Paying homage to the kin who shaped it, from the (dance) floor up
By Kinza Zafar
Nightlife has always been Queer, racialized and cripped—and maybe it’s time we stop pretending it’s anything else. For much of my life, I was forced to hide parts of myself, not truly understanding the depth of what it meant to radically accept my body and my being until I found the spaces where people celebrated each other without judgment, without fear, without punishment. I soon realized, between the bass lines and drum breaks, what liberation actually felt like: unrestrained, unashamed and full of possibility. After dark isn’t when Queerness emerges, but when it’s sustained.
Nightlife as we know and enjoy is now under threat, amid the ongoing war on Trans bodies that is seeking to erase the community to which we owe it. The pulsating beats that echo through literal dark alleyways and shatter metaphorical closets, the shared experiences that turn strangers into kin—these moments have always been more than a mere means of escape.
For decades, the dimly lit spaces we’ve flocked to after dark have served as incubators for community and resistance. In this issue, we challenge the superficial, the commercialized and the sanitized version of nightlife to bolster the stories that deserve their long-due flowers.
Within these pages, you’ll find stories centring harm reduction, Queerness, Transness, sexuality, sex work, disability and much more. These aren’t fringe elements—they are the very foundation of what nightlife has always been.
We have much to learn from the pedagogies of the dark.
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