There’s a mythology we perpetuate about the dancefloor: It’s romanticized as an escape from the stresses of the outside world, a sanctuary where we can find communion and freedom. Something happens on the nights we chase after this kind of nourishment. In the blur of fog and sweat and limbs, we hope to realize our dreams of pleasure, community, and self-confidence. This fantasy of nightlife as utopian is even more palpable when it’s queer.
Queer venues, bars, clubs and performance spaces aren’t perfect, but they do possess a specific kind of promise, one that aims to release us from the demands that a cisheteropatriarchal society imposes. They are integral to cultivating a politic of care and joy. They are networks of emotional and financial survival, creative wellsprings, and places where we can begin to trace an alternate way of living. But privilege and prejudice exist here too, and we aren’t seen as equal simply by being in a “safe space.” The phrasing alone provides too-neat a story, one that presumes that violence—both legislative and physical—is barred entry from a club.
The threats are not new—it is a longstanding American tradition to push queer and trans people into the shadows—but the current landscape is especially alarming, when conservative lawmakers and right-wing groups are endangering the existence of queer people in every way possible. The artists, venue owners, and party organizers interviewed for this piece conveyed a heightened level of concern over security at this time. Ariel Zetina, a trans DJ, producer, and a resident at Chicago’s Smartbar, says she has her guard up when she tours—especially at airports or corporate clubs. “How conservative do I need to dress? How much do I need to pass?” she wonders. “I’m not necessarily gonna get clocked as what a stereotypical trans person looks like to conservative media, but that for me is always on my mind.”
The data itself speaks volumes: A recent study from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) tracked more than 193 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents through mid-November of 2022—three times more than the year before. A GLAAD report detailed 161 protests and threats targeting drag events from early 2022 through April 2023. And starting in January of this year, state legislators across the country have introduced 491 anti-LGBTQ+ bills, more than in the last four years combined. These laws affect all spheres of private and public life, from education to healthcare, with one of the most direct dangers to nightlife being the ban on public drag performances.
In March, Tennessee became the first state to pass a ban on “adult cabaret” shows in public or in the presence of minors, which then influenced Arkansas, Florida, and Montana to pass similar bills. Likeminded legislation is currently pending in Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, and a number of other states.
On June 2 came a small bit of hope: Tennessee’s drag ban was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge. Sasha Buchert, Director of the Non-Binary and Transgender Rights Project at Lambda Legal, says that the ruling in Tennessee is “powerfully written” and that courts in other states “will have to grapple with the force of its reasoning.” She adds, “The decision should serve as a warning to state legislatures that they will incur significant litigation costs should they decide to pursue similar measures.”
Whether lawmakers will heed that warning is yet to be seen. Touted by conservative politicians as an effort to update indecency and obscenity laws, these bans have raised concerns about how legislators may surveil and discipline queer nightlife moving forward. In light of these threats, and a wave of apparent hate crimes over the last few years, performers, party organizers, and venue owners are fighting to protect and preserve these beloved spaces.
In the wake of shootings at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub in 2016 and Colorado Springs’ Club Q in 2022, the risk of physical attacks is weighing heavy on queer party organizers. The co-founders of QDP (short for Queer Dance Party), one of Nashville’s biggest queer monthlies, have noticed growing concerns over safety, due in part to gun violence. Venues have asked QDP to hire police officers to be present during their events, a request they’ve declined given the discrimination and harassment that the LGBTQ+ community has historically faced from law enforcement. They recently decided to implement metal detector wands at their monthly party. “There’s been no threats on the party, but it’s responsible to add this extra layer of, ‘OK, we’re gonna be checking for guns,’” says QDP co-founder Laura Taylor, emphasizing the state’s open carry laws.
This past March, the DJ and producer Zaida Zane was getting ready to play an Atlanta club night called T4T, a term used to celebrate love and solidarity between trans folks. Zane was excited; she’d just released her first EP, Boy Eyes, on the celebrated British label Night Slugs, and had prepared a two-hour set. But hours before the event, the party’s organizers, Southern Fried Queer Pride, were forced to call it off, concerned for the safety of attendees. They’d received violent messages from Facebook groups associated with the Proud Boys and other far-right extremist organizations, who warned that they needed to “watch out” because the event was being shared in right-wing circles. “I’ve faced my fair share of bullshit, but I ain’t never had a party get canceled out of fear for safety,” Zane says.
