Glitter sparkles across people and surfaces, rainbow-colored acrylic nails snap in time to the Afrobeat, and boisterous cheers egg on the occasional dance floor death drop. These are moments that make up spaces created for and by queer and trans people of color (QTPOC). From Los Angeles to Philadelphia, New York City to Atlanta, queer community organizers, DJs, musicians and artists are producing monthly pop-up events that attendees and organizers say are reimagining queer liberation through collective joy.
Events range from underground warehouse raves like Hood Rave in Los Angeles to sunlit day parties and potlucks featuring patio yoga. Regardless of format, the trappings of queer life and culture are evident everywhere you look — necklaces made of popper bottles; chest harnesses as fashion; flags; fans; cheeky political statements across nails, hats and tees. The recognition of Black and Brown queer experiences is often apparent in event titles, like New York City’s notorious Papi Juice dance party and Los Angeles’ weekly Toxica event for sapphic Latine queers.
These parties also frequently double as advocacy work, where they highlight mutual aid campaigns, promote queer causes and spread political awareness. In recent years, DJ shouts of “Free Palestine” are frequently met with affirmative cheers from dance floors dotted with keffiyehs and watermelon imagery. QTPOC parties are also changing the tunes of gay nightlife from the pop/EDM/disco variety to a musical mix of hip-hop, trap, house, reggaeton, soca and Afrobeats.
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“Everybody is able to see themselves in the music and feel safe here,” said Terri Flamer, who attended the Soulovely prom in Oakland, California, in May. “That’s probably the best thing about it, is you’re safe to be yourself, you can party, you meet people that don’t look like you and it’s all love.”
Queer dance parties also enable the ecstatic experience of group dance, which can be understood as its own form of activism. Maya Bhardwaj, a scholar studying the global influx of such parties in the last decade, called them queer utopias that center: “healing, mental health, ancestral faith practices, queer Black and Brown music and dance traditions, and spaces for activists and cultural workers to gather beyond mainstream bars and nightlife.” Mission statements from QTPOC dance party organizations often invoke terms like “affirmation,” “celebration” and “sustaining.“
While queer nightlife as a space of resistance isn’t new — it has its roots in AIDS activism of the ’80s — the intersectional community building and intention brought to crafting these spaces makes the current slate of QTPOC parties feel fresh. Often exclusionary White male gay spaces are frequently the only options for LGTBQ+ nightlife, and the pop-up event has become a go-to to address a lack of gatherings that feel welcoming to QTPOC folks.
There’s this sense of pain shared among QTBIPOC […] and therefore the joy that is experienced at these parties feels more necessary, more dire and more of a relief.”
Nicole Prucha
Pop-up spaces provide “a feeling of safety in being able to trust that the people who are there have experienced or understand what it is like to be othered, in a sense apart from our sexuality,” said performance studies scholar Nicole Prucha about her experience attending Los Angeles QTPOC parties. As a queer Arab person who has often struggled to find places where she feels truly seen, Prucha said parties like Casual, Hot Pot and its sister event HabibiPot fill a vital need for queer people of color: “A place of refuge and queer world-building” at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack.
Event organizers are often working with limited resources amid challenging financial situations. Five queer BIPOC coordinators — Kike Ayorinde, Camryn Casey, Madi Dalton, dRi Guillén and Leslie Tellería — produce community-funded Lavender Evolutions (LE) events in D.C., and the ticket sales for each event contribute to the next event. In a collective statement, the organizers shared that they are largely unpaid but, “We do give core organizers small payments to cover things like gas, food during events, and the many hours of labor leading up to an event.” The LE organizers acknowledge that “money is a huge barrier and we could always use more of it, but for us, it’s more important that we have events that are financially accessible.”
They keep ticket prices below $25 to achieve that aim but struggle with the financial load of creating these pop-up spaces. The organizers say they are often unable to meet the market rates of DJs and other collaborators due to tight budgets, while logistical support frequently comes from community members willing to volunteer their time to assist with check-in and ticketing. Another challenge they face is making their work in building queer community attractive to funders. “Grant makers don’t always understand the scope of the work that we do and why it’s so important, especially in this moment,” organizers said.
Despite the challenges, organizers said the work is worthwhile. “We do experience burnout but we rely heavily on the collective,” the organizers said. “More than anything, we prioritize people. For our core organizers, it’s a delicate balance because our time and energy is limited. We’re all balancing our full-time jobs, life and Lavender, but the love of community keeps us going.”
They need us, we need them. It’s not always about the bottom dollar, sometimes it’s about building community and the dollars come after.
Sgt. Die Wies
The 19th sent photographers to queer pop-up parties and events in Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta to show these spaces of radical queer joy in action and highlight the work that queer organizers are doing to build QTPOC community across the country.
OAKLAND
Soulovely has brought QTPOC-centered “cultural affairs” to the Bay Area for 14 years
Soulovely is a beloved and long-lasting pillar of queer life in the Bay Area. Since 2011, its monthly events have served as a safe haven for a predominantly BIPOC queer community to celebrate their identities and bodies through music and dance. “I actually just found out that a loved one passed. So coming here was kind of like in honor of them as well, because they love to dance, I love to dance, we met out dancing — it brings people together,” said Mello-Jahlil Travis, who attended Soulovely in May.
