Black Box, “Everybody Everybody” (1990)

Providence, Rhode Island is a very gay city. Like, really gay. So gay that locals call the area downtown where the gay bars and clubs are located “the fruit loop.” So gay that, apparently, queers from Boston and other nearby pockets of the Northeast commute here to take advantage of the colorful queer scene, making Providence something of a queer nightlife destination and challenging the perception that vibrant queer nightlife only takes place in major urban centers like LA, New York, and San Francisco.

The Dark Lady. The Alley Cat. The Stable. The Eagle. Ego. VU Lounge. Mirabar. These are the seven gay bars and clubs currently active in Providence, and that’s not even counting the many other vibrant queer collectives, DIY queer spaces, and pop-up queer club nights that take place from time to time—from Dyke Night to Planeta, a multidisciplinary artist collective that produces queer dance parties centering social justice and community building. My own quarterly party, , where I am also a resident DJ, is a collaborative social practice project composed of DJs, local club kids, and community organizers that brings some of the most interesting queer underground DJs working across house music, Baltimore/Jersey club music, techno, and beyond. For a city of 195,000 people in the smallest state in the country, Providence punches above its weight on the local queer nightlife scene.

Some of the gay bars in Providence are even too gay for 2020 presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg who, in January 2020, suddenly canceled a campaign fundraiser at The Dark Lady—a mainstay situated right in the heart of “the fruit loop”—because of a go-go dancing platform and stripper pole that anchors the middle of the room. You really can’t miss it—it’s the first thing you see when you walk in. Fortunately, The Dark Lady refused to remove the pole, that symbol of unruly queer togetherness, reminding us that it has “been here since we opened and it’s not going anywhere. The dancer pole is part of who we are—if you want to dance on a pole, we’re the place to be” (Bawden and Machado Reference Bawden and Machado2020). The venue later blasted the Buttigieg campaign: “Pete Buttigieg’s husband just canceled his appearance/fundraiser tonight at the Dark Lady because the ‘gay bar has a dancer pole!’ […] We guess this is what the gay candidate does to the gay community! We’re open, we’re here, we’re queer, get over it” (Bawden and Machado Reference Bawden and Machado2020).

I’m the last person to be gagged that a mainstream political candidate got cold feet about doing a campaign stop in a gay bar. But it’s not that it was a gay bar that was off-putting to the Buttigieg campaign. It’s because it was a gay bar with a stripper pole and a go-go platform–that is, not the right kind of gay bar for whatever they were selling. Gay, but not that kind of gay. “To be gay,” Michel Foucault noted in an interview from 1984, “is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life” ([1981] 1997:138). For Foucault, what frightens the public about queerness, what makes it unsettling, is not necessarily gay sex but a “homosexual” way of life—a way of life that might be rooted in dancing for hours and hours in clubs and bars and that might include wigs and stripper poles and lesbian sex clubs and drag shows and dark rooms and messy bathrooms covered in soggy toilet paper and and and. Such a way of life gives queer people a place to come together outside of “institutional relations, family, profession, and obligatory camaraderie” (136).

Let’s go dancing. A November 1989 issue of The Guide to the Gay Northeast, a monthly gay lifestyle magazine that catered largely to gay men, highlights the range of gay social spaces and ways of life in Providence, New York, Montreal, Philadelphia, and other corners of the Northeast. The Guide includes juicy travel stories, club write ups, maps and guides to area gay bars and clubs, classified personal ads for men seeking sex with men, and news articles about AIDS treatment opportunities, as well as social events in New England. For example, in a section titled “New England Going Out,” all known gay clubs, bookstores, cinemas, restaurants, and accommodations from Connecticut to Boston to Vermont to Western Massachusetts are listed, with the goal of making commutes to queer night/life easier across the region. And as the historian Martin Meeker reminds us, these kinds of innovative gay “sexual communication networks” of listings and travel guides were central to a full gay life in the 20th century (Meeker Reference Meeker2006:2–3, 13–16). These communications networks show how queer people “have had to coalesce around an identity and gather themselves into collectivities, into communities, into specific places, and around certain ideas” (1).

Perusing these extensive, crowd-sourced venue and queer nightlife listings in publications like The Guide is one way to engage with gay travel guides. But what I love about them, what I am always drawn to, are the ads, especially the full- or half-page ads for nightclubs. Before apps and online social media, club ads in gay publications were the best way for people to find out where the hot spots were. The ads were straightforward: an address, the name of the venue, and what you can expect once you get there. Here are a few from the Guide:

“There’s no place like it,” the venue promises.

Keep on dancing:

And then there’s:

It has 4 bars to serve you, 2 game rooms, a video lounge, an indoor-outdoor patio, and disco music starting at 8pm.

But unlike the other club listings, Gerardo’s publishes no address—only directions from the highway.

Don’t worry, you’ll find it. Chances are you’ll hear the place before you see it anyway.

