A Piss Falls in Brooklyn

GONZO

Driving around Williamsburg with Gavin McInnes

By Jack Ludkey · September 24, 2026 · 18 min read

“You’re not Antifa, are you?” Gavin McInnes said as he opened the door to his top-secret studio. “Because they’ve been trying to get me for years.”

“No,” I assured him.

“You’re forty minutes late and you smell horrible.”

“That’s called gonzo journalism,” I responded, earning a raised gray eyebrow and a tilt of the head.

“Even Hunter S. Thompson took showers.”

Gavin McInnes is the original hipster. He’s spent his life creating counter-cultural institutions, then being exiled from them. In 1994, he co-founded VICE Media, which he turned into a multimillion-dollar company before “going out bad” in 2008. He then founded Rooster Worldwide, an ad agency that “created advertisements for people that hate ads.” Most notably, “How to Piss in Public,” a Vans ad that went viral on Youtube. He was asked to take an indefinite leave of absence from Rooster after publishing an essay in Thought Catalog titled “Transphobia is Totally Natural.” This is his pattern. Build a club, then get kicked out of it.

After a career in the liberal hipster-sphere, Gavin wandered through the anti-woke media landscape. He worked at Blaze, a mainstream conservative news site that fired him within weeks after an organized harassment campaign; enemies emailed management a slew of his most offensive and outrageous quotes. Although seen as a political extremist by the Canadian government and the ADL, Gavin doesn’t have a home on the “far” right either, mainly because of his weirdness, philosemitism, and lack of homophobia. He’s equidistant from groyper and conservative. A man without a country, born in England to Scottish parents, shuffled off to Canada, now haunting New York.

You can’t go anywhere in the city without seeing an aesthetic he molded or a fashion trend he started, or killed off. Patient zero of Williamsburg’s iconic “ironic” mustache, flannel shirt, and suspenders. With his cynical voice and punky aesthetic, he defined the counterculture of 2000s Brooklyn when it was still largely by and for young white people. He is now banned by most social media sites and exiled from popular culture for his political views, which according to him haven’t changed since 2005.

I first met Gavin at a house party in the East Village a few months ago. He was surrounded by a group of truckers with long hair, tattoos, and sun damage so advanced you couldn’t tell what race they were. They were a nice reprieve from the malevolent gay vibe that the rest of the party exuded. Nick Fuentes sat in the corner.

At around 3:00 a.m., I found myself pissing next to Gavin in the men’s room. He finished first.

“Wow, that was the best blowjob I ever got!” I heard him yell to the truckers as the bathroom door swung shut.

A chorus of laughter followed. I stood there with my dick in my hands, squeezing out the last drops of beer. I had to think fast. My Bachelors of Fine Arts had prepared me for this exact moment. I barged out of the bathroom, sniffed hard, zipped my fly, and deployed my comeback.

“Wow, Gavin, that was the best rimjob I ever received!”

Sparse laughter from the truckers. A begrudging nod from Gavin and an eye roll from my girlfriend, who came despite knowing nothing about the “dissident right.”

I later learned the truckers were members of the Proud Boys, a group of self-proclaimed “Western chauvinists.” They’ve been considered a neo-fascist organization since their participation in Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally and the storming on J6, although Gavin “officially and permanently” distanced himself from the group in 2018.

Anytime I told someone I was working on a profile of Gavin McInnes, they immediately responded, “Isn’t that guy a Nazi?”

Months later, I went to his studio to find out.

When I arrived at the compound he handed me a Coors Light.

“How did it feel to come in second in Gawker’s Hipster of the Decade contest?” I asked.

“That burned. Did that Asian chick win?”

“No, the guy with the music blog won. Carles.” (Admin of Hipster Runoff)

“Oh yeah… that guy doesn’t exist. So I don’t really count that as a loss.”

“He doesn’t exist?”

“Well, it’s like an anonymous fake thing.”

“It’s like a bunch of music nerds writing under the same name?”

“No, it’s just some guy being a character.”

Gavin’s Compound Censored studio is decked out like a classic man cave: full bar, a wall of whiskey, police paraphernalia, a stuffed bear covered in an Israel scarf and yarmulke. He shows me his collection of guns, his “The Rape Game” made by the late Jim Goad, and his desk, which is covered in Sex Pistols and Clash posters.

I eyed the tallit-laden bear and asked Gavin if he’s always been pro-Israel.