Kenny Marks, a fixture of the St. Louis, Missouri DIY scene, is contending with similar issues for their soon-to-open space, Kenny’s Upstairs. “We’ve had meetings about what our security measures are going to be, which if I was cis—or if we weren’t a queer-owned spot—I don’t think we’d even be thinking about,” they say.
The business that previously occupied the space had a rich history of throwing queer house and drum’n’bass shows, and Marks believes theirs will be Missouri’s first trans-owned bar. Still, they have been hesitant to describe the bar as “trans-owned” in interviews with local publications, as a result of the hostile climate. (By the end of the 2023 legislative session in Missouri, the ACLU reported that they were tracking 48 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in the state.) “I’ve mentioned I’m queer, but I’ve never straight up said I’m trans,” Marks says. “And it feels really wrong, because I’m so open in my day-to-day life about it. Instead I’ll talk about bullshit like cocktails.”
This pressure to self-censor is very palpable to QDP founders as well. Taylor says they are not allowing that fear to dictate “how we’re throwing the party, how we’re making artwork for the party, how we’re promoting the party.” But it doesn’t help that the drag bans are purposely written with ambiguity in mind, which leaves them susceptible to subjective interpretations and bias. “These laws want us to be scared and police ourselves so that they don’t have to,” adds QDP member T. Minton.
In the text of the Kansas bill, for example, drag performances in public are outlawed under the pretense that they are “promoting obscenity to minors.” Under these bans, drag is prohibited in several contexts, including drag story hours at public libraries, drag queen appearances at all-ages events, and Pride parades. While definitions vary across states, many bills describe drag queens and kings as “male or female impersonators” or entertainers who “exhibit a gender identity that is different from the performer’s gender assigned at birth.”
This language has perplexed many in the community, who worry that gender non-conforming or trans folks may be harassed under such definitions. “The ambiguity in these bills is not a bug, it’s a feature,” says Andrew Ortiz, an attorney with the Transgender Law Center. “Proponents of these laws expect them to be used as justification to target and harass trans people, drag performers, anyone with insufficiently ‘normative’ gender expression, or even just queer people in general.”
Marks echoes the concern. “You could call me a ‘male impersonator’ because my gender markers are still female on all my licenses,” they say, frustrated. This confusing language has already had consequences: On June 1, a public library in Montana canceled a lecture by trans speaker Adria Jawort. County attorneys claimed that the talk, which was about queer Indigenous history and sexuality, would have violated the ban because minors may have been present.
While the threat of attacks looms across the country, in Orlando, Florida, the LGBTQ+ community is still struggling in the aftermath of the Pulse shooting seven years ago. Pulse is the second-deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, taking the lives of 49 clubgoers and wounding 53 more following a three-hour showdown between police and the killer. It is also the deadliest incident in the history of violence against LGBTQ+ people in the country, eclipsing the 1973 arson attack on New Orleans’ Up Stairs Lounge. “Pulse has definitely made everyone more wary of going out in Orlando,” says queer performance artist Nico Speed.
The city’s violence hasn’t stopped: In January, the windows were shot out of a local gay bar, which police characterized as a hate crime. Speed notes that many queer businesses have faced economic obstacles, too. The famed gay resort Parliament House, which hosted drag shows and performances for more than four decades, shuttered in 2020, while local club Stonewall closed last year. “We definitely lose a lot by losing these spaces,” says Speed, who came up in Orlando’s drag community after immigrating from Venezuela. “It gets harder with not knowing if you can even have a drag show at all in certain spaces now.”
To make matters more complicated, the Orlando city council approved two new nightlife security ordinances in March. The first is a six-month moratorium on opening new bars or clubs, with the potential to extend the prohibition for another six months. The second ordinance requires establishments to seek a permit to serve alcohol after midnight, to obtain extra law enforcement based on their maximum occupancy, and to implement new ID scanners. The cost of these measures may be prohibitively expensive for some locales—particularly queer-owned ones, which are typically focused on community building rather than profit. “The whole nightlife scene is gonna change downtown for sure,” says Speed.
