Dan Slater is in Sydney, going through boxes.
He's home helping family, which has meant sorting through what he calls the knick-knacks and trinkets, and a few days ago he found something he'd forgotten he had: his credential from White Party Palm Springs in 2015, the first year he worked with the late Jeffrey Sanker, the man who revolutionized the gay party scene and created White Party.
This upcoming Labor Day weekend Dan Slater plays White Party Las Vegas.
Slater is careful about the lineage. Sanker created White Party Palm Springs in 1989 and ran it until he passed in 2023. "He was a pioneer back in the day," Slater says. What Sanker started has held, he thinks. "Wherever we go, the original essence is people coming together and celebrating as a community."
So I asked what he'd tell the guy wearing that 2015 lanyard.
"It gets better. You've struggled and gone through so much, but you've experienced so much as well ... know that all the hard work that you've put in, it is going to get so much better for you."
He means that more literally than it sounds. This year has been hard.
"End of last year, this year were really tough. For me and my friends, we all kind of go, what are we doing this for?"
He describes the shape of it plainly. "Sometimes we do get stuck in a rut where we're constantly just doing the same thing after another, and you do get beat down."
Then, unprompted, the other half. "But honestly, we are around such a great group of people that I'm so excited for the next journey."
Ask what that journey is and he goes deliberately quiet. "I've definitely got some projects which I'm going to start working on soon ... but I can't really say too much at the moment, because I kind of want it to be a surprise." What he will say is that he's leaving different from how he arrived. "I'm definitely coming back from Australia in a much more focused and positive mindset."
We're at a point where anyone with a browser can generate a passable dance track in about a minute, so I asked where he stands on AI.
"I haven't really used any on my sets," he says. That's the whole answer on the music. Everywhere else, he's all the way in.
He came up through a business background and recently finished a course in social media marketing specializing in AI, which he leverages in his digital marketing. "If you haven't caught up on AI, or at least done some basic stuff, it's going to be a lot harder to catch up, because the whole platform is changing day after day."
Which is a fairly precise description of where he draws the line. Let the machine handle the business. Play the records yourself.
He's just as deliberate about switching off. In July, working two cruises back to back, he ignored his phone for nearly three weeks.
"I didn't turn it off, but I just ignored it basically for nearly three weeks and lived in the moment, enjoyed spending time with my friends, and was like, you know what, if someone really needs to get in touch with me, they'll call me."
The response says more about the rest of us than about him. "I had about four of my really close friends checking in on me saying, Dan, are you okay? We haven't heard from you for the last three weeks and you've not posted anything on social media." Going quiet now reads as an emergency. "And I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm on a cruise having the best time ever."
Being present keeps coming up. It is the thing he guards on a boat with his phone face down, and it is the thing he is paid to manufacture for eight hours at a pool in Las Vegas.
The pool party and tea dance at White Party Las Vegas is eight hours in the sun, noon to eight, finishing as the light goes rather than at four in the morning. That changes the room, and it changes the job.
Orel Sabag opens, and the two of them treat the day as a single build. "When we work together, whether it's a nighttime, whether it's a tea dance, we can actually complement each other and you look at it as an arc. So he'll know how to take the energy from say twelve till whatever time he finishes, and I go on and then I'll take it on from there."
Left to shape the whole day himself, he knows exactly where it goes.
"I would definitely start with some tropical house, and then revving it up and move into disco and house. And then by the end of the afternoon it's taking it as a high energy, a lot of pop anthems and house and classics too, to take it right into the end of the night."
He builds the sleep into the job. "I would probably be sleeping myself the night beforehand for at least eight to ten hours, because you need to have the energy yourself to keep the energy going for the event."
You sound like an athlete, I told him. He didn't disagree, and offered last weekend as evidence. Chicago: in on Friday, seven hours on Saturday, three more on Sunday. "All I did was get there, sleep, work, sleep."
In an environment built on excess, that is its own kind of discipline.
"Trust me, we all have our moments too, we can enjoy. But you definitely have to, as I get older - geez, I sound like my mother." He laughs. "As you get older, you definitely have to pick your moments. I can go out and enjoy myself with my friends, whether it's with work or socially. But God, I can't do it like I used to."
At some point he clocked where we'd ended up. "I feel like this is a self-help book rather than talking about White Party Las Vegas." Then he decided he didn't mind. "I love this stuff. I think it's great that we can raise an awareness within our own community that we have to look after ourselves, look after each other."
Dan is, by his own description, a reality television junkie. White Party Las Vegas is at the Vanderpump Hotel, and he found Vanderpump Rules a couple of months ago and is now obsessed with it, which makes the venue its own event for him. "Have you seen that rooftop pool? ... Looking at all the photos, that place looks incredible. That looks like the place to celebrate Labor Day weekend."
His advice for White Party is the same whether you're going with a partner, with friends, or on your own.
"If you go with an open mind, you're either going to have the time of your life. Or if you're going to be one of those people that sits there judging other people ... you're going to have a terrible night wherever you go."
He does it himself. "I will go out by myself. I'll be happy to go to a bar or a restaurant by myself, because it's kind of nice to just have that connection, all that interaction with people ... I might end up having a conversation with the table next to me, and it's almost like we have gone out together, because people just are happy to connect."
The last thing I asked was what success looks like now.
"As a gay man especially, we sometimes look for validation in whether it's money, career, sex, whatever it is. But you need to be really happy with yourself."
He continues: "You could have all the money in the world but be miserable. And you could have no money in the bank but be happy that you have a great group of friends around you, you're doing well at work, but it's having that balance ... Life is too short to look at things negatively."
Dan is flying into Vegas a few days early. Then, on Sunday, September 6, he plays the pool party and tea dance at White Party Las Vegas, noon to eight at the Vanderpump Hotel.
"Bring it on, Las Vegas," he finished. "Let's do it."