“I’m not that pro-Israel, I just don’t think they control everything. The trend right now is just to blame the Jews for everything,” Gavin said. “My friends have started calling me Goyvin McSheckles because I don’t hate the Jews.”

“It’s reaching people that are now just mindlessly scrolling on their phone,” I agreed. “Coworker level.”

“That’s a good way to put it. If it rains on your birthday, you blame the Jews. Though the people that harass me in my shi-shi neighborhood are mainly secular atheist Jews.”

I was surprised people still felt that strongly about him.

“They harass you? Like they yell at you on the street?”

“They vandalize my house, they vandalize my car, they put signs on my lawn and all the other lawns, they ostracize my children to the point where they have to go to boarding school.”

I ask more questions about his kids that are struck from the record. He might be an asshole, but he seems like a good father. We talk about strategies for avoiding DUIs, something Gavin failed to do a few months ago, earning him an ankle monitor that checks his sweat every 30 minutes.

I point out a framed poster of the Twin Towers dipped in Maker’s Mark’s iconic red wax.

“Maker’s gave you this?” I asked.

“This is my most prized possession. If there was a fire, I would go and run and save this,” he said. “It’s from a dive bar called Max Fish. It’s gone now. I met my wife there. I won this playing karaoke or trivia or something. And I didn’t even drink Maker’s at that point. And then 9/11 happened and I became obsessed with Maker’s, coincidentally. Now this is like the greatest thing in the world.”

Gavin relishes in the obscene and irreverent. He founded the Proud Boys in 2016, explaining that the group started as a joke and was named after the song “Proud of Your Boy” from the Aladdin soundtrack. Initiation involves getting punched by five members while trying to name five cereal brands. Like a “Western chauvinist” version of getting jumped in by the Bloods.

“The Proud Boys was originally your fan club, right?” I asked.

“I don’t like the word fan. But it was guys that would come to be the live studio audience of my podcast, and then we would all go across the street to Sullivan’s and hang out. But they were podcast fans. I have a folder on my computer called Babies I Made. Every time someone thanks me for encouraging them to get married and have kids, I put it in there. There are hundreds, which seems more impactful than any media company or men’s club.”

Gavin now hosts a plethora of shows from his compound, including Compound Censored with Anthony Cumia from Opie and Anthony. He was showing me around the studio when two retired NYPD officers arrived for Gavin’s other show, Cops and Robbers, which consists of the two cops, an ex-con, and a Hells Angels member watching and reacting to body-cam footage of arrests.

They cracked open some vodka Gatorades, then gave Gavin a pussy hat and a sweatshirt that read “EXERCISING JUST ENOUGH TO FIGHT AND FUCK.”

When production wrapped, Gavin and I left to get pizza. We talked about the local biker gangs and neighborhood history, and he chopped it up with the pizza guy about the shittiness of the Mets. Then, on the car ride back, he threatened to nix the whole interview because I didn’t know who Shane Smith was.

“You really should read the Wikipedia of someone you’re interviewing. It’s literally the least you can do. You think you can just come up here knowing nothing and get some of my pizza?”

“No,” I said. “After I drink all your beer, I’m gonna be hungry and need some pizza. I thought we were getting along so well.”

“No,” he said. “You’re still at base level, a chrysalis.”

That stung, but I laughed it off. It’s hard to get too offended by anything Gavin says because by the time you process it he’s already moved on to the next story. In a way, he’s always been a streamer. Someone who’s too intelligent and has too much to say to ever shut the fuck up. In this sense, streaming is just another grandfathered trend he arrived early to within a culture attempting to defy, depose, and outgrow him.

“So what were you wearing back then?” I asked, discussing the late 2000s.

“When I was in the hipster scene, I wore a screwdriver belt buckle ironically and had a T-shirt that said ‘Speak English’ with an American flag. That wasn’t unusual back then. Pre-Obama, it was just edgy. People thought it was ironic. It wasn’t ironic to me. It probably seems mundane now.”

“Do you think your politics have changed since then?”

“No, not at all. My politics changed drastically after September 11th, but I’ve pretty much been the same since then. Stronger borders, Islam is not compatible with the West, free speech, 2nd Amendment. Thomas Sowell talks about how you can go from a liberal to a conservative without changing your views. But I think that the background changes.”

“You think—”

“—You know,” He interrupted. “It’s like Hasidic Jewish. Your accent.”

This was the second time Gavin brought up my “accent.”

“Well, I do hang out with a lot of Jewish people,” I said. “I’ve gotten Woody Allen before.”

