A startling aspect of the Brooklyn Renaissance of the past twenty years is the palpable absence of those bellwethers of cultural -- and concomitant real estate -- transformation, gay folk. Perhaps the absence is mirage. Maybe New York City’s large gay population, especially the growing number of “straighty gays,” are so integrated into progressive Brooklyn, they don’t stand out.

Regardless, their absence is palpable at Brooklyn’s array of all-night, barely underground warehouse “parties.” Commandeered by a seemingly endless variety of broadly defined “art collectives,” from Rubulad (the insiders’ fave) to TheDanger to the Madagascar Institute to Gemini and Scorpio, and chronicled on Jeff Stark’s wonderfully eclectic Nonsense List (nonsensenyc.com) -- NY’s answer to SF’s Squid List -- these parties have grown tired over the last five years as they consistently re-work themes of the costumed carnival, freak show, and burlesque, formerly edgy tropes when I aggressively covered the city's counter-culture from 1989-1995. Nevertheless, they remain arty, smarty, and fun (compared to enduring the clueless coeds in the East Village, and frat boy knuckleheads in neighboring Murray Hill), though they are, technically, illegal. At last night’s New Year’s Eve TheDanger party (see newlostcity.com) off Morgan Avenue in Bushwick, there was an indoor fire breather right near the dance floor. I highly doubt the Fire Department would have favorably smiled on that had they known about it.

Though the risk was real, I did spot two fire exits, lest this turned into the Happy Land Social Club redux. And though I could have done without the goopy stuff (or was that “false snow”) on one side of the floor (which engendered uncontrollable Michael Jackson-style sliding), the music was as good as advertised: an inspired mix of electronica and funk on one floor, campy sixties on the bottom floor, and who knows what in a neighboring building, since the cops -- or was it the fire department? -- shut the collective’s neighboring sister party down before I got there (ruining another Crotty attempt to see the Hungry March Band).

Nevertheless, last night, as in most of my hopeless attempts to find a glimmer of late 80s/early 90s nightlife edginess in New York City, there was a palpable hollowness at the heart of the event. First, all such Brooklyn events strike me as purposeless. Not that one needs an ontological purpose to have a good time, but “back in the day” (and what curmudgeonly middle aged writer does not talk about “back in the day”), there was more than an entertainment function for a party. Not just a political function either, though there were plenty of political parties during the heady 1990s heyday of Jesse Helms and the NEA 4. Rather, the purpose of an illicit art party back then was to mosh disparate groups together and force them to connect.

Despite the communitarian ethos at the heart of today’s art collectives (some of whom, in the SF Digger tradition, host potluck grubfests, with food procured from area restaurants, health food stores, and, yes, dumpsters), their Brooklyn events have the opposite effect. And that’s because they are too darn straight. Though there are folks who risk a little visual flair (a Native American headdress here, some all-white fantasy get-up there) for the most part the events reinforce conventionality even as they strike against it. Everyone stuck in their own circle. Very little blending. Very little opening in the heart, mind, and, most important, body. Mostly just moderately enthused spectators biding time on the dance floor or on the outdoor patio, till they settle down, procreate, and watch their kids play at the new fancy breeder playground coming to a young, white neighborhood near you. This is, to use a particularly Brooklyn trope, “ironic,” since most of these parties drew their primary inspiration from the Burning Man ethos of “No Spectators.”

Of course, it’s inevitable really, when you try to transport SF Bay Area’s open source credo to the comparatively square, stratified, and decidedly “Altes Europa” vibe of today’s New York. Silicon Alley was really more of a bogus real estate distinction than a reality in New York in the 90s. And all the attempts for twenty years to ape the anarchic, eccentric mindset of SF’s Cacophony Society have likewise felt stilted, if well-intentioned and ambitious.

While these are forgivable sins of those who lack the renegade imagination to bust out completely on their own, yet are still desperate to forge an identity in opposition to the creepy consumerist mono culture that has swept through Manhattan since 1995 (and will engulf most of the outer boroughs in the next decade), there’s something particularly cloying and annoying about these Brooklyn-based stabs at wildness and resistance. Unlike San Francisco’s revolutionary communitarian experiments, which concretized into the desktop computer, the natural foods movement, Craig’s List, and the consumer-driven “Don’t Be Evil” mindset of Google, these Brooklyn faux innovators seem doomed to obsolescence from the get-go.