Club 69 featuring Kim Cooper, “Warm Leatherette” (2005)

Queer nightlife is all the rage. Over the past several years there has been an exciting surge of creative practice, performance installations, music, film and media, public humanities projects, and scholarship focused on past, present, and future of queer dancefloors. Sociologist Amin Ghaziani calls this work the “cultural field” of queer nightlife (Ghaziani Reference Ghaziani2025). And it is a crowded field. I’m thinking, for example, about contemporary television shows like Legendary (2020–2022), Pose (2018–2021), and P-Valley (2020–present); films like Wildness by Wu Tsang (2012), Benjamin Mullinkosson’s The Last Year of Darkness (2023), and Leilah Weinraub’s Shakedown (2018); DJs such as Honey Dijon, Shaun J. Wright, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale, and Lakuti; artists including Sable Elyse Smith, Edie Fake, LaWhore Vagistan, Xandra Ibarra, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Sebastian Hernandez, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas; as well as writers like Kareem Khubchandani (Reference Khubchandani2020), McKenzie Wark (Reference Wark2023), Kemi Adeyemi (Reference Adeyemi2022), Jason Okundaye (Reference Okundaye2024), madison moore (Reference moore2018), Lucas Hilderbrand (Reference Hilderbrand2023), Marlon Bailey (Reference Bailey2013), Luis Manuel Garcia-Mispireta (Reference Garcia-Mispireta2023), Jafari Allen (Reference Allen2022), and Emily Bock (Reference Bock2021). We are all taking queer nightlife seriously as a messy, complicated, imperfect space of self-fashioning, community organizing, and world opening, with a focus on the textures of how queer lives are actually lived.

Of course, writing about queer nightlife is not new. Just look to the work of Langston Hughes, Isaac Julien, and Marlon Riggs; or to deep historical studies of queer nightlife communities in 20th-century San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City by scholars including Nan Alamilla Boyd, Susan Stryker, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, George Chauncey, and Shane Vogel—not to mention those legendary reflections on gay disco culture by Richard Dyer and Douglas Crimp.

But lately I’ve been wondering…why now? Why is there a surge in focus on queer nightlife now? That is, what is it about the dystopia of the present, as Jayna Brown describes it (2021:1), that has led us to seek cover, together, in the ambient haze of the dancefloor? What forms of exhaustion or duress have brought us here? And do we know what to do next?

It is a frightening time to be alive. We are in a cultural moment when tech companies are racing each other to cede human creativity to the machine, and where music producers often have to think more like software engineers than musicians for their music to gain any traction on platforms like Spotify or TikTok (Prey Reference Prey, Whelan and Nowak2016). Each month we pay monthly fees to subscribe to music or film (but don’t miss any payments or POOF! you’re out of luck) instead of having a collection of movies and albums we have curated for years. And more and more of our choices and exposure to culture are determined by algorithms, and the surveillance, data mining, and eavesdropping this entails.

We crave analog intimacies. By analog intimacies, I’m thinking about intimacies between people and other sensations that are not shaped by algorithms or scrolling on screens. It is a kind of intimacy that eschews the glossy, exhausting spectacle of 24/7 global hyper-connectedness and prefers live, slowed down, local situations—local as in what is right in front of you, as in this place, this experience, this scent, this song, this vibration, this room, these people, here now. What can thrive—what possibilities emerge—when we aren’t connected to everything else?

Think: the lost art of making and sending someone you like a mixtape, or messy beads of sweat, running into someone you haven’t seen in ages at a bar and kiki-ing on the dancefloor, your own wild dance moves and gestures going everywhere, or lingering touches and cruisey glances with someone you may never see again, chests vibrating to the bass from unfamiliar sounds you may never hear again and can’t “Shazam.” A new friend, maybe a new lover. These are all live, person-to-person, elusive, ephemeral textures that are facilitated when we gather together in person, offline. Analog intimacies points to an intimacy of the senses: scent, touch, taste, rough edges, sound, sight, gesture, exchange, presence.

In Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, Jonathan Crary writes that in our contemporary culture, “one of the most noted and now banalized phenomena of contemporary urban life is the atomized crowd of individuals all seemingly absorbed by the contents of their screens” (2022:119). It’s no wonder that so many queer spaces these days insist on not having or using a phone on the dancefloor. And the reason these spaces often encourage no phone use on the dancefloor is to keep you in the live, analog moment. Are you “here” in this room with us if you are also texting and scrolling through your phone the whole time? At the same time, no phone use on the dancefloor is also a form of redaction that helps shield vulnerable communities from voyeurism. For Crary, the influx of screens in our social and public lives forecloses the intimacies of gathering in public space and “constitute a ritual demonstration of the refusal of community demanded by neoliberalism” (119).

In the course of my own research in queer nightlife, which is largely focused on the 1980s and 1990s, I’ve realized what I love about seeing club photographs and videos from this period is that nobody has a smartphone. I mean, of course nobody had a smartphone, but what I want to highlight is the analog intimacy and urgency of that moment. All you see are photos and videos of people who are just there doing the thing. Local. In the middle of those textures and sensations of gathering. This is a kind of intimacy of the senses in a world driven by the flattening of culture through screens, smooth and optimized, and algorithmic choices. The analog intimacies of queer nightlife refer to those textures and sensations that allow us to be surprised by what comes next, to move slowly, to not know, to wander and wonder, locally.

Inner City, “Good Life” (1988)

This TDR Consortium issue brings together an intergenerational group of queer artists and scholars who are thinking about the rhythms, textures, and analog intimacies of queer nightlife and queer dancefloors—how they succeed, how they fail, and the performance experiments that take place on them. Though the contributors don’t directly address the “why now” of queer nightlife, taken together the pieces do give a sense that the urgency of approaching the topic now has to do with queer nightlife as a method of living, as the search for analog intimacies. Queer nightlife is a way to be here, now. A way to sense, touch, vibe/rate together. In the muck of the present moment, there’s a deep hunger for what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise possibilities.” For Crawley, otherwise possibilities means knowing that what we have is not all that is possible. The otherwise notes a “disbelief in what is current and a movement towards, and an affirmation of, imagining other modes of social organization, other ways for us to be with each other” (Crawley Reference Crawley2016).