“No, it’s not that. Woody Allen doesn’t speak in interrogatives. That’s what you speak in.”

We passed an old building.

“This high school is 65% Hispanic,” he continued. “That’s where we’re headed. The Mexicans are wily, they don’t get in your face. You just turn around one day and boom. Your high school is Hispanic.”

A few blocks later we returned to his studio. After Gavin found out a convict who was scheduled to appear on Cops and Robbers wasn’t coming, he threw me on the air as his replacement. The show consisted of the cops watching videos of police being brutalized and videos of female cops being disrespected. I got drunk because the good cop kept feeding me shots. He told me that Gavin can’t actually smell and is just messing with me, which probably isn’t true, but was nice of him to say. Another cop showed up in the middle of the episode and walked us through a double homicide he’s been investigating for three years. Gavin sniffed a bottle of whiskey, constrained by the ankle monitor that checked his sweat every 30 minutes.

I didn’t feel like I’d gotten the full story, so Gavin agreed to meet again soon. He said we could ride around Williamsburg and check out his old haunts. A week later, I got the call.

“You’ve really grown since you first walked into the studio. I’m gonna call you Monarch because you’ve grown into such a beautiful butterfly.”

I wasn’t under the impression that I’d impressed him. I’d gotten drunk during his show and couldn’t remember making any funny or insightful comments about the reverse police brutality on the show. Still, he picked me up in front of my place on 1st Avenue, and we took a left down memory lane. As we crept through LES in Gavin’s 2000 Jaguar XJR, he pointed out one place that used to be a bar, then a bank that used to be an abandoned high school. He told me about meeting Dash Snow.

“I met him riding down Allen on his BMX bike. He wasn’t like a lot of New York dickhead celebrities like Lou Reed. He was genuinely interested in people. I once did cocaine with Dash and his father. I think if you’re doing cocaine with your child, you’ve failed as a parent.”

The stream continued, Gavin jumping from story to story, becoming distracted by landmarks tied to an endless well of diverging anecdotes. He’d interrupt his own interruptions to point out passing women’s asses.

“I fought Ryan McGinley right here when I lived on Ludlow. I got a few good hits in, but he won, and Dash Snow goes, ‘Well, how does it feel to get your ass beat by a faggot?’”

We passed his old apartment.

“When I lived here, Paul Sevigny once broke into my apartment trying to kill me ‘cause I gave him a bad review in VICE. I said he should be called DJ Chloe’s Brother.”

We finished moseying through LES and took the Williamsburg Bridge to the neighborhood where Gavin, two decades prior, first conceived of hipsterdom. Gavin is pro-gentrification, but his best stories are from a much seedier, cheaper time.

“If there weren’t projects here, it would just be more boring rich white people,” I said as we passed the Jacob Riis Houses between Alphabet City and the East River.

“See, you have that self-destructive white gene where you hate your people. I remember this white guy came up to me in Williamsburg and he had a petition to stop the gentrification. And I said, ‘So you want me to sign a petition to prevent people like you and me from being here?’”

“Maybe I wouldn’t hate gentrification if I made more money,” I responded.

“Ha! Gentrification is generally a favor, and you’re welcome. If you’re bored, go to Bushwick, or, if you want to get raped and mugged, go to East New York. An integral part of being funny is being mean. That’s why women aren’t funny, because they’re not confrontational. They don’t understand why you’re being mean.”

We passed the apex of the Williamsburg Bridge and pulled into Brooklyn.

Gavin’s phone rang. He looked at it and immediately silenced a call from “Mum” before returning to a monologue about his love of Williamsburg.

“It’s like the East Village without the crackheads,” he explained.

This struck me as anachronistic. Something no one’s said since Trump was elected and all the hipsters either moved to Vermont, died in tragic penny-farthing accidents, or drowned themselves in small-batch bourbon.

“Why does the right wing attract such eccentric weirdos?” I asked him.

“Well, we’re coming out of an era where if you don’t vocally oppose Trump, you’re canceled, your career is garbage. So you either have these independent entrepreneurs or these toothless orcs with nothing to lose, some of which I was partying with at the Proud Boys’ 10-year anniversary. They’re like, ‘You can’t cancel me. I don’t even know what I do.’”

He got distracted by another pair of jaywalking asses in matching yoga pants.

“Look at this fucking arrogance,” he said. “Nice outfits, girls.”

