At New York Fashion Week With Internet Personality Linux (Not The Software)

“You can’t even tell it’s me. I've been waiting to get a viral moment like that and turn it into a million dollar career.”

Linux is a slight, refined blonde with feline elegance and the energy of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan at their mid-2000s nightclub heights.

The model and professional party host, self-named after the open source software and philosophy, is someone you may have seen online under a digital mask as soon-to-be-former president Joe Biden. Linux made the original TikTok, drinking from Bud Light tallboys to pregame for a night out, as a joke in response to the hysteria around Dylan Mulvaney’s 2023 Bud Light sponsored video. Then, some conservative somewhere put the Joe Biden filter on top of Linux, and some other conservatives at Sky News Australia misattributed the video as “Dylan Mulvaney” cosplaying as the President, and the widespread erasure was born.

This wasn’t the first time Linux has gone viral unintentionally, and it wasn’t the last. Besides, we were excited about New York Fashion Week.

“Let’s not talk about Joe Biden or people sending people to my house to kill me,” Linux said.

“Are we doing interview vibes?” Linux DMs me days before Fashion Week.

I respond, “We’re doing insane running around vibes.”

“Omg c**t”

1:05 AM and the block is still mobbed. Paul’s Dolls is the hottest place on a Wednesday night and a Thursday morning, attracting the likes of Chloë Sevigny, whose brother Paul Sevigny owns the venue (Paul’s Casablanca); Ben Stiller; Snooki; Hunter Biden; Diplo; and more. It’s Linux’s weekly party by and for trans women, but anyone can go.

People are scattered around outside in their best glam, seeing and being seen, and I’m immediately let in right when I get to the ropes.

It’s like a crowd crush situation the second I get past the DJ booth and I start doing a lap. I find the shattered glass remains of a “twink fight.”

Nightlife, Where The Demons Come Out

Seemingly every week, Linux is called to mediate conflicts between young, newly out trans women in her Wednesday night sanctuary.

“The moment I start hearing one baby queen being shady to another baby queen, I sit them both down. I say, ‘Nope, we did not do this.’ There are people on the outside trying to kill us," Linux said. "There are people right now in an office unionizing to remove our rights. And then we are going to be in a club fighting over what so and so liked on Twitter behind your back? That is not how we change the world. That is not how we act. We are a sisterhood, and we need to act like it.”

This is as much a story about New York City as it is about one New Yorker. We work out a lunch interview between her fittings for Paloma Spain’s audience look, as well as Christian Siriano’s, and I lie my iPad on the table to record. “It’s like, I'm gonna go somewhere where I like the food. Oh my god, not me—Oh my god, that is so funny,” Linux looks down. “Testing, testing.” I ask her to start from the very beginning.

“Who were your parents?”

“Who were my parents? I mean, I was born to just like the most normal people ever. My dad passed away when I was in high school. My mom's still pumping around Wisconsin. Party girl. I get my party genes from her. She's the life of the party. Any room she's in. Get her a vodka cranberry, bright red, and she commands the room, just like I do.”

Linux continues, “I was raised in Wisconsin, Midwest. I knew very early on, just from seeing New York City—I remember one of the first times I saw New York City. Do you remember Godzilla? I remember there was this one scene. For some reason, Godzilla was one of the first movies I saw where it was, like, the long streets. And I was just like, okay, no, there's a giant dinosaur [tearing things] up, but I need to live here. I need to live in a city like that. There was just something immediately—it feels safe. You’re in the middle of all of it.”

“The people, all the cars,” I interject.

“Exactly,’ Linux added. “The thought of living in an apartment building and there's 1,000 other people that live in that building with you, it just felt so safe. And I needed it. And that started this obsession with New York City. ‘I need to move there. I need to move there. I need to move there.’”

Complex Original (via C.H. Stern)

How did she find her way to the nightlife, post-Club Kid scene?

“I remember I first saw the movie Party Monster, and I was just like, oh, that's what I'm supposed to be doing.” She had the revelation: “I get to combine using my body as a medium for art. I get to make other people happy.”

She continues, “I started seeing on YouTube, there's Nelson Sullivan, who has archival footage of all the ‘80s and ‘90s. I was in eighth grade going into freshman year. I was obsessed with Party Monster. I loved Lady Gaga. And I was just watching all these archival videos of Susanne Bartsch’s parties at Copacabana in the ‘80s and ‘90s. And I was like, that's me. That's what I gotta do. And I was like, okay, I just need to graduate high school. One way ticket to New York. That’s what we're doing. And then I moved here, 2015. I was 19 years old, and the rest is history.”

Linux credits her friend and mentor, Susanne Bartsch, the mother of all parties and early RuPaul collaborator, as essential to all aspects of her life. The success is easily observable.

