he's also in his villain era

most recently in shrill and playing Joe Exotic.

Hi John Cameron Mitchell, how are you?

Oh, good.

Now, I must start off with I was just at the monthly party that you host at Julius right here in the

West Village called Madysheen.

Let's start out with talking about the significance of Julius and about this

this monthly dance party that you host there and DJ for I think maybe at least 10 years.

Yeah you know I started it with PJ de Boy and Paul Dawson who are the couple, the gay couple in

short bus and they're still together actually.

And then we quickly brought in Amber Martin, who's my concert partner when I go on tour,

just did two shows at Joe's Pub. And so we've been doing, Julius Barr was, is the oldest gay bar in New York and was, you know, about 15 years ago being

threatened as many places were in the village with closing and so it was by that point a kind of old man old man gay man bar which was our neighborhood bar and we loved it

It's still got that 60s diet bar feeling and so we started this club that we play a lot of old music you know so we

wanted the elders as well as the young people to both enjoy all music is dance

music is our vibe and it's quite small and but people have had some very sweaty good times there

I mean the irony is it's a dance party and yet you're actually not allowed to dance at Julius Is that true? Yeah, I think there's something that

literally says no dancing. You can, you can. There's definitely been nice

where it's full- on dancing in there.

Yeah, there are these cabaret laws that Julian,

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