This is not to situate the dancefloor as some kind of utopia, what Jill Dolan once called a “utopian performative” (2010:5), because the club is full of muck and failure, too. There is drama at the club. There is violence and sadness at the club. And it is also not to position the queer night as a temporary autonomous zone of anticapitalism and PLUR—peace, love, unity, and respect—waiting for us at the coat check…that is, if you can afford to get in. Miss Thing, if the only thing to say about queer nightlife is that it’s utopian, then there isn’t much to talk about! For example, in the anthology Queer Nightlife, edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón Rivera-Servera, queer nightlife is situated as a complicated site that is certainly rooted in fun and the pursuit of pleasure—if you can get noticed when you walk in the door—but it isn’t equally fun for everyone all the time. Reference Adeyemi, Khubchandani and Rivera-ServeraAdeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera rightly underscore the centrality of “the many forms of surveillance staged within queer nightlife settings that can limit the forms and expressions of desires and bodies” (2021:1). Or, as Adeyemi tells it again in Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago, “someone always fucks up the vibe somehow” (2022:x).

When we insist on the queer night as a space of “otherwise possibilities,” what we want is a desire to try “to create change, to be something else, to explore, to imagine, to live fully, freely, vibrantly” (Crawley Reference Crawley2016), all while pointing to the complications and nuances of trying to build community, and of failing and trying again.

The urgency and emergency of queer nightlife means our feelings of disaster and catastrophe in the present moment are so intense that we are desperately and collectively seeking, trying and maybe failing to create these other possibilities. At the same time, and in our cultural moment of ongoing emergency, we are also craving new, risky, and more personal ways to write and think with our communities, to kiki with them, eager to close the gap between how we live and what we study. If queer life is already rooted in mess, as Martin Manalansan IV reminds us (2014:94), maybe the messiness of queer dancefloors is also an invitation to not know where we’re going, to make it up as we go along. As scholars, we are trained to embrace “rigor” and “discipline” as a measure of our work, what José Muñoz once brilliantly theorized as “rigor mortis” (1996:7–8). But the lesson from queer dancefloors might be an invitation for us to experiment, get messy, and take risks.

It would be all too easy to think of this surge in the focus on queer nightlife as something like a “turn” in a field of study. But that would be much too institutional, boring for the club. So let’s call it what it really is: turning it in queer nightlife. It’s like one of my friends always says: not reinventing the wheel…turning it, Miss Thing!

The Urban Dictionary:

Also: a Black queer colloquialism that points not necessarily to fabulousness but to a surge of unique creative energy, and how that creative energy gets reflected in what you make. You didn’t reinvent the wheel—you turned it.

Turning it in queer nightlife is about writing and thinking that has the energy of a good party. It’s about bringing the energy of the party to all parts of your life. A temporary turning it zone. The goal isn’t to extract information from queer nightlife communities and practices in order to bring them into the glaring light of legibility and discipline, but to figure out how the sweaty, cruisy, messy dancefloor can shape how you write, how you think and what you think about, what questions you ask, how you move, how you dance, how you feel, and how you daydream. “We must become undisciplined,” Christina Sharpe reminds us (2016:13), and so turning it in queer nightlife is an invitation to play, play off each other, turn up the volume, take risks, invent new methods, get messy, fail, try something else, not know what comes next, improvise.

Kevin Aviance, “The Beats” (1999)

What would it mean to think about queer nightlife as a way of life? To take queer nightlife seriously as a strategy of living in a world on fire, a way to move, find each other, collaborate, touch, improvise, mess up, fail, scheme, try, vibrate, create, think, and imagine otherwise? What im/possibilities and other frustrations might such a way of life open up?

One of the first scholarly texts I read about the queer dance club was Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, a 2002 performance ethnography of the underground house and queer dance music scene in 1990s New York City by Fiona Buckland, which was also the subject of her dissertation in Performance Studies with José Muñoz at NYU. At the time, around 2003 or so, I was in my first semester as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and discovering the field of LGBTQ studies, starting with a fabulously “scandalous” course I was in called “How to Be Gay.” It was a course devoted to exploring gay cultural practices, from cruising to diva worship.

I spent most weekends at Necto, the big dance club in Ann Arbor. The club wasn’t even a 10-minute walk away from my dorm in South Quad—a perfect set up. Sadly, I don’t remember much about the space anymore, but I do remember that the Red Room played mostly R&B while the main dancefloor played up-tempo dance music and Rihanna remixes. Sometimes, if we got tired of Ann Arbor (a2), my friends and I would take the three-hour road trip to gay clubs in the Short North in Columbus, Ohio—you know, just to change it up a little.

