My Weekend with Bikers, Clowns, and Highlove at the Donner Party Picnic
By Jordan Ranft
Sister Viva L’Amour stands onstage with her back to the audience in full face paint and a bedazzled nun habit. The music starts, and she almost immediately struts off the platform and into the crowd. She produces a bucket full of clown noses and wordlessly saunters from person to person, handing them out. After everyone has adorned their nose, she walks away from the stage and into the shadows rimming the campsite/performance space for the evening. Moments later, an engine roars to life, and a cyclopean headlight bursts through the back of the crowd. A few women are so startled that they fall out of their camp chairs.
Viva is now mounting a giant, custom-built Harley Davidson and revving its engine. The music fades, Viva comes back on stage, bows, and everyone loses their mind. Viva is a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a queer and trans activist/drag/performance art group that has been operating out of San Francisco since 1979. She is also a devout motorcycle rider. She is at the Donner Party Picnic to merge these two aspects.
My knowledge of motorcycles and biker culture is that of simulacra, representations of representations. Sons of Anarchy and Ghost Rider, stories about the Hells Angels killing Meredith Hunter at a Rolling Stones Concert, and countless other depictions of gruff, sun-damaged men with big beards and bad attitudes.
This, I know, is not accurate, but it persists as an automatic association that I can’t seem to shake. It is a testament to the power of stories, the ones we tell and the ones we are told, how once we are exposed to one, no matter how myopic or sensational, it can shape and maintain our structures of belief. It is the operant mechanism for how we come to define ourselves and our communities. We tell our stories to others, hoping something within us finds a resonant counterpart within them. It is also the driving force behind propaganda, division, and nationalism. One story can blot out all others and become the dominant narrative; it can twist collective beliefs into opposition and create bitter enemies out of people you have never met personally.
The Donner Party Picnic is billed as a three-day chopper campout in Grass Valley that takes place at the end of July. A chopper refers to a custom-built motorcycle with a modified frame and pared-down aesthetic. People at this event take the concept of customization extremely seriously. Everything from the engine down to the upholstery of the seat is made by hand and meant to make the bike a one-of-one creation. Custom paint jobs, hand-built handlebars, and home-printed bumper stickers. As I walked around the event, doing my best to conduct informal interviews and learn more about the culture, one concept was repeated by almost everyone I talked to: a custom-built bike is a work of art you can ride.
While motorcycles are ostensibly the unifying force of the Donner Party Picnic, that’s not all it has going for it. There is a fully functional tattoo studio running out of a picnic area, a hair salon, and a vintage clothing pop-up. The campground is next to Rollins Lake, which was unfortunately drained a year ago due to a burst pipe, but that didn’t dissuade a gaggle of attendees from piling into the back of pickup trucks with coolers of beer and inflatable rafts to go swim and lounge in the somewhat muddy basin.
At night, performers take the stage; avant-garde clown strippers and nationally touring aerialists. On night one, the Calistoga-based art-rockers, Sam Vega, ripped through a thunderous and psychedelic set as a crowd gathered to eat barbecue and party into the night. The next night, Jenny Don’t and The Spurs, a lively western band, returned for their second year of performing at the picnic. I was invited to participate in a co-ed wet t-shirt contest and won “best jiggle” and “deepest belly button.”
When I say that Mark Highlove’s life is a party, I mean that quite literally. Highlove, the producer for Donner Party, is one of the premier event builders in the country. He has built stages and structures for Coachella, Lightning in a Bottle, Burning Man, the Superbowl, and elsewhere. He has given more thought to how to throw a good event than most people have thought about anything.
His rules for throwing a good party are relatively simple, and they start with shared interest and safety. “People like to come together with other people who are into the same thing,” he explains. For Highlove, he loves choppers, clowns, and out-there art, so why not create a space for others who share those interests to come and celebrate them?
“People also want a place to feel safe enough to be themselves,” he continues. This brings us back to the idea of challenging a dominant story. Donner Party doesn’t just welcome, but celebrates the multivariance of people who are, to use a term I learned at the picnic, total “gearheads.” As long as you like bikes (or stripper clowns) you are welcome to the party regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or creed.
Highlove has worked hard, in conjunction with the small army of volunteers and supporting organizations, to create a culture in which any sort of gatekeeping is met with boos and jeers. “The truth is that all different kinds of people have always been riding and building,” he clarifies. “We aren’t creating a new story, but just making a space for the ones that have always existed to have more space to be told.”
“Telling a story is how we connect with others,” says Katie Loftus. Loftus is the founder of Ride to the Warehouse, a traveling photo gallery that showcases women who ride and build bikes. Loftus is also the owner of the coolest chopper I saw at the campout, a turquoise bike with a portrait of Frida Kahlo painted on it. When Loftus started riding, she felt isolated by the lack of other women she knew who rode. To her, telling these stories and sharing these pictures functions as both a celebration of different experiences, but also an invitation to others to join her. A story, then, can also be a beacon for others to gather around, an antidote to isolation.
As I’m sure anyone with a baseline knowledge of the craft and lifestyle will be able to discern from reading this, I still don’t know a whole lot about motorcycles, and driving my Honda Fit to a three-day campout is not a substitute for years of dedicated participation. The only thing I can say with confidence, really, is that out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, there is a place where people are welcome to be themselves, to challenge the dominant narrative with their own stories. To dance, swim, eat a hot dog, and make a new friend. If my experience is any indication, you don’t even need to know a lot about motorcycles to be invited, provided you’re still down to clown in other ways.
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