Photo: Shot by Zach Zanetich. Linux, painted gold, poses atop a plinth in a trophy costume.
By midnight, the floor is packed—dolls, club kids, artists, and a few wide-eyed newcomers who weren’t sure what to expect. The outfits are unapologetic, the energy unmistakable. This is Paul’s Dolls—the weekly trans and queer nightlife event that has become the defining gathering place of its kind in New York City.
Since 2022, Paul’s Dolls has drawn trans women from across the city and far beyond it—not just for the live sets from electronic, disco, and pop DJs, the uninhibited fashion, or the occasional celebrity guest, but for the community itself: a space to connect, find one another, and offer support. Most often held at Paul’s Casablanca—the downtown club owned by DJ and nightlife fixture Paul Sevigny, brother of actress Chloë Sevigny—the party is the creation of a single organizer named Linux.
Linux is a trans nightlife organizer and fixture of New York’s club scene, who shares her name with the open-source operating system—and like that software, what she’s built runs on open access: no gatekeeping, no hierarchy, just a system designed to let people in. She didn’t stumble into one of the city’s most carefully curated trans and queer nightlife spaces. She built it from the ground up.
“Nightlife is like therapy. It reminds people that they’re stars in their own right, that their fantasy world isn’t just something that only exists in their head or in their bedroom,” said Linux. “It can exist in a very tangible space, like a nightclub, and you can build a life from that, like I did.”
Photo: Shot by Zion Reed. Guests gather at Paul’s Casablanca for Paul’s Dolls.
Long before Paul’s Dolls took shape, Linux was already creating space for queer expression that didn’t exist in her city. Growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she began sneaking into clubs as a teenager and realized she didn’t just want to attend parties—she wanted to create them. At sixteen, she was hosting her own club-kid, drag, and cabaret-style events across the city, creating promotional material, organizing lineups, and encouraging friends to try drag and dress up for the first time—one of the only spaces in her community where that kind of expression had a home.
As soon as she was old enough to leave Milwaukee, she did. At eighteen, Linux moved first to Chicago, then to Los Angeles, and eventually to New York City, following queer nightlife. She entered each scene the same way: by showing up, standing out, and outworking everyone around her—selling tickets, building connections, and pushing flyers until she had a foothold, often starting at the bottom as a party promoter.
“I wanted it to be like a running joke,” she said. “Like ‘Girl, any damn flyer you see, any damn party you’re at, there’s Linux, and she’s leaving with an envelope of cash.’”
Photo: Shot by Zion Reed. Linux, far right, sits beside trans icon, artist, and club fixture Amanda Lepore, center.
By her own account, Linux was one of the only trans women making noise in New York nightlife when she moved there in 2016. “Well, it was me and Amanda Lepore,” she said—referring to the iconic trans model and club fixture who has defined queer nightlife for decades. And unlike most promoters at the time, she was all over the internet—building a presence across platforms and teaching herself whatever tools she needed to stay visible
“Before a party, I would plan my look to be ready by 6pm if I had to be at the party by ten or eleven, so that my post is up on Instagram by 7pm and everyone sees the outfit,” said Linux. “Everyone knows what to look for at the party, people are sharing the outfit.”
As she planted herself across New York nightlife, Linux began to notice a pattern: other trans people were showing up, but they rarely gathered together. The spaces existed, but none of them were built for trans women—no dedicated room, no guaranteed safety, no sense that they were the intended guests. Linux made it her mission to change that.
Photo: Shot by Zion Reed. Guests pose with Linux, far left, at Paul’s Dolls.
Paul’s Dolls began as “Doll Dinner,” a way to bring Linux’s growing circle of trans friends together over free meals, often sponsored by restaurants in exchange for social media promotion. What started as an intimate gathering of six or seven people grew quickly—until a single dinner table was no longer enough.
“We also always wanted to go out after,” Linux said, “because dinner only lasts so long.”
When the opportunity arose to host a weekly Wednesday party of her own at Paul’s Casablanca, the idea scaled from dinner to dance floor.
“So Doll Dinner, then we all go to Paul’s Dolls,” said Linux. “Then I can invite fifty, sixty of my doll friends to come to Paul’s Dolls. It’s like the best girls night ever, right?”
As trans and queer people flocked to Paul’s Dolls—some discovering the community for the first time, others who had been living in it for years—Linux realized she’d created more than just a party. Between the dancing and the music, stories were being exchanged. She had created a cultural hub. Like the OS she named herself after, her focus shifted from ownership to access.
“How do I book? How do I hire as many different trans people from as many different walks of life, all over New York City, as possible?” she asked herself. “How do I make people most excited to be a part of something, rather than come to Linux’s party?”