Reading Impossible Dance for the first time, I was fascinated that queer nightlife, this messy and imperfect cultural practice, could be a subject of scholarly inquiry. I loved how Buckland moved beyond the inner workings of the dancefloor and other practices of self-fashioning to think more broadly about how the club creates a space of queer world-making, drawing attention to the strategies queer people use to imagine new ways to gather when coming together feels impossible. Queer nightlife as a site of world-making, or as I now like to say, “world opening,” is a crash course in the broader legal history of fights for LGBTQ people to meet, dance, and come together when the state, the law, or the police worked overtime to prohibit/entrap/surveil those gatherings. It is also a crash course in the many forms of violence, racism, and exclusion that can and do also take place in these spaces. “As queers are often denied access to state, church, media, or private institutions,” Buckland writes, “they constitute lifeworlds in a variety of sometimes contesting ways that cannot assume a taken-for-granted social existence” (2002:3). Crucially, she reminds us that many queer people “are made worldless, forced to create maps and spaces for themselves, without the support of these more traditional realms. In such circumstances, any queer lifeworld is itself a critique as well as a place from where participants critique these realms” (2002:3).

What I am drawn to here is the sense that a queer lifeworld is already a form of critique. Gathering as critique. I’m thinking, for example, about queer lifeworlds in San Francisco in the 1940s and ’50s, a period of extended fights for the right of LGBTQ people to meet in public space. As the historian Nan Alamilla notes in Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965, the years between 1942 and 1951 saw a dramatic increase in the harassment and policing of San Francisco gay bars. In 1949, the Black Cat—a local gay watering hole known for its drag revue led by community activist José Sarria—had its liquor license suspended by the State of California Board of Equalization simply because the bar was thought to be “a hangout for persons of homosexual tendencies” (2003:121). Sol M. Stoumen, the bartender, sued the state on the basis of no wrongdoing but his lawyer, Morris Lowenthal, shifted the focus of the case away from wrongdoing and toward the rights of gay people to have public assembly (121). In 1951, the California Supreme Court reinstated the Black Cat’s liquor license in Stoumen v. Reilly, overturning the state’s initial decision, but the kicker is that the Court’s decision was based on an unusual 1913 case in Oklahoma (Patterson v. State) “where prostitutes were classified as human beings entitled to basic human rights such as food, clothing, and shelter.” This means that, on this basis, “homosexuals were, indeed, human beings, and the public assembly of homosexuals was not itself illegal” (122).

Whether legal or not, queer people, those inventive queens, have always found new, often covert ways to gather anyway, sometimes moving their practices further underground to preserve acts of gathering as critique. It’s the “doing it anyway” that tells a story about the urgency of the queer night as a way of life.

If Impossible Dance was the first text I read about queer nightlife, today we arrive at the club with more contemporary queer nightlife scholars like Eric Gonzaba and Lillian Faderman, for example, who are using queer archives and listings from historical gay travel guides to create searchable online maps of queer bars, clubs, restaurants, bookstores, and other LGBTQ businesses dating as far back as 1871 (Regan and Gonzaba Reference Regan and Gonzaba2019; Queer Maps n.d.). These maps paint a picture of how and where queer life was lived. Across the pond, Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’s UK Gay Bar Directory (2016–2020) offers a video portrait of all the remaining gay bars in the UK, underscoring the emergency of queer venue closures brought on by real estate greed.

Other recent scholarship in queer nightlife studies has also pulled up to the bar, offering snapshots of the centrality of queer/night/life. In an essay titled “Queer Nightlife and Contemporary Art Networks: A Study of Artists at the Bar,” Joseph Daniel Valencia highlights how important queer dancefloors were to the experimental practices and community-building projects of queer Latinx artists working across contemporary performance, sound, and installation in Los Angeles (Valencia Reference Valencia2024). Building on the space opened up by Marlon Bailey in Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (2013), the cultural anthropologist Emily Bock is currently working on the much-anticipated Ordinary Queens: Queer Performances of the Good Life, a study of the contemporary ballroom scene. There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (2022) by Jafari Allen offers a stunning rumination on the Black gay cultural production that emerged during the long 1980s, including the clubs and house music that soundtracked it all, and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife (2021) by Kareem Khubchandani is a wonderfully playful study of race, drag, desire, sexual and party politics between Bangalore and Chicago, with important reflections on migration and labor in queer nightlife.

And then there are the road trip–style, bar-hopping explorations of gay bars across the US that mirror historical gay travel guides of the mid-to-late 20th century. I’m thinking, of course, about Who Needs Gay Bars: Bar-Hopping Through America’s Endangered LGBTQ+ Places (2023) by Greggor Mattson and The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After (ā2023) by Lucas Hilderbrand, which both offer historical perspectives on the gay bar as media by covering as many of them and in as many unlikely locations as they could gather. Finally, moving from the physical space of the brick-and-mortar gay bar to more improvised, itinerant queer spaces, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution (Ghaziani Reference Ghaziani2024) explores London nightlife, taking up how a swift line of queer venue closures in London has given us new kinds of DIY pop-up gathering club nights; and McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023) merges situationism, autotheory, and autofiction to take us on a journey through the underground queer Brooklyn rave scene from the perspective of a trans femme.

Crucially, not all queer nightlife takes place in gay bars or clubs. My mind wanders to the evenings of large parties on the cruising beach of Anse Moustique in Martinique that Vanessa Agard-Jones describes so well. There, Agard-Jones remembers the scene of a local promoter who

These parties include queer folks dancing to good music, as well as somewhat public sex under “the cover of night’s darkness and the privacy of the surrounding brush to consummate their unions, however tenuous” (338).