Attendees and organizers both are often quick to point out these spaces are not about excluding White, straight or otherwise non-QTPOC people. Rather they are about radical inclusion and belonging. Sgt. Die Wies, a burlesque producer and performer who attended the Soulovely queer prom in May, said that the party is all ages with a variety of ethnicities coming out to be together: “It’s beautiful to see because there’s so much division in the world right now.”
While all are welcome, Jaycee Chang especially appreciates the way Soulovely centers queer and trans people of color. “It is both a space of joy and being a community but also, it’s a relatively politicized space where they’re very intentional about the artists that they bring in, the DJs, the themes,” Chang said.
And that can even extend to their families.
“One of the DJs who helped host HabibiPot [in Los Angeles], her mom was there to watch her first DJ set and she played Arab classics that my own mom had introduced me to,” Prucha said. “They’re both Palestinian, and her mom was there, standing on the tables with the rest of us, and she was crying because she was so happy that her daughter was there and had found community.”
These spaces also provide opportunities for LGBTQ+ people to meet each other beyond dating apps. A 2020 Pew Research Center study reported that lesbian, gay and bisexual people were both more likely to use online dating and more likely to experience harassment through dating apps than their straight counterparts.
Soulovely is always part of our story.”
Chenelle Reed
Ahn Lee feels safe at Soulovely parties because harassment is far less likely. “I feel like no one’s gonna try to come at me in a way that doesn’t feel comfortable,” Lee said.
And for others, like Tiara Reed and Chenelle Reed, Soulovely has become a character in their love story. Reflecting on the experience of meeting her now-fiancée, Tiara, at Soulovely and their future together, Chenelle said, “It’s going to be absolutely beautiful, because we have places like this … where you can connect and learn that anything is possible, family in all the ways is possible.”
ATLANTA
Southern Fried Queer Pride builds QTPOC community through education and embodied healing
Grassroots collective Southern Fried Queer Pride (SFQP) — now in its 11th year — focuses its events toward “artivism” with a stated mission to fight narratives that confine Southern LGTBQ+ people to “stigma, statistics and struggle” instead aiming to uplift an “honest narrative of resilience, rich history and vibrance.” SFQP offers year-round programming, typically providing between 40 to 60 events that feature community education — like the upcoming trans health care workshop — as well as gallery shows, marches and dance parties, such as its June trans cabaret and open mic.
Community organizer Maya Wiseman said the May 18 SFQP Community Potluck was an alcohol-free and masks-required event to further expand on their inclusiveness, which has become a hallmark of SFQP events. “Queer folks have been marginalized throughout time, but often queer folks, whether they know it or not, naturally end up creating safe spaces for everyone,” said Wiseman, who has worked with SFQP as a community organizer for six years. “We try to create spaces that say ‘come as you are,’ because we’re not having this at a club. If you want to come here in pajamas, in a tank top and shorts, it’s fine with us.”
Atlanta’s queer community is very easy to navigate, and SFQP is a big reason why.”
Magdalena
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Lavender Evolutions and Alphabet Soup make space for QTPOC joy at summer day parties
While not explicitly centering QTPOC, Alphabet Soup events, like the recent Daisy Dykes pool party, are “sapphic-focused” and find other ways to make their events inclusive and accessible for queer people of color. Tickets are available at different price tiers, with some lower-cost tickets allotted for BIPOC attendees.
Adu Ogbagiorgis has witnessed a big shift in the racial makeup of Alphabet Soup parties after the organizer started this pricing practice, which they see as a welcome recognition that “Black queers have a different experience than White queers.” For Ogbagiorgis, this approach to ticketing shows they want people of color to come to the events. “So it’s really awesome to see that a lot of more predominantly White spaces are making space for Black queers,” they said.
Mackenzie Bolden said they can be themselves at Alphabet Soup events. “I feel like I can just embrace my skin, embrace my personality, embrace my queerness, embrace everything that is me. And that’s something I treasure and will never take for granted because of how often I don’t feel that way.”
Lavender Evolutions hosted a daytime beer garden pop-up called SWEAT on June 8 that featured a wet T-shirt contest, a water balloon toss and little cabanas filled with the sounds of multiple kikis.
Jojo Morinvil, who attended the SWEAT party, deeply values the way Lavender Evolutions has been intentional in their creation of space for queer BIPOC people to enjoy themselves. “They started out doing nature walks and book [clubs], then, as they grew, they really created safer spaces for folks to socialize, to get to know people and learn queer history, [along with] events where you can dance and party with your friends,” Morinvil said.
I truly believe that being whimsical will crush the patriarchy.”
Sgt. Die Wies
Sgt. Die Wies points to the unabashed vibrance, love and joy experienced at parties like Soulovely as “things (that) are going to just crush the darkness. We’ve survived harder times than this. We’ve been bullied before. They ain’t got shit on us. There’s too many of us. There’s too much light and too much love and too much joy. We’ll be okay.”
Mariah Miranda, Piera Moore and Manuel Orbegozo contributed reporting.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled Adu Ogbagiorgis and Jojo Morinvil's last names.