Today, Paul’s Dolls runs monthly in Los Angeles, appears regularly in Miami, and has expanded to cities like Chicago—each iteration modeled after what Linux first built in New York.
All the while, Linux is a one-woman show. She runs Paul’s Dolls on her own, handling design, bookings, scheduling, promotion, and hired talent. She runs the @paulsdollsparty Instagram account (which doubles as a meme page), writes and hosts her podcast Pumping It, and has even taught herself screenprinting to design and sell her own merchandise on her website—which she built.
“I wanted to build computers as a kid. I also wanted to design clothes. I wanted to throw parties. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to make music—I wanted to do all those things that are confined by zero rules. I say who I am. You know, same with my relationship with my gender identity, like all of those things,” Linux said.
That impulse to move freely across mediums without restriction shaped her name choice. She recalls obsessing over the iPod commercials as a child in the 2000s.
“It was fierce. It was cunt,” she said. “It was a combination of multiple art forms or mediums, while also helping people and moving society into being more fab and more futuristic.”
She recalls watching the early Apple Keynotes. “I want to be Mr. Tim Apple, up there on the stage,” Linux said. “I want to be the person designing these iPhones. So I, with all my free time I had as a kid, I was doing research, like, ‘how to be a coder.’”
While Linux’s path ultimately led her away from Silicon Valley, she channels the same drive to create into Paul’s Dolls, her social media work, independent music releases, and forthcoming acting projects.
“The algorithms on these social media sites that we’re using are billionaire owned and right wing-leaning, without a doubt,” said Linux. “The algorithms are not meant for queer people, which is such a niche community of users already as it is.”
The algorithm offers queer creators like Linux two bad options: invisibility, or the wrong kind of attention. Her content is either buried before it reaches its intended, trans audience, or it catches fire among hostile viewers whose comments only amplify it further.
“I would rather have one thousand views or ten thousand views on good content by my dedicated fanbase and audience,” said Linux.“I’m saying my real shit that is making those people see the content, jaws on the floor, and they’re like, ‘this is why I love this bitch.’”
Photo: Shot by Zion Reed. Guests at Paul’s Dolls.
Linux feels strongly that organizing works best face-to-face. At Paul’s Dolls, infographics are placed on tables, conversations about hormone access and safety happen organically, and community forms in real time—without algorithms mediating who sees what.
Linux’s commitment to building safety for trans people arrives from lived experience. In 2017, she was arrested for a falsely reported incident and was placed in the men’s prison unit at Rikers Island while her case dragged through the legal system. What followed was a deeply traumatic nine-day incarceration, compounded by years of costly legal uncertainty. For seven years, Linux fought to prove her innocence, facing a lengthy prison sentence before all charges were finally dropped this past July.
“I wrote all my experiences down on toilet paper,” she explains. “I was like, ‘the world needs to know that this happened,’ because I also met a few other trans girls in my unit, and they’d been there for much longer. They didn’t have the privilege of having an outside community there to support them financially to get them out.”
She transcribed her notes into an essay published by Paper Magazine. The experience never left her—but neither did the drive to make it mean something. Rather than allowing the traumatic experience to define her, Linux turned storytelling into a form of advocacy. She went on to launch a nightlife column, What You Missed Last Month in New York City According to Linux, spotlighting the joy and creativity of her community, and later started the podcast Pumping It to share stories that inform, encourage, and connect.
Most recently, Linux began distributing ‘Dolls Off Drugs’ wristbands at events to address the prevalence of drug use within trans communities. She also rallied Paul’s Dolls behind trans comic Ashley Ryan’s “Doll Walk”—an organized march of trans women and allies through Manhattan held on Trans Day of Visibility, March 29th.
Photo: Shot by Zion Reed. Guests at Paul’s Dolls.
Through Paul’s Dolls, Linux has become a mother figure to younger people without present mothers, a big sister to those without sisters—or without sisters who accept them. She models healthy relationships between employers and employees that many of her guests may have never experienced. And to many, she stands as living proof that a trans woman can build, sustain, and lead something of her own.
“Nightlife has always been so magical for me, and I want to pass the baton.”
That baton, she hopes, will travel far.
“If you want Paul’s Dolls in your city, either bring Paul’s Dolls to your city, or, the easier option: make your own Paul’s Dolls,” Linux said.
“Don’t use the name, but yes, make your own. Make your own doll party, or make your own non-binary party. Make your own queer party, make your own trans man party, like, do whatever you can. Do something and make your own.”
Regardless of where her career expands next, Paul’s Dolls remains rooted in a philosophy Linux has lived by since the beginning: build the space you wish existed, then leave the doors open behind you.