Although this scene of cruising doesn’t take place at the club, it does take place at night, a moment of opacity that the labor historian Bryan Palmer describes as the privileged temporal space “for the daylight’s dispossessed—the deviant, the dissident, the different” (2000:17). Performance studies scholar Eddie Gamboa takes the cover of darkness further by encouraging us to see the privileged temporal space of nightness as “pedagogies of the dark,” highlighting that the night is not necessarily about orientation but disorientation as a kind of orientation. Sensing rather than knowing. Walk into the club, your eyes adjust to the room, but somehow you still hold a sense of where you are going. Gamboa asks us to consider the forms of “outlaw intimacies” that come together in this darkness, noting that the way we move through a darkened club means we hold an awareness not only of how we move but how we move together with others (2021:92). This sensorial feeling “is a crucial mode of approaching a pedagogy of the dark and disrupting the voyeuristic comfort of the reader through an alternative form of engagement, a queer reading practice” (93).

Darkness as participation.

Blake Baxter, “One More Time (Red Planet Remix)” (1992)

The problem with “queer nightlife studies,” as with bringing any underground communities’ practices into the glaring light of academia, is a question about what you reveal and whether you should say anything at all. How much tea do you spill? What is your responsibility to the space? Does every party, rave, renegade, function, or kiki need to be written about? And if you do write about it, how should you do it? What can be fictionalized and what should be “real”? What needs to be exposed and what is better off kept secret? , but I hear it’s just gossip anyway.

How can these limits open up more creative ways to do “queer nightlife studies”? What we need are new methods and other ways of approaching this work, other ways of writing that are just as blurry or foggy as the queer night can sometimes be: Memoir. Autotheory. Entirely redacted pages. Fiction. Critical Fabulation. Autofiction. Playlists. Drawings. Crowdsourced reflections from the floor. Collage. Humor. Puns. Stream of consciousness. Manifestos. Drink recipes.

Most of the essays in this special issue embrace autotheory as a kind of queer nightlife method. For the critic Anna Kornbluh, autotheory is a “conspicuously hip” and “lucrative” form of writing where “academics proffer lyrical expression of personal experience and impressionistic musing punctuated by theory quips. Often shaped as aphorisms, fragments, elliptical nonnarratives, and momentary illuminations,” she adds, “these texts rebuff systematic elucidation” (2024:158, 160). But this kind of writing has long been the practice of queer and feminist authors. I’m thinking, for example, about “Me and My Shadow,” a 1987 essay by the feminist theorist Jane Tompkins where she describes a false dichotomy between the critic who writes for professional academic credentials and the critic who writes about her feelings in her diaries late at night ([1987] 1993:24).

Only one of these forms of critique is taken seriously, she notes, because “feelings, and the attitudes that inform them, are soft-minded, self-indulgent, and unprofessional” (24). But “the dichotomy drawn here is false—and not false,” she writes. “I mean in reality there’s no split. It’s the same person who feels and who discourses about epistemology” (24–25). As Tompkins sees it, we have “to pretend that epistemology, or whatever you’re writing about, has nothing to do with your life, that it’s more exalted, more important, because it (supposedly) transcends the merely personal” (5).

I think the excitement of “queer nightlife studies,” and its potential as a space of making and writing and thinking, has to do with exactly these kinds of vibrations and slippages between genre and form and theory and experience and and and. The club itself is already an environment of fractures, fragments, and partial impressions, and there’s no total master vision of the dancefloor. If you are in the toilets you have no clue about the drama unfolding backstage, and if you’re backstage you don’t know how people are being treated at the door. Even as you get to the dancefloor, you’re likely to move through the space instead of staying put in one place the whole night, cruising from spot to spot, encountering a series of fragments along the way.

In putting this special issue together, we (myself as issue editor, Rebecca Schneider as TDR Consortium editor, and Beckett Warzer as assistant editor) were faced with the reality of what people were willing to share, or not, and this was an important part of our editorial process. Our goal was to bring together scholars writing about queer nightlife as well as the people who make queer nightlife happen: the practitioners, artists, and organizers who create the possibility for world-opening. A few invited contributors opted out for reasons of their own personal safety, professional status, and the sensitivity of their research or community practice. There was fear of exposure in our current hostile cultural moment of right-wing crackdowns on those who live wildly queer, unruly, messy lives. And in one instance, an article was ready to be published but the author pulled it at the very last second out of an abundance of caution and care for their local community. What we see is that communities on the verge of being exposed come together quickly to shut down the exposure.

To be sure, this special issue is not about bringing queer nightlife into “legibility” in the academy. Nightlife can never be fully contained anyway. But how can the ways we bring queer nightlife into language disorient standardized forms of knowledge production? How can the live, analog intimacies of queer nightlife shape new ways of understanding the dynamics and poetics of gathering?

If anything, our hope is to have a party. The hope is that what’s learned on the dancefloor, in the DJ booth, at the bar, in the backstage, on the beach, in the toilets, at the renegade rave, cleaning up after and taking the night bus home can shape how we write, how we think, how we come together, how we fight, how we heal, how we protect, how we listen, how we build, and how we imagine otherwise. As Reference Adeyemi, Khubchandani and Rivera-ServeraAdeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera show, queer nightlife is already its own method, so it doesn’t need to be legitimized (2021:10). But queer nightlife can also be difficult to engage academically because its practices resist documentation, surveillance, and associated extractable “evidence” that might complicate pleasure and fun. As a method, queer nightlife’s resistance to documentation amplifies the significance of hearsay, gossip, fragments, opacity, debris, trash, speculation, partial impressions, imperfections, and other ephemera as the sticky residue of queer nightlife.