As one strolls around the Lorimer, Morgan, and Bedford stops in Williamsburg and Bushwick, one gets the impression that today’s edgy Brooklynites are unwittingly trying their level best to match the criteria list from Christian Lander’s disturbingly close-to-the-bone “Stuff White People Like.” To put a firm point on the stereotypes routinely on display, at last night’s gathering TheDanger folks had their token black “members” working the door, while the white members were inside serving drinks and engaging in ironic performance hoo-ha, with no one with the experience, smarts, or cajones to engage in meaningful crowd control. An occurrence the far more precise and conscientious SF Burning Man contingent learned through painful trial and error to never allow again after some early and tragic missteps.

Naturally, given the overwhelmingly straight whiteness of these and other such Brooklyn events, there was the requisite quota of European foreign nationals. In fact, at last night’s party I encountered Portuguese, Swedish, and German citizens on just one block as I made my way to the door. Naturally, this offered several opportunities for me to display my characteristically white and empty American promise to learn a foreign language. Though I didn’t get to show off some of my new hip-hop references (I am now rediscovering gangsta rap, about thirty years too late), there was plenty of satirical know-it-all camaraderie on display between my smart-alek white friends and myself. In my mental calculus, the more ironic statements I get to make with another person in an evening, the happier I am by evening’s end. Heck, at one high point, my new friends, Bjorn Perby and Julie Saratoga, joined me in singing “Edelweiss” from lyrics displayed on my iPhone, after geekily using my iPhone flashlight utility to find our cranberry vodka-stained jackets. You will definitely NOT hear “Edelweiss” or comments about the Mondrian pattern displayed on one aspect on the iPhone flashlight utility at anything but a straight white Brooklyn gathering.

Now, let’s be very clear: at 50 years old, I am no longer a barometer of anything remotely cutting edge. Besides, in true former hipster fashion, I’ve long eschewed both the language and notion of “hip” or “cutting edge,” believing, like all former hipsters, that these notions died with my departure from “the scene.”

Unfortunately, I have failed to join the ranks of other formerly hip chroniclers of alt.culture by settling down and raising kids in the Waldorf Way or moving to Berlin, Amsterdam or Copenhagen, or re-booting my travel writing career in emerging markets like China, Brazil, or India. I am as much part and parcel of what I bemoan in today’s New York as any young person fresh out of design school. But for those who might think my past life as peripatetic publisher of Monk Magazine and primary writer of “The Mad Monk’s Guide to New York City” gives me a tiny bead on what worked in decades previous, there is a salient need I have noticed in my grandfatherly peregrinations around the outer boroughs. And it can be summed up quite simply: GET THEE SOME GAY PEOPLE, HIPSTER FOLK.

IMHO, the reason for Brooklyn’s rote conventionality is the absence of flamboyant, gender-bending, boundary-breaking, insanely witty, fetishistic gay, bi, transsexual residents AND party-goers.

It seems that GBLT folks are everywhere else in the city, not just in Chelsea or the West Village. Why wouldn’t they take that short L train over to Morgan Avenue or catch a cab to the Navy Yards for at least some all-night reverie? Do they need to be invited? Is there an undercurrent of homophobia beneath the Obama-adoring Brooklyn veneer that keeps gay folk away from these overwhelmingly straight WHITE gatherings?

Is the transfer of the formerly edgy East Village to Bushwick and beyond a bridge and tunnel too far for Manhattan gays? Or, in the intensely realistic, post-AIDS world of today, has Manhattan’s formerly outrageous gay pioneers – from Wayne County through Lady Bunny -- simply tired of the party, the gentrification of former edgy haunts (e.g., Meatpacking District), the boorish American cultural landscape in general and have opted, instead, for a modicum of quiet domesticity or sexual isolation behind the laptop and iPhone?

I don’t know the answer. But I sure would like to know.

Can I get a witness?