The Cultural Field of Queer Nightlife: Organizations, Artists, and Curatorial Activism

Abstract

Queer nightlife is recognized by humanists as an artistic project, while social scientists use it more often as a case to examine deviance and regulatory control, macro-structural inequities, substance use, and sexual violence. In this article, I invite researchers to prioritize culture and creativity in theoretical frameworks of nightlife. Based on 112 interviews about underground parties in London that have arisen as gay bars close, I argue that, more than just an art form, queer nightlife is a cultural field. The conceptual shift from form to field accents the organizational plurality of nightlife, relational artmaking practices, and the aesthetics of activism. While these themes have been described by others—and they are by no means exhaustive—I use them to explain broad associations between art and event-based nightlife scenes in the context of community-level disruptions.

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