Queer Nightlife Can Help Us Bridge the Party Gap

I spent Inauguration Day at a protest near Boston's City Hall, arms linked with my friends for warmth. It was too cold to march for very long, so we peeled off and took the train a few stops to Dani's, Boston's only sapphic bar. We sat in the back, faces lit up by neon, and ordered a disco ball full of sangria and a couple plates of chicken wings and laughed to keep from crying as the sun went down.

Two months earlier, Nix Corporan had been DJ-ing at the same spot. It was the weekend after the election, and the experience was “extremely humbling,” they tell PS. The 32-year-old New Yorker performs as MANGUMAMI and has had a residency at the bar since it opened last summer. “Everybody was nervous, like what's going to happen to our future,” they remember of the crowd that weekend. “Even in liberal cities like Boston, they're still getting attacked with anti-gay rhetoric.” Still, waves of people showed up ready to dance.

Under a second Trump administration, some fear the demise of party culture. Parties have already been on a downward spiral for years, and in 2023, Americans apparently partied 35 percent less than they did in 2004, according to The Atlantic. Those numbers don't seem to be changing anytime soon: Whether it's the squeeze of the economy, soaring interest in sobriety, a painful isolation epidemic, or a general post-election funk, the vibes are off and morale is low. But depending on who you ask, the party never stopped. “Those are straight people stats,” actor-writer Franchesca Ramsey said, referencing that Atlantic essay on a recent episode of the “Sam Sanders Show.” Fellow guest Brandon Kyle Goodman put it another way: “The gays are partying.”

They all giggled, but any queer person knows they weren't totally joking. Queer party culture is the stuff of legends. While public displays of homoeroticism have been punished by western societies since the fall of Rome, it's widely known that the gays have never stopped partying — from Weimar Republic Berlin to Studio 54, drag balls, Fire Island, every Pride month since Stonewall, and all the house parties, circuit parties, sex parties, and afters in between.

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Kemi Adeyemi, PhD, is an associate professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington. She is the author of “Feels Right: Black Queer Women & the Politics of Partying in Chicago” (Duke University Press, 2022) and co-editor of “Queer Nightlife” (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

That same Atlantic essay makes the case that America needs its parties to maintain “intimacy and togetherness,” and the author challenges every American to throw two parties a year. And while some people are looking to the history of places like the Soviet Union for inspiration on how to embrace escapism under authoritarianism, no one has had as much practice partying through hardship — or made it look so sexy — as the world's queers.

Having worked in queer nightlife for decades, Moe Girton knows this all too well. “During the AIDS epidemic, it was bury your friends in the morning, riot all afternoon, and dance all night,” the founder and owner of San Diego's Gossip Grill tells PS. “Dance revitalizes you and gets you ready to do the fight the next day.”

But to save the American party, it will take a lot more than simply borrowing queer aesthetics. It's not enough to slap a rainbow flag on a Hooters menu or fire off a glitter cannon at the cul-de-sac cookout.

University of Washington gender studies professor Kemi Adeyemi says queer nightlife is as much defined by its outrageous style as it is by its role in shaping solidarity. “Partying is as important to queer people as it is important to the straights,” she says. “I think the difference is that the [queer] party has often been attached to specific political agendas.” There's often a community need that queer social gatherings attempt to serve, whether it's fundraising for gender-affirming healthcare or legal assistance, raising awareness about issues like STI prevention or mental health, or organizing around specific policies or politicians.

“In the various histories of LGBTQ life and community, we've seen the party as a space that is explicitly tied to bettering people's lives after the party ends,” Adeyemi says.

It's this reason that sapphic and gay bars across the country — though far outnumbered by “straight” bars — have become essential community pillars at a disproportionate rate. Gossip Grill is one of California's only lesbian bars, and one of only 34 lesbian bars left in the country. With so few peer establishments, Gossip shoulders a heavy burden, having to not only serve up revelry every night of the week but also anticipate the growing needs of its community that regularly extend far beyond the offerings of your average neighborhood bar. Though wildly popular, Gossip has always had a hard time paying the bills and is constantly having to reinvent, according to Girton.