I first met Linux in 2021 doing my first column for Pro Wrestling Illustrated, an international magazine that maintains no digital access to or platform for its articles. It’s old school. You find it in Barnes & Noble. It’s international and keeps regular coverage of Japanese professional wrestling as well. Choke Hole, a drag wrestling troupe based in New Orleans, booked a gig in New York City on a Fashion Week festival headlined by Christina Aguilera and invited local guest stars to appear.

Linux accepted the booking without hesitation, despite knowing nothing about wrestling. The rubber male pec-and-six-pack torso unit she wore in the ring cost her almost as much as she was to be paid for that night.

Linux’s party column in Paper Magazine, “What You Missed Last Month (According To Linux),” follows her doing anything and everything to be more major, more iconic, and more chaotic. Wrestling, offending Jeff Bezos, spending 36 hours straight in Berghain, running around with Blizzy McGuire and Julia Fox, k-holing at Coachella. The girl’s done it all.

Her weekly party, Paul’s Dolls, is a centerpiece of her party philosophy.

“My friends joke that Paul's Dolls is a cult,” Linux said. “They joke about that all the time. Joke that, ‘Linux is a cult leader.’ And I'm like, well, as long as my sons and daughters are doing good things in the world, then you know what? Let it be a cult.”

Thursday night, we’re in a warehouse full of celebrities, but everyone swarms her with flashing lights and cameras the second she walks in. She hugs a lineup of people including Halsey and Kerri Colby, and perches herself on the back of a couch in between Noah Cyrus and rising star Madison Rose.

Linux found unexpected fame as a writer in 2018, following a wrongful arrest and incarceration in Rikers Island. Originally composed awaiting bail inside the jail, the first draft of her confessional essay, Linux TheRobot Breaks Her Silence on Being Incarcerated at Rikers Island: One Trans Woman’s Experience in Rikers’ Men’s Prison, was written on toilet paper. Once freed, Linux approached Paper editor-in-chief Justin Moran about running the essay, and it was an instant hit.

At Christian Siriano’s private party, we’re sitting behind the DJ booth as Ty Sunderland spins. She emphasizes to me this shouldn’t be a story with so much negativity and baggage, but it shouldn’t be too surface either.

“I’m an it-girl, but I’m so much more than that,” Linux said.

I can’t get a reliable recording, and I write down scattered sentences as they’re coming out of her mouth.

“I wake up every day and chase my dreams even though I’m suicidal.”

I start typing her words on my phone, “There are so many people in the world that I need to heal…”

She grasps my phone and finishes the sentence.

“So it feels almost silly wasting breath talking about things like Twitter and memes and clothes.”

We’re trying to get our words into the little speaker on the iPad, holding it flat between us, and Linux’s dear friend, DJ and drag queen Aquaria of RuPaul’s Drag Race fame, swoops in and pretends to sniff from it, joking, “Can I get a line?”

Shortly, all of us are piled into an Uber XL. Linux, Ty, Aquaria, the photographer who worked on Linux’s most recent visuals for Paper Magazine, and another nice man whose name I didn’t catch. A water bottle is passed around, and we’re all discussing poor etiquette and safety we’ve recently observed in the nightlife climate. Proving Linux’s point that she tries to foster a calm and inviting space around her, we all worry out loud about people we’ve met who can’t handle their substances, and whose safety getting home each night is a concerning mystery. Outfit changes are made at the photographer’s apartment before Linux’s hosting gig at Basement. Multiple sidebars are taken where Linux’s friends tell me on and off the record about how important she is to them and how they are seriously committed to her.

Everyone loves Linux and is super vocal about it. Earlier in the night, I watch a muscular man whisper into Linux’s ear, checking in with her and looking at me. My photographing of her, and only her, put him on edge. He apparently wanted to make sure she was safe. For a girl with real-life stalkers, you never know. People have been buzzing about “Linux’s photographer,” and it clicks for him that I’m the one referenced. Outside the club as everyone is leaving, more excitement surrounds the mysterious Complex piece. Aquaria and Linux get stopped for photos and videos on the sidewalk in their Friday night finest. On the phone, I bring up Linux’s cheering section and adoring fans.

“How is that for you inside, emotionally?”

“It is kind of a ‘pinch me’ moment,” she said. “There’s eight billion people on this planet. Girl, I know it’s impossible that I am having the only original thought on Earth. So if I'm feeling down, millions are too, and I don't like feeling that way, and I also would assume as much, that other people do not like feeling that way. So how can I lift the global vibration even a little bit? You know? How can I make people no longer sad?”

For Linux, dancing is healing. A space to dance is a refuge. We all deserve to feel famous once in a while.

“I'll throw a party that's all about loving yourself, even if I don't necessarily feel that way,” Linux said. “And then the next day, I get so many messages from people being like, ‘Oh my god, thank you. I was having a really bad day, but you invited me to go dancing and changed my whole day.’ I’ve just learned that in my personal way of feeling, even in times of sadness, ‘Do unto others.’ I’m sad just like you, and the way I get over it is by going outside every day being my true self and helping other people.”

Linux, patron saint of downtown nightlife, concludes, “Girl I’m faking it all.”