No One Has Swagger Like Kelly Lovemonster
“No one on the corner has swagger like us,” M.I.A. rapped on her runaway radio hit “Paper Planes” in 2007. When you step into Swagger Like Us, Kelly Dezart Smith’s queer hip-hop dance party, a crowd of people possessing similar aplomb surrounds you.
Before trailing off about how we’re both such devoted M.I.A. fans, we discussed how the name choice came to mean so much to the devoted fans of his parties at El Rio and Oasis.
“The name resonates on so many levels; I love the word swagger,” Smith said. “It represents this idea of being cool and confident that I think a lot of people that come to Swagger embody. When my business partner and I were throwing around concept names, we researched swagger’s history and the acronym SWAG stood for Secretly We Are Gay. And I really loved that. It fit.”
Swagger Like Us will turn four in July. In just a few years it went from a local party to a themed community event thrown around the world.
“When I started Swagger, I wasn’t thinking that I’d be contributing to conversations about QPOCs (queer people of color) in San Francisco,” Smith said. “I just wanted to have a space. When I first moved here people kept saying there weren’t any people of color, but that wasn’t true. There just weren’t spaces for people of color to congregate. So I took that idea and ran with it.”
“So this really innocent party started catching the attention of local QPOCs and they would come up to me and say, ‘Thanks for throwing this. I really like what you’re doing here. You’ve created a space for us!’ But I didn’t know what I was doing at first for others!”
It’s rare when you get to find a space where everyone can let their guard down and feel really comfortable. Swagger Like Us not only represents a sound that doesn’t exist here, but a community celebrating their collective diversity.
“There wasn’t a lot of spaces for QPOCs in the Bay Area to see reflections of ourselves, but we’ve all found it at Swagger,” Smith said. “We have incredible QPOC performance artists and musicians perform here as well, and it’s not just during February for Black History Month to fill a quota.”
In earlier years, Swagger was thrown in the Castro, but the vibe simply wasn’t a good fit.
“That’s not to say that I wasn’t grateful to have had the opportunities or that our parties weren’t successful in the Castro, but we were so popular that sometimes our regular attendees couldn’t get through the door,” Smith said. “When I looked around at the people, it wasn’t the Swagger crowd that I was used to seeing. I don’t think it was a bad thing, but I didn’t want to lose track of what this party was about.”
“I was creating a space for a very particular group of people, and I wanted to make sure that they still had space. I still want to set a precedent that this party was for queer people of color. That’s when it was born.”
For more information, visit: http://www.swaggersf.com/
Note: This article originally appeared on Ripple.co, which has been acquired and now appears on Hoodline.