As editors, we were interested in how the queer night comes together, how it fails and falls apart, who doesn’t get in, how you get there, what it sounds like, what it feels like, who you meet, who you flirt with, what time you go, and who cleans up the mess at the end. We also wanted to think about the many elemental gestures, performances, forms of labor, doings/undoings, and mess that both frame these practices and render total framing slippery at best and impossible at most, and we wanted to think with the exhaustions and obstacles that power or foreclose the rhythms of community, pleasure, and ecstasy at night.

And as the pieces started coming in, we loved the idea of having a separate section that gathers short provocations “From the Floor” that explore the analog intimacies, memories, textures, practices, vibrancies, and contingencies of the dancefloor. At first, we thought about starting the issue with more traditional “articles” and leaving these short “From the Floor” provocations to the end. We also thought about weaving these provocations between each “article.” But we soon realized that both approaches reinstall the binary between “traditional articles” and these short dancefloor provocations.

So, we decided to start the issue on the dancefloor—12 separate reflections as one crowded room. I’m reminded of Fiona Buckland again here, who tells us that “[a]ny queer dance floor is a node in which many weaving, layered maps meet” (2002:3). Think about it: few people want to be alone on the dancefloor and most don’t dance until somebody else is dancing. Besides, queer nightlife has no single author anyway. The experience is always work that is made in community, together.

As someone engaged in queer nightlife research, one of my favorite things is listening to or reading about other people’s dancefloor memories and stories. I think of them as queer nightlife self-portraits. As they tell their stories, I love seeing their eyes and faces light up as they remember the songs they heard or how they felt inside the space or who they were with. For me, these queer nightlife self-portraits and memories are not nuggets of nostalgia but ephemeral gestures of queer nightlife as a method of living. They reflect a way to be alive and going in search of……s o m e t h i n g.

The essays gathered here, which come to us from an intergenerational mix of artists, graduate students, junior scholars, and senior scholars from performance studies, ethnomusicology, queer studies, music, media studies, Latinx studies, American studies, and beyond, touch on queer nightlife histories and other dancefloor sensations. So, head to the coat check and grab a drink because you’re starting “From the Floor,” right in the thick of the night. We’ve been here a couple hours already, and we’re waiting for you.

The Carry Nation, “This Bitch Is Alive ft. Viva Ruiz” (2012)

Juana María Rodríguez takes us on a night of analog intimacies at Berghain, that famous techno cathedral/sex club in Berlin, a space she initially avoided, swearing she “hated techno and the idea of sweaty German gym bunnies did not entice” (20). We follow her as she learns more about the history of the club from a Brown club kid who is her “RaveMate, PlayMate, NativeInformant” (21), and we follow her as she navigates those infamous bouncers. We go with her inside the club, where we feel the bass she describes, “bass that had been calling you […] waiting to grab you, as your eyes dart across the anteroom to the gates of decadence,” and we go with her to the toilets, to refill our water bottles and back to the dancefloor again (21). Reflecting on that evening of sweat, dancing and intimacy, she recalls that “[t]hroughout the night, the dancing becomes the fucking, on the floor, in cold metal cubbies […] this is the real ecstasy, the space of abandon where desire breathes free” (22).

The techno beats are still pumping. It’s Pride Weekend in 2024 and McKenzie Wark ruminates on how raving feels now after the publication of Raving, her seminal book that explores “the intersection of queer nightlife, techno, and raves” (23). The book, like her essay, brings together dialog, autotheory, and autofiction in a deeply rhythmic text that lets the club seep in between each word. We’re in Bushwick, Brooklyn, meeting friends, starting at Bossa Nova Civic Club, rolling from venue to venue. It’s Pride Weekend after all. Crucially, Wark highlights the amount of labor that makes the rave possible. But sometimes, the result of that labor is what she calls “style extraction,” or the way that urban industries capitalize on and extract from rave culture and queer nightlife. These industries love to extract from “these living situations—where we go to get free—to package them and sell them as product” (24). For Wark, “nothing sacred, nothing free, nothing joyful, nothing safe, can exist without us. And I don’t just mean transsexuals. Something like that goes for all the freaks and monsters and demons and other others” (27).

From the Brooklyn rave scene we go to Cheung Chau, where Rory Fewer describes his first time taking ketamine. “Take ketamine with me. Burn, tingle, drip. The world folds into itself until it barely resembles anything at all,” he writes (27). Of interest to Fewer is how ketamine produces its own sense of queer time—“the queer time of ketamine” where “there is not only no future but also no past” (29). For Fewer, the “queer time of ketamine” brings us closer to “memories of what it feels like to forget. Vacant. Pointless. Blank” (31).

“Time: 3:30am on the 4th of July. […] Location: xx°xx’xx”N xx°xx’xx”W, a picnic ground located along a camping trail in San Gabriel Valley, a predominantly Asian American region on the outskirts of Los Angeles” (32). With these coordinates, Alice Zhao hops the fence and raves in the undergrowth. That is, not in the “underground” but in the undergrowth. For Zhao, that undergrowth reflects the elemental “plethora of shrubs, low bushes, insects, fungi, and other small matter” (32) that is sometimes the space of world-opening for “those who are marginalized, surplus, anonymous, unmarked, and otherwise socially dead” (32). At the heart of her own experience curating raves in the undergrowth is a fascination “with the way (night)life happens through trespassing into overlooked corners in the undergrowth” (33), a nod to queer life as a DIY practice.

Going from the rave to the Latinx club in Los Angeles, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. dances with the memories of Arena, Escandalo, Tempo, Club L, and Moonshadow’s world-opening nightclubs in his queer nightlife self-portrait. He thinks about what these spaces teach “us about being queer and fabulous, about the collective affect” and about “how bodies on the dancefloor create momentary utopias and make histories (sometimes as we make out)” (34). For Alvarez Jr. these memories of lines and dance music form a “sensorial archive” that lives in our bodies through sound, smell, sight, touch, and those commutes to queerness in the flatbed of a pickup truck (34).

Kristy Li Puma takes us to the DIY queer nightlife culture of Washington, DC, a capital city known more for surveillance and government infrastructure than its Black and Latinx DIY queer nightlife scene. Working her way through a tangled web of cables, spilled drinks, broken soundcards, and other “janky” or “bootleg” DJ and sound equipment (39), Puma introduces the term “precarious systems” to think about the “everyday moves made by people at the margins who are crafting their own creative solutions while living within larger systems of state-produced precarity” (39). These systems are precarious because they are low-budget and always on the verge of falling apart. For Puma, the “precarious system” is a critique of neoliberalist and corporate forces that insist on the shiniest, most expensive gear as a means to legitimacy.

Nick Bazzano reminds us that “we—as scholars, producers, enjoyers, and acolytes of queer nightlife—should hold no transcendental methodological entitlements as to how we go about accessing, disclosing, describing, defining, representing, or remediating the amorphous, anomalous queer underground” (44). He rightly notes that the underground is always endangered. With this precarity in mind, Bazzano’s original essay was pulled. In its place is a new text with a redacted page that not only honors a community’s privacy and protection but that also highlights the important lesson that not everything needs to be shared in print. This brief manifesto is a call to “always learn, unlearn, and relearn how to simultaneously elaborate and protect the queer underground” (45), posing an urgent methodological question for “queer nightlife studies.”

Tavia Nyong’o remembers la madrugada, a Spanish word for the specific “time of day between midnight and dawn”—around 4 or 5am (46). He remembers that you can only get there after “you took a long afternoon siesta, met friends for drinks and pinchos as the sun set, perhaps ate a proper meal […] around 8 or 9 prior to hitting the clubs before they got too crowded at midnight” (46). In other words, you can only get there by carrying. Nyong’o thinks of this specific moment in time as a “temporal commons” of queer nightlife, a time that “didn’t belong to work or family or even biological needs like sleep […] Instead it belonged to the dancers, the insomniacs, the queer kids sneaking out, the sex workers finishing late shifts” (46). La madrugada lends a sense of queer nightlife as “an improvised choreography of freedom” (46).

Jennifer DeVere Brody takes us back to her memories of dancing at the Paradise Garage, one of the most important venues in the history of Black queer nightlife and dance music. In her queer nightlife self-portrait, she samples, mixes, and digs “through shards of evidence—sonic, danced, seen, heard, smelled, and felt—as a mode of remembering how bodies of life came together” (48) on the dancefloor, describing what she wore, how she got there, her last nights at The Garage, and what the music sounded like. On one of the last nights there, Brody remembers that resident DJ Larry Levan played “Heart Beat” over and over again “on an absurdly long loop—at least one-half hour. Sometimes he would stop the music altogether” (52).

Ariel Osterweis reflects on a life of dance—both at the club and at the Alvin Ailey School, where she took classes in ballet, the Martha Graham technique, and the Lester Horton technique. But it was those Sunday afternoons and nights at Body & Soul—“an after party to the after party” (53) where Ailey dancers merged with club dancers. “Interestingly,” she writes, “we had no classes in improvisation or choreography. We were training to be dancers with a capital D” (53). Improvisation skills could be learned in rehearsal and with choreography. But crucially, Osterweis frames her experiences in the New York club scene of the time as integral to learning the skills of experimentation and improvisation in dance.

It wouldn’t be queer nightlife without fashion, and Kamilah Glover puts on all her jewelry just to go to the bodega. In this style lookbook, a glimpse into how she curates looks for the club, the classroom, or the bodega, Glover shares that “style has always been one of the few ways [she] could genuinely express [herself ]” taking “every chance to turn a look” (55). A central style rule Glover lives by is the ability to shapeshift, “anchored by the belief that gender fungibility (in Hortense Spillers’s conception) provides an opportunity to constantly remake oneself” (55). It is a shift in consciousness that allows her to not only shine through style, but to embrace “contradiction rather than seeking to minimize or eliminate it” (56).

The final “From the Floor” comes to us from PachaQueer, an Ecuadorean performance collective that describes themselves as “radical activists, gender terrorists” fighting for the rights of trans people, transvestites, LGBTQ+, and dissidents. Their manifesto, “celebrA(C)TION,” presented in Spanish and in an English translation by Yayo Meza, highlights the party as “a political act of rebellion, emancipation, unity, and creation” (64). With dissidence and care at the center of their practice, they remind us that “nightlife grown from our many divergent realities goes way beyond a fashionable song or a genderless outfit; because what matters is to feel cared for” (66).

