This undercover report is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
In the hills above Elysian Park, something is stirring.
Local residents have reported a flurry of nocturnal activity, centered around an historic beauty spot high up on a hill overlooking the skyline of downtown Los Angeles. What happens there among the trees and across the picnic benches at night is not for wallflowers. It’s dangerous, it’s sexy, and it’s turning everything we thought we knew about young people and modern romance on its head.
“We’re tired of being alone,” one late-night romper told VICE, “and now we’ve got the grass stains on our jeans to prove it.”
“Dogging” is a term that has acquired rather squalid connotations over the half century or so that it has been in the wider parlance. Across the ocean in Great Britain, where dogging originated, it is most often used to describe convoys of bored retirement-age couples grunting their way to underwhelming climax in motorway laybys and industrial estate parking lots. It’s an old people thing, and it’s gross.
But this tired ritual is getting an adrenalizing zoomer makeover. If you go down to Elysian Park tonight, you’ll be in for a big surprise—namely, the exotic dancers, bar staff, wayward rich kids, out-of-work actors, stylists, e-girls, intellectuals, occultists, shitposters, grifters, poets, and influencers of today’s LA underworld, in the open and in flagranti.
These are the “ace faces” of a new era of dogging that has left tastemakers dumbfounded and got the world’s biggest brands scrambling for a piece of the action—and it’s a thirsty retort to everyone who’s dismissed the youth of today as a bunch of screen-obsessed, brain-rotting shut-ins.
Not that the local residents are impressed.
“We thought we had bought in a nice, neighborly area,” said one resident, who spoke to VICE on condition of anonymity. “Now, we barely get a wink of sleep. The screaming, the honking horns, the heavy metal music… We can’t stop thinking about our house prices. They’re going to tank!”
At least one member of the crew, however, is unrepentant. “These people will never understand us,” said Jerome*, after VICE collared him emerging from a patch of shaking shrubbery.
“We’re glad their house prices are falling. It’s our revenge on a generation who hates us.”
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
Photography by Ivar Wigan
Text by Ravi Giwan
Photo Assistant: Ciara Mendez
Styling: Peri Rosenzweig
Styling Assistant: Karen Gonzalez
Makeup: Loftjet
Hair: Fitch Lunar
Models: ALX Leon, Ciarda Hall, DeAngelo Abledinger, Indiana Piorek, Peri Rosenzweig, Simona Kust, Travis Castle, Trevor Stewart
This undercover report is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
The post A Park Despoiled: In LA, Gen Z Goths Are Making Dogging Cool Again appeared first on VICE.
