The New York Healing Circle (NYHC) practiced touch as a form of mutual aid during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The NYHC’s work challenged fear of the ill body while asserting a view toward flourishing despite illness. Participants asserted a practice of truly seeing each other—a practice of “activist intimacies” centered in care and acceptance (but not passivity) rather than in fixing, hiding, or avoiding.
Queer nightlife is all the rage. Over the past several years there has been a surge of creative practice, performance, music, media, contemporary art, and scholarship focused on the past, present, and future of queer dancefloors. This TDR Consortium issue brings together an intergenerational group of queer artists and scholars who are thinking about the rhythms, textures, and analog intimacies of queer nightlife.
Ranging across queer sexual politics, clinical psychoanalysis, and political solidarity, this conversation investigates the opportunities and vulnerabilities that arise related to risk. What possibilities open when safety is not the goal, but solidarity? An ethical relationship of responsibility rooted in “mutual entanglement” and vulnerability can accommodate the surprising, enigmatic, and unruly nature of sexuality, in ways that an affirmative consent model cannot.
Managing queer venues requires plunging into flows of effluence removal and taking care of drinks, patrons, money, performers, and queer effervescence. A DIY queer nightlife methodology embraces gossip, embodied knowledge, and mess, examining shocks, blocks, and leaks as both material and metaphorical dynamics to trace how use and misuse intertwine in these spaces.
Honcho (George d’Adhemar, Aaron Clark, Michael Moraine, and Clark Price), a staple of the queer dance music underground, highlights the centrality of collaboration and connection to queer nightlife. For Honcho, queer nightlife is not simply flashing lights and the faint smell of poppers, but an opportunity to engage queer history. The most important aspect of queer nightlife, what keeps people coming back for more, might not be the spectacle and dancing bodies, but the many kinds of long lasting, queer intimacies that can unfold on, through, and beyond the dancefloor.