We stopped at 97 N 10th Street, the first VICE HQ. I took a photo of the front of the door. Nothing remains of the old VICE offices, now a co-working space. Music blasted from an empty bar across the street. Some yuppies passed us on the sidewalk. I wondered if they were going to recognize Gavin and scream in terror, this phantom of old Williamsburg raised from the upstate. But the yuppies passed unfazed.

I reloaded my camera with film. When I turned around, Gavin was pissing in the street, underneath the driver’s-side door. I’m a veteran of pissing outside, but this method was advanced even for me. I instinctually snapped a photo of this 57-year-old holding his uncircumcised cock. The author of the most famous outdoor-pissing-related video in history. It was like capturing Picasso mid-stroke or Tiger mid-swing.

“So, did all your celebrity friends cut you off?” I asked. “Or are they just friends with you secretly?”

“There are one or two that are still friends with me secretly, but 99% cut me off.”

Before Gavin was deemed a truly nuclear political threat, he had lots of friends in Hollywood: Jimmy Kimmel, Johnny Knoxville, Fred Armisen. He even bought land with David Cross.

“Do you get offended when people call you a Nazi?” I asked.

“I would be, but the word has just become synonymous with jerk, and I don’t mind being a jerk.”

“You made a whole career off of it.”

We drove in silence for a while, enjoying the sunset over Manhattan. I had been building up the courage to ask about the dildo incident, but didn’t want to piss him off. In 2016, while making fun of Hillary Clinton’s dancing, Gavin had claimed on air he could out-dance her with a dildo up his ass. The subsequent insertion of the dildo stirred controversy with the right, while he was already excommunicated by the left. A good example of how Gavin has always been uniquely talented at pissing off the entire world at once.

“So, uh, did you prove you’re not homophobic by shoving the dildo up your ass?”

“Didn’t you bring that up already?” he asked, instantly irritated.

“No.”

“Is that what I did? I wanted to prove I wasn’t homophobic?”

“That’s what I read online. Were you just doing it for fun?”

“No. Hillary Clinton was dancing, and she was dancing horribly. I said, ‘God damn it, I bet I could dance better than her with a dildo up my ass!’ We were using Opie and Anthony’s studios, and they interviewed porn stars, and they would leave dildos and things around, so, I take a butt plug and shove it up my ass, sort of, and I danced much better than Hillary Clinton!”

“Gotcha…”

“But I think the people that bring that up are trying to sabotage my popularity because young men are freaked the fuck out by anything ass or gay. You can say it was to prove I wasn’t homophobic or to own libs, but it’s just weird it keeps coming up. It’s a generational thing. Jackass put stuff up their asses all the time.”

It’s true. Jackass was always putting stuff up their asses. Dildos, toy cars, etc. This sort of humor also died out with the hipsters, ending the “vulgar wave” of the early 2000s and capping yet another era Gavin would help construct but eventually become haunted by.

The interview wound down. Gavin had a meeting in the West Village. As we headed back to the city, I told him how I’d recently set up a “Do’s and Don’ts” stream for VICE with Clavicular and Liz Schmidt that never saw the light of day. I’d suggested having them review a photo of Gavin in the segment, but was immediately shut down. I told him this as we crossed over the bridge, and it seemed to make an impact.

“Yeah, I sort of haunt that place like Banquo’s ghost. I mean, it’s my culture, my brand that they stole.”

“What happened with VICE? You quit?” I asked.

“No, not at all. I was forced out. We were merging with Viacom. And this gay guy there, Brian Grayden, really didn’t like me. He saw faggot in the ‘Do’s and Don’ts,’ and he wanted me gone,” Gavin said.

“An ex-employee from your time there said it’s like watching someone take your dead wife’s corpse out of the ground and fuck it,” I added.

“It must be how David Lee Roth felt when Sammy Hagar took over Van Halen,” he responded.

In Gavin I saw the cost of being a genuine rebel, not just a guy who plays one on TV. The ostracism, the lack of credit, the haunting fate of watching your successors inherit your counterculture, strip-mine it for aesthetics and language, then put you out to pasture. But I also saw why it was worth it. He seemed vindicated—the self-assurance and self-respect that come from refusing to debase yourself. That delicate but vivid sense of presence we call “authenticity,” which can’t be faked, only preserved.

“Can you drop me off here? I am about to read my poems at a reading,” I told him.

He squinted at me, respect dwindling.

“What, you think that’s gay?” I asked.

He scoffed. “That’s like asking if sucking cock is gay.”