Chaka Khan, “This Is My Night” (1984)

From the edge of the dancefloor, where we kee’d about analog intimacies and the im/possibilities of queer nightlife, we move to a set of historical articles on the lesbian surround, the trans history of the lip-sync, activist intimacies, queer nightlife and “safe space” narratives, the unique listening environment of Berghain, and the leaky, messy muck of doing a party.

Lauren Bakst shares an important history of Clit Club, a 1990s lesbian club night cofounded by Julie Tolentino and Jocelyn Taylor that “was a space for lesbians to have sex” (70). Crucially, by focusing on lesbian social life, she develops the concept of the “lesbian surround,” drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s thinking on the undercommons. “A lesbian surround,” Bakst notes, “denotes the deliberate tending of porous and affective atmospheres amid cycles of abandonment and enclosure that shape sexuality in the neoliberal city” (72). This lesbian surround notes that a lesbian social life is “not bound to any one place or space but is an affective possibility promiscuously and insidiously embedded within the given world” (72).

eva pensis writes an important history of the lip-sync that queries the relationship between drag and “trans femininity” (87). In her essay, she recenters the street queen in the history of the lip-sync, highlighting “the influence of sex-working trans people on drag, gay/queer culture, and popular culture more broadly” (89). Because the street queen “dared to ‘drag’ or cross-dress in public, they were targeted by both mainstream society and by their professional counterparts” (88). And of that publicness, pensis notes, the street queen who worked in drag professionally navigated “hostilities not only within public culture, but critically, within gay and queer counterpublics as well” (88).

Amber Hickey offers a history of “touch and pleasure as a form of mutual aid”—what she calls “activist intimacies” (106) in the 1990s during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In her article, she highlights modes of “activist intimacies” that “comprise forms of mutual aid that prioritize the body and its diverse needs” (106). Crucially, Hickey reminds us of New York Healing Circle (NYHC), which provided many forms of mutual aid that served as a form of care for people sick with the virus. “Participants shared experiences and knowledge, disco danced, experimented with healing practices, and collectively grappled with grief” (107).

Benjamin Haber and Daniel J. Sander interrogate the tensions between the dancefloor as a space of possibility and the rules-based “safe space” methods (120) that clubs often use in the practice of harm reduction. For many, but not all, in queer nightlife, the authors note, drugs are a central part of the experience. Haber and Sander situate drugs like ketamine or ecstasy as an interface that facilitates the way clubbers “defamiliarize, refamiliarize, provide friction, and otherwise deconstruct and reconstruct [their] bodyminds in relation to corporeality and collective possibility” (123). At the end of the day, and in another lesson for “queer nightlife studies,” the authors “seek to make nightlife less capturable and calculable and more surprising and disappointing, to make nightlife foggier” (128).

Sound artist Ash Fure takes us back to Berghain through what she calls “the social life of sound.” But “this is not an essay about raving,” she notes (131). Instead, it is an essay about sound, duration, time, and the “listening protocols” unique to the sonic environment at Berghain as well as the techniques the club uses to create conditions for sounds to “stich together and enter the body” in new and different ways (131). Crucially, Fure, an artist who has also performed at the club, takes a look at her own compositional techniques and practices and explores how her practice is shaped by the listening protocols of club culture. “If being together is something we practice,” she notes, “then every site of listening is a social training ground. Bodies are arranged. Attention is choreographed. Power, relation, and time are scripted” (142).

Joe Parslow and Phoebe Patey-Ferguson take us to the DIY basements and club nights of London, but with a focus on the plumbing, power supply, and people who make it possible (146). Parslow and Patey-Ferguson draw on their experiences managing and working in queer nightlife venues in London, “doing some of the shit work that makes shit happen,” their “hands connected by the labyrinthine sewer system of London as [they] unblocked (shitty) toilets” (146). They are interested in taking seriously the “queer utilities in nightlife—sparks, blocks, leaks” and how these metaphors can shape how we do queer nightlife research (150).

Sylvester, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” (1979)

As editors of this special issue, we thought it was important to create a space to hear directly from nightlife culture workers themselves about the work they do in community. So what follows the articles are two conversations. First up is my interview with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania–based DJ collective Honcho (George d’Adhemar, Aaron Clark, Michael Moraine, and Clark Price), one of the most important queer nightlife collectives in the American dance music underground. Here, they touch on how PrEP changed queer nightlife, their first queer nightlife experiences, and queer coming of age in Pittsburg, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, DC, in the long 1990s and early 2000s; the precarity of queer nightlife as a site of cultural labor; the dramatic shift in how queer people connect today; as well as the importance of collaboration, friendship, and hanging out to creative practice. The central theme that emerges again and again is queer nightlife as a space for community organizing, collaboration, and connection.

Finally, Beckett Warzer stages an important conversation between Lucie Fielding, a sex therapist, theorist, and sex and kink educator, and Avgi Saketopoulou, a practicing psychoanalyst in New York. Their conversation covers the risks of consent, safety, seduction, and “mutual entanglement” in kink spaces. As Warzer writes, “what happens when we didn’t know we wanted something until after we got it? Or when we thought we wanted something, but realize afterward that we didn’t?” (163). For Fielding, “safety doesn’t actually do—at least the way that we use it—what we desperately want and need it to do. We want risk-taking, but that’s not what it actually allows us to do” (167).

Alright. That’s the line up. The party is on; the girls are here. Maybe it’s late, maybe it’s early, who knows what’s next.

Catch you later. I’m going back downstairs; my favorite DJ is turning it.