Queer theory scholars write about nighlife, dancing, and public sex to theorize on intimacy and queer worldmaking.
“Theatre Journals: Dance Liberation,” David Roman (2003)
Mainly I went to dance and to be part of the sense of queer culture that the space enacted. Dance became the entry point to other forms of queer connection: friendship, sex, employment. But it also was a means in itself, a way for me to begin choreographing my own movements through the world as an openly gay man. I loved dancing because it gave me a way to be in my body and to be around other gay people in a way that was very new for me.
“The Land of Somewhere Else: Refiguring James Brown in Seventies Disco,” by Alice Echols (2008)
In this glitter-ball universe, gay men and the “ladies,” either as vocalists or as much-sought-after objects of desire, held sway against an aural backdrop that featured that relentless four-on-the floor THUMP. What could any of this have to do with the heteronormative macho funk of James Brown, Mr. “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine.
“Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories,” by José Esteban Muñoz (1996)
The works I have surveyed in this article, taken side by side, tell us a story about the primary linkage between queer desire and queer politics. Taken further, this work allows the spectator to understand her or his desire for politics alongside the politics of desire. The lens of these remembrances and the hazy mirages they produce not only allow us to imagine utopia, but, more importantly, whet our appetite for it.
Of course the nightclub is not always an idyllic space and can quickly turn to violence, as we too well know. These short essays are part of an issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking organized around the Pulse nightclub shooting in June 2016:
“The Sound of Everynight Life,” by Julia Steinmetz
The dance hall has always been a site of resistance forged through sweat, bodies, and souls entangled for the night by a shared rhythm, glistening in the temporary suspension of the everyday.
“Locked Eyes,” by Ramzi Fawaz
In queer studies classrooms, we discuss the most visceral and intimate aspects of lived experience from sex and sexuality, to pleasure and desire, to family and alternative kinship—we make these realms public, objects of collective concern, so that our students can begin to imagine that a classroom might not be so far from a dance floor, a consciousness-raising session, a political planning meeting, even perhaps an intellectual orgy.
