#26 __ queerness

A glint of light from their belt caught by the spotlight; an undulating silhouette in the darkness; a freeze-frame of their body in motion between flashes of the strobes. Your eye instantly scans up and down, and you see the way their body responds to the music. Oh.

Not wanting to gawk, you cast you gaze to the floor, but you can feel the unique radiation from their direction. From the corner of your eye, it looks like — did they — glance at you? Hard to be sure, amidst the fog. You chance another look in their direction, and find yourself eye-to-eye. Oh my.

Mutual smiles erupt and you turn to face one another, openly admitting that you want to see and be seen. Maybe you dance together, maybe you just dance near one another. However you do it, you share your love of the music, multiplied by your appreciation of one another’s presence. Maybe it lasts for just a moment before you each return to your own world on the dance floor, or perhaps it’s the beginning of a connection that will blossom for months to come. There is no commitment or contract here; it will last as long as both of you agree that it should, and no longer.

The dance floor is a deeply sexual place; the history of nightlife is inextricable from the human instinct to explore, understand, and celebrate sexuality.

A pervasive myth about sexuality is that people innately know what they are and what they want from the beginning of their lives. While some people might have always gravitated one way or another, for many of us it requires some exploration and experimentation. It gets particularly complicated when we abandon the gender binary, which takes away from the norms and expectations baked into modern society. Out in the infinite wilderness of sexual mysteries, no one can tell you what you ought to be.

There are a few helpful conditions for embarking on this oft-times harrowing journey:

• A diverse group of open-minded and willing individuals. More people means more opportunities to learn what’s interesting and attractive, to identify patterns, to see what stays true over time. For some people, the right person to learn from or experiment with is one in ten thousand.
• An environment that supports escape. Something that feels sufficiently distant and different from the real world, where standard rules do not apply.
• A safe space devoid of judgment, harassment, or violence. Fear and anxiety are antithetical to the vulnerability and trust necessary to let go and be in the moment, to experience things as they are, rather than what you presuppose them to be.

As it happens, these are the same conditions for a great dance floor. The kind of vulnerability required for sexual experimentation is the same needed to lose your inhibitions, to allow the music to guide your body; to dance. This is part of why house and techno both originate from the gay scenes of Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

It’s not just the music that makes this possible. Darkness and fog — used to lure people onto an empty dance floor by making people feel less exposed — also creates the conditions of comfort for exploration. Fog softens faces and blurs silhouettes, hiding all the little blemishes that might count against us in the daylight. Darkness allows for anonymity and dissociation from the self. We become less critical of others, and of ourselves.

For myself, I never expected to discover my queerness simply by following the music I loved most. But over time, as I learned to give myself completely to the music, that came in tandem with a curiosity and openness to new connections, a new way of thinking about how I relate to others on and off the dance floor. Combined with the overwhelming sense of belonging I only felt among the company of the beautiful queerdos of the rave scene, the conclusion became inevitable.

Thank you so much for reading.

previously on outer ][ space:

• #25 __ movement
• #24 __ techno is more than this
• #23 __ the narrative