Category: WK13: Party & Play

Queer Nightlife is a collection of essays that catalog queer interviewees’ and writers’ individual experiences of going to queer spaces at night. Through first-person narratives and scholarly analyses of place-making, the authors explore how queer nightlife in bars and clubs creates important spaces for queer individuals in terms of self-discovery and community-building.

To capture the complexity of queer nightlife experiences, the writers introduces the necessity of queer nightlife: “For LGBTQI+ people whose desires, pleasures, bodies, and/or existences are invalidated in the propriety of daytime, the night does often offer an alternative set of rules with which we can know ourselves and one another.”

With this idea of how nightlife is carried out, the essays are sorted into four sections: Before, Inside, Show, and After. The Before section catalogs the anticipation and anxiety surrounding the possibilities the night holds after days of desire; Inside captures the pleasure of the utopic queer nightlife experience; Show spotlights drag shows and how these performances create a pedagogical structure for visitors to be present; while After explores how nightclubs influence queer life on a daily basis.

The overall narrative in the introduction is very utopic—this queer space is a utopian possibility created by queer individuals, offering an alternative life distinct from their daily reality.

Towards the end of the introduction, the authors summarize the sections: “Before, inside, show, and after frame the spatiotemporal coordinates of a traveled phenomena reliant on political economies of global circulation (of goods, people, data) but grounded in the embodied microsociologies of the senses.” This observation of temporal-spatial occupation situates queer nightlife within broader spaces of global circulation. It reveals the necessity of queer place-making—even if temporal, it remains deeply meaningful for those who occupy these spaces.

Within the beginning of book, “Queer Nightlife” there is a breakdown about the planning, the formation of making space, and the outcomes of creating an inclusive space where queer nightlife is able to provide a space for members to be themselves. From the start of the book I found it interesting to learn about the ways in which expression through materialistic items lead to a form of going against the status quo or used as a tool to stand for oneself. Oftentimes in society perception is connected to ideologies, and intentional ways to express oneself openly as queer is a statement to claim space and embrace oneself. While there is a progressive movement that works to use fashion as a way to express oneself there are constraints that are explored within the reading. The book puts an emphasis on the planning that it takes to create spaces or movements of expression within the LGBTQ community as there is a conscious need to think about the safety of the people. It works to discuss the ways that some spaces are not as inclusive to the BIPOC community which relates to the two previous readings in class. I connect this to the other readings as the book shows how intersectional identities are a struggle to represent equally in some spaces. This connects to the socio-economic status and setting of queer nightlife spaces which can contribute to the high cost in events or lack of accessibility for community members that may have limited income. A quote that stood out to me was: “Indeed, queer nightlife venues have often been the target of police raids meant to manage aberrant bodies and desires, and gentrification efforts meant to ‘clean up’ neighborhoods  to make way for allegedly normative people and revenue streams” (5). This is important to understand as there is an interesting dynamic within law enforcement and queer spaces as we have seen within this reading and in the documentary that discusses housing displacement and claiming space. Overall, there are nuances when discussing the claiming of spaces and the usage of law enforcement as they have a history of discriminatory treatments to some identity groups that at times put their life in danger.

In Caleb Luna’s Queer Nightlife, “Introduction,” & “Jockstraps and Croptops,” he introduces the readers to the politics that are involved in queer night time clubs that one may have thought were abandoned due to their common queer identity, emphasizing how even minority LGBTQIA+ members are unable to find acceptance in their own communities sometimes. He also introduced the idea that queer nightlife isn’t limited to the club and traditional spaces but also found in parks, streets, online, etc. In the 3rd chapter, fatness and queerness are explored as minority identities, both together and alone, especially in stores where money isn’t an available method to let you in. 

In the introduction, one’s femininity/ women identity serves as a barrier to accessing queer nightlife. Instead of the rumination free zone and accepting place one might expect it to be, one of the women- identifying LGBTQIA+ researchers experiences prove the scene otherwise. Although she is let in, she is missing a part of the experience, namely being patted down and actually having someone pay attention to her within these spaces, showing how entrance isn’t the same thing as acceptance. The discrimination and deciding who gets to be a part of queer nightlife begins at the door to the clubs where gay man dominated spaces exclude other identities. 

In the 3rd chapter, a queer individual criticizes the fashion world for their lack of clothing possibilities for fat people and within that category, fat queers who don’t dress in basic normative styles in which the barely available clothes do come in. Thin bodies are given privileges that fat bodies aren’t which also include access to stores where they can find clothes that do match their aesthetics and allow them to express their identities, even queer ones although it is harder, using clothes. 

These texts combine the queer identity with another marginalized identity, exploring how one identity may dominate another in different settings, not by choice, but in the eyes of the outside world and other individuals who don’t share both identities as them. This issue reminds me of the documentary we saw in class, Flag Wars, where people who were both queer and black long term residents, were not featured. The issues stemmed from two opposing sides, showing how two parts of a person’s identity were welcoming of only one side of them, making it difficult to imagine where they would have stood on the issues.

The book Queer Nightlife by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera details the intersectionality within queer nightlife and how race, gender, and class play large parts in the mainstream queer nightlife culture. The book also goes further into detail on the impacts of gentrification and commercialization on queer nightlife and how the environments have been immensely transformed over the years.

In terms of intersectionality, there are numerous signs of exclusion and discrimination within different groups and subsections of people in the queer community. There are many instances of Black and Latinx exclusion within queer bars and clubs, specifically those that are in gentrified areas and are majority-White. However, since the early 20th Century, there have always been specific spots and areas, such as parts of Detroit and Chicago, that have had nightlives and clubs catered specifically to these racial minority groups. Overall, there has always been a general trend, which still persists today, of the catering of White-owned queer and other LGBTQ+ venues towards White, cisgender men. 

This ties not only into the topic of intersectionality, but also further into gentrification and its impacts on the queer nightlife scene. These same White-owned venues, which often are located in gentrified or just historically-White neighborhoods and cities, do not face the same issues as minority-catered queer and LGBTQ+ clubs and venues, which have to suffer from underfunding, over policing, and just a general set of extra strictness and unnecessary and unfair treatment. Specifically with over policing, which happens in a different way in gentrified neighborhoods, most often heavily targets Black and Latinx queer participants in the nightlife scene. Additionally, through the process of gentrification, the overall price and cost of participating in nightlife has skyrocketed. This, generally, has impacts mostly on queer people of minority races, and not nearly as much for White people. 

The issue of overpricing and a general transition in the culture surrounding queer nightlife is also a large result of commercialization and social media. Both of these factors have caused traditional LGBTQ+ clubs and venues to shift towards appealing to a more wealthy and “modern” audience. This not only causes hikes in the cost of participating in nightlife, but also takes away from some of the traditional and historical places of comfort and enjoyment for queer and LGBTQ+ partygoers and clubgoers. 

Overall, I feel that the issues brought up within the text reflect a larger issue of gentrification and society’s feeling of need to cater to a White, wealthy population. I feel that this process makes things such as nightlife less enjoyable for the middle and lower class, and for minorities across the country.