On a sandy beach, I sit and ponder my transfer to Tallahassee, Florida, sorting through my lamentation for queer community and gatherings while flipping through the pages of Queer Nightlife, an anthology edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera. Having just moved for a job, I consider how the experience of biweekly meet ups with my hermanes, or queer sisters, brothers, and folx, has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and relocation to an area without many LGBTQI+ events or spaces, and where saying “gay” is met with hateful legislation. My body, amid the Floridian mix of humidity and sun, yearns for a sweaty get down at places like Cobra, Tempo, and the New Jalisco Bar back in Los Angeles, California, all Black and Brown gay nightclubs that experienced closure during the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, and spaces now over two thousand miles from me. Diving into the book, I reflect upon and make sense of my queer clubbing experiences and longings, sweatily grooving with the now-damp pages of the book as the editors and authors journey me through the complicated layers that queer nightlife, crisis, and togetherness entail.

Queer Nightlife is divided into an introduction and four sections: “Before,” “Inside,” “Show,” and “After,” segments named for the different intervals that are constructed and influenced by queer intimacy after dark. In citing the pre, during, and post sessions of queer nightlife, the authors remind us that queer beings and belongings are at play, in experimentation, and in search of safety well beyond the confines of nighttime clubs, parties, gatherings, and rituals. So often, queer nightlife is burdened by a catchall conceptualization that limits it to “safe LGBTQI+ spaces” that run from 10:00 p.m. to dusk. And while there is much truth to the club as “safe space,” a term that sexuality studies scholar Moira Kenney argues originates back to the queer liberation movement and development of gay nightclubs in the 1960s (Reference Kenney2001), the book editors and writers point out what we miss when we do not veer outside of this generalization. There are unique crevices, nuances, and moments catalyzed and shaped by racial, sexual, and sociopolitical factors that are often overlooked when we forget about the inequities and intricacies of the before, during, and after of queer gatherings. With this in mind, the editors of the volume visibilize the multiplicity of queer nightlife primarily by expanding the terrain of queer(ed) togetherness beyond the US-centric, white, cisgender gay male “safe” club site. Instead, Adeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera ground