The RNC in Cleveland isn’t the only unhinged, drunken, drug-fueled marathon party going on this week.
Starting today, thousands of Juggalos and Juggalettes gather in Thornville, Ohio, to participate in the 17th Annual Gathering of the Juggalos, which runs through Saturday.
Each year at the Gathering, fans of Insane Clown Posse gather to celebrate the weirdness that unites them. The “Juggalo” moniker is from the rap act’s 1992 track, “The Juggla.”
What’s it like? “A psycho-porn theme park,” one die-hard attendee told the New York Times. “It’s an intense sensory overload.”
From the New York Times coverage of this year’s edition:
The documentary [“American Juggalo” (2011)] also helped to defang the image of the Juggalos, described by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in February 2011 as a “criminal street gang” but now widely regarded as a tribe of mostly harmless outcasts.
The director of “American Juggalo,” Sean Dunne, 35, a filmmaker who grew up in the suburbs of New York City, said that he was inspired to make the movie in 2010 after Tila Tequila, a Myspace celebrity who performed at the Gathering of the Juggalos that year, was pelted with rocks and beer bottles before being chased from the stage to her trailer.
“I remember sitting around and thinking that there was no way they could be that bad,” Mr. Dunne said of the Juggalos. “And I went to the gathering, and they really weren’t.”
