Glitter sparkles across people and surfaces, rainbow-colored acrylic nails snap in time to the afro-beats, and boisterous cheers egg on the occasional dance floor death drop: these are moments that make up QTPOC-centered spaces. From Los Angeles to Philly, NYC and Atlanta, queer community organizers, DJs, musicians and artists are producing monthly pop-up events that center queer and trans people of color. Attendees and organizers say these spaces are reimagining queer liberation through collective joy.
Events range from underground warehouse raves like Hood Rave in Los Angeles and sunlit day parties like Alphabet Soup’s Daisy Dykes in Washington, D.C. or Oakland’s Soulovely to potlucks featuring patio yoga like Southern Fried Queer Pride’s (SFQP) May offering in Atlanta. Regardless of format, the strappings of queer life and culture are evident everywhere you look — necklaces made of popper bottles, chest harnesses as fashion, flags, fans and cheeky political statements across nails, hats and tees.
The recognition of Black and brown queer experience is often apparent from event titles, like New York City’s notorious Papi Juice dance party and Los Angeles’ weekly Toxica event for sapphic Latine queers. Another element tying them together is that these parties 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 the crowd as keffiyehs and watermelon imagery can be spotted across the dance floor.)
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Queer dance parties also enable the ecstatic experience of group dance, which can be understood as its own form of activism. Scholars studying the global influx of such parties in the last decade, such as Maya Bhardwaj, call 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“ where healing conceptually flows through bodies that move in sync to music reflecting cultures as wide-ranging as those in attendance. Because, according to attendees and several of the parties’ marketing materials, another paradigm shift of the QTPOC party is its changing the tunes of gay nightlife from the pop/EDM/disco variety to a musical mix of hip hop, trap, house, reggaeton, soca, & Afro-beats. “Everybody is able to see themselves in the music and feel safe here,” says Terri Flamer. “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.”
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 intentionality brought to crafting these spaces makes the current slate of QTPOC parties feel fresh. The highly-publicized loss of lesbian bars across the country might be a prompting factor — that absence has largely left the often-exclusionary white male gay spaces as the only options for LGTBQ+ nightlife. To address a lack of gatherings that feel welcoming to QTPOC folks, the pop-up event has become a go-to for queer communities in many cities across the country.
Event organizers are often working with limited resources amid challenging financial situations. For example, a group of five queer BIPOC coordinators (Kike Ayorinde, Camryn Casey, Madi Dalton, dRi Guillén, and Leslie Tellería) produce community-funded Lavender Evolutions (LE) events in DC, meaning that the ticket sales for each event contribute to the next event. The organizers say 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 still struggle with the financial load of creating these pop-up spaces. The organizers say they are often unable to meet the true 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 legible 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.”
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, CA, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, GA to visualize 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, CA
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. Mello-Jahlil Travis, who uses they/them pronouns, emphasized their unique experience to the particular Soulovely they attended in May, saying, “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.”
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 says that it’s all ages and everybody comes out to be together, “white, black, Filipino, chinegro, negropino, everything. 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 and how, “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. I feel like it is not necessarily just a space to escape and get away from harms that come from a heteronormative society, but a space where people come together … to build each other up.”
Soulovely is always part of our story.
Chenelle Reed
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. Ahn Lee, however, feels safe at Soulovely parties because harassment in these spaces 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 says.
And for others, like Tiara and Chenelle Reed, Soulovely has become a character in their love story. Reflecting on the experience of meeting her now-fiancé 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.”
In an increasingly anti-gay and transphobic sociopolitical climate where LGBTQ+ lives are under constant attack, spaces like Soulovely and the many other queer-centered events provide both sustenance and safety — opportunities to recharge from the ongoing battles for human rights and racial justice.
ATLANTA, GA
Southern Fried Queer Pride builds QTPOC community through community education and embodied healing
Grassroots collective Southern Fried Queer Pride (SFQP) — now in its eleventh 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 40-60 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 a sober and masks-required event to further expand on their inclusiveness, which has become a hallmark of SFQP events. Wiseman (right), who has worked with SFQP as a community organizer for 6 years, says “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. 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 more inclusive and accessible for queer people of color. They release event tickets at different price tiers, with some lower-cost tickets allotted for BIPOC attendees.
Adu Ogbagiogias has witnessed a big shift in the racial makeup of Alphabet Soup parties after the organizer started this practice, which they see as a welcome recognition that “Black queers have a different experience than White queers.” For Ogbagiogias, this approach to ticketing shows they want POCs to come to the events. It says “we recognize that statistically, you make less money and also LGBTQ POC folks face more hurdles than our white queer counterparts. So it’s really awesome to see that a lot of more predominantly white spaces are making space for Black queers.”
Mackenzie Bolden says 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.”
Another queer party staple in DC is Lavender Evolutions, which hosted a day party 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. Lavender Evolutions is “a collective of QTBIPOC cultivating spaces for community, healing & celebration” where several coordinators work together to make the events possible, which is an admittedly big undertaking. “We do experience burnout but we rely heavily on the collective,” says the organizers. “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.”
Jojo Morinville, 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,” says Morinville.
“I truly believe that being whimsical will crush the patriarchy.”
Sgt. Die Wies
Performance studies scholar Nicole Prucha, who writes about her experience attending Los Angeles queer party Casual, believes these QTPOC pop-up spaces provide “a place of reckoning, exploring, colliding, creating, and imagining … where we, queers and trans cuties of color, co-conspire with one another to experience something other than the losses and longings of everyday life.” As a queer Arab person who has often struggled to find places where she feels truly seen, Prucha says parties like Hot Pot and its sister event HabibiPot fill a vital need for queer people of color, offering “a place of refuge and queer world-building” at a time when LGBTQ+ rights are under attack.
Sgt. Die Wies echoes that sentiment, pointing 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.