The violence has even hit the presumed queer haven of Brooklyn. In April of last year, a man named John Lhota set the queer nightclub Rash on fire after pouring gasoline on the floor. Employees ran out of the building and sustained burns to their nose and lips; the blaze destroyed the bar. Though Rash was only open for five months, it had quickly become a queer nightlife haunt in the neighborhood of Bushwick. Jake Sillen, a co-founder of the club, says that she and her business partner Claire Bendiner scheduled programming at Rash seven nights a week, with hundreds of artists performing each month. “For a space that was a quarter of the size of some of the other clubs in the area, you got much more out of it,” she says.
Sillen was shocked by the support they received after the fire. “We got people from around the world reaching out to us, who had never been planning on going,” she says. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Sillen and Bendiner started a GoFundMe to cover employees’ paychecks and hospital bills, quickly raising $125,000.
Sillen and Bendiner are currently restoring Rash and plan to re-open this year. The physical damage was substantial, requiring the entire floor to be replaced, along with the electrical systems—repairs that were largely not covered by insurance. Sillen says they have gone into debt trying to re-open the space. Referencing the arson, she says, “Nothing like this could ever make us stop or be afraid to keep doing what we’re doing.”
Lhota was charged with arson soon after the attack. The incident is still under investigation as a hate crime, and has not gone to trial. “We haven’t really gotten too much as far as information or motive,” says Sillen. “But whenever something happens that causes a queer- and trans-forward community to halt and puts so many people out of work—it is an attack on our community, whether or not it’s intended to be.”
“Nightlife has always been really, really important to queer and trans culture,” she continues. “Beyond just being able to escape, it’s been an engine for our living wages for a long time.”
The impact of these threats isn’t just physical or economic—for many in the community, nightlife is about emotional survival. Zaida Zane calls it church. “My whole life has been built around the defiant hope that I have something better on the other side of all this,” she says. “I see that every time I play these parties. I see people catch a spirit when they’re on the floor. When I see them scream and clap and vogue during a set, that’s it.”
Zane’s performance roots come from the world of drag, but as a trans woman in a space typically dominated by cisgender gay men, she says that the “gender politics of the dressing room” left her disillusioned. She’s been DJing for five years now, and while she’s adamant that she doesn’t want to pigeonhole herself, she often plays parties in service of queer communities—especially trans women who do sex work. “I really hold onto them because I’ve seen a lot of ’em come and go over the years,” she says. “Nightlife has kept me alive all these years: When I think about how trans people only find solace at night for the most part, it makes sense for me to be here.”
Still, the canceled Southern Fried Queer Pride event left Zane questioning her approach to touring in more conservative areas. “Do I wanna go do shows in states where I know they have open carry?” she wonders.
In spite of the challenges, nightlife workers are firm about one thing: Queer and trans people will not be eradicated. “You’re not gonna stop girls from getting hormones. You’re not gonna stop them from putting a wig on, putting lashes on. You’re not gonna stop that,” says Zane. “You can’t get rid of all of us.” Kenny Marks, the St. Louis DIY linchpin, attributes their community with keeping them alive. “I was able to afford my top surgery because a show was put on,” they say. “That was all my community. I didn’t do a thing for it, besides saying, ‘I can’t afford top surgery, but I really need it.’ A couple of months later, I had $14,000.”
At its best, queer nightlife is about collectivity and the possibilities born out of conviviality. There’s a fundamental need for emotional affirmation that these spaces can provide—especially in a world that often tries to eliminate queer and trans people from public life. “The things that I’ve learned about how to be a stronger, self-loving human being, I learned from queer people,” says T. Minton of QDP. “And that gives me hope.”
While these spaces may not be utopian, their capacity to call people together is a powerful crucible for potential political mobilization. As the queer rave scholar McKenzie Wark said in a recent interview, “To get a few hundred people off their phones, being proximate and intimate with each other—that’s a useful capacity, even a kind of power.” In the flashes of euphoria we experience on the dancefloor, there’s a liberatory impulse—one to be harnessed, sharpened, and ushered into the real world.