If there's something to learn from queer history, it's not how to preserve joy, it's about how to organize social movements.

During the pandemic, for example, Gossip employees mobilized food deliveries to neighbors in need. Amid the flood of anti-LGBTQ+, anti-women, and anti-immigrant executive orders since January, they've opened up their space for use by community organizers and LGBTQ+-aligned nonprofits for events and fundraising. Girton, too, is hyper-aware of the presence of ICE agents in her San Diego neighborhood, and is focused on protecting employees who could be vulnerable to detention or deportation.

“Everyone is overwhelmed. My trans employees are scared for their life,” Girton says. Her nightclub lighting designer, a trans woman from Mexico, is “petrified right now that she's gonna get picked up.” The staff is getting “bombarded, from all angles, we're all kind of spinning trying to figure out where do we start fighting this.”

This Trump administration is another in a long line of tests that queer nightlife has withstood throughout its history. Yes, the gays stay partying, but queer nightlife is under perpetual threat. As Adeyemi explains, these are spaces that have “historically been unduly targeted by police and political violence.” And while joy is important, Adeyemi forcefully rejects the idea that queer nightlife exists just to facilitate it.

“We may go party to let off steam, have fun, disassociate, or whatever — and that's a great thing — but there has to be more,” she says. “If there's something to learn from queer history, it's not how to preserve joy, it's about how to organize social movements.”

Oppression, and reacting against it, are defining elements of queer party culture. What looks like unadulterated joy on the outside often conceals the anxiety, vigilance, and willingness to resist that vibrates underneath. Queer nightlife is armored by its several layers of community care — and the consent guidelines, fundraisers, skill shares, and mutual aid so common in queer party spaces are all forms of showing up for one another when nobody else will.

But that doesn't mean these spaces should always be idealized. “We like to think of queer nightlife as inclusive, as a space where anyone can go and be free,” Adeyemi says. But queer nightlife “is and has always been very segmented, especially regarding race and class. . . . The struggles surrounding queer nightlife teach us that ‘inclusion' is a complex and challenging practice that requires intention, dedication, and lots of mistakes.”

Still, queer social circles are well equipped to carry on through hard times because of how they build networks of trust. Queer nightlife is a form of organizing, and that's why it never stops: communities need to organize if they're going to survive. As more and more people inside and outside the LGBTQ+ community are denied access to traditional seats of power under this antidemocratic administration, there will be an increasing need for alternative avenues for organizing — and parties are a fan-favorite way to do just that.

True to form, queer people are continuing to gather through these strange times, with new parties and hospitality offerings popping up in major cities. Alphabet Soup Events is centering BIPOC representation in Washington, DC, while wine bar Rebel Rebel is running weekly events in Somerville, MA, to provide community mutual aid. And in New York, Corporan recently hosted the first installment of a new party series called Thique, designed specifically for fat sapphics.

The hype was almost as good as the party itself, Corporan says. For weeks, the DJ's DMs were full of people asking for tips on what to wear, eager to put their “FUPA on somebody's face.” The actual event, at Brooklyn dyke bar The Bush, didn't disappoint. The night featured sets from multiple fat, queer DJs, with Corporan kicking things off. They wore a grape-colored velvet dress with matching gloves and purple sneakers.

“Just looking at the crowd and seeing the different kinds of bodies there, all of that buzz made me happy,” they say. “I heard from a lot of people after like, ‘We had a really good time, the music was vibing, the beats were bumping, this was a party we needed.'”

Corporan hopes to take Thique on the road this year, focusing on red states that are going to “need fat, queer, trans, gay-ass representation.”

Ultimately, Corporan thinks there are lessons to be learned on a queer dance floor. “We don't really give a fuck who's to the left or right of us, we're gonna have a good time,” they say. “It's not who's the flashiest, or who's buying bottles to show off to a girl. At the end of the day, we all have a common ground. We just wanna shake some ass. We just wanna go home at the end of the night in peace.”

Emma Glassman-Hughes (she/her) is the associate editor at PS Balance. In her seven years as a reporter, her beats have spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she's covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, and food, climate, and farming for Ambrook Research.