After his arrival, he began hanging out at Squeeze, the now-defunct Fort Lauderdale alternative club that helped nurture Marilyn Manson. He'd heard about another club, Nemesis, but only found it by accident. "I was driving home one night, and I saw what looked like a funeral home. I drove around the building, and it was like seeing my family: people in black, top hats, fetish-looking girls. Then I saw a sign: öDress Code, Freaks First.' I thought, I'm home."
He came into promotions gradually, first by working at a Broward County fetish store, acting as "like their PR guy," organizing parties for the store. He became familiar with Miami Gothic establishments such as the Kitchen, "but in Broward there was nothing going on."
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Through his connections, he eventually began helping out a fetish/Goth endeavor called the Phoenix Room, located at the venerable Fort Lauderdale gay club Coliseum, eventually partnering with its operators. By that time, he'd been using the Abusement Park name for many of his efforts.
His club nights and parties have always had one boot in fetish and the other in Goth -- which might not make sense in other markets, but given the relatively small size of any underground in South Florida, the two subcultures have tended to overlap and coexist, despite some inherent contradictions. Of course, not everyone sees this as a good thing.
He says that some Goths equate fetish with swinging, which isn't what his parties are about at all. (His rule: "If you wanna have sex, go home.") But he's heard from Goths who find the overt sexuality of fetish to be "raunchy." Whatever kind of music might be spinning, "That kind of ruins it for a lot of the Goth people," he admits.
Bonilla stresses that, as a club promoter, he's going to continue to try to broaden the appeal of the Gothic culture, even if that doesn't fit Aiden's or Rivera's perception of what it should be about. "A lot of guys hate the fact that I'm trying to open it up to new people. If the hardliners have disdain for the scene, there's nothing I could really do about it to accommodate them. I had a night with a dress code, and they [the traditional Goths] didn't show up."
As for Aiden's focus on the international Goth scene, Bonilla says that blinds him to the local realities. "If you're talking about trying to support the local scene, you have to be ... not mainstream, but open to the fact that people aren't going to go for that super-ultra-Goth stuff. If I only tried to accommodate the hardliners, there might be 25 people there." And if his Goth nights don't make any money for the host club? "There's a hip-hop night, a Brazilian night, and a salsa night out there waiting for me to fail," he declares. "If you want it to work, the nature of the beast is to bend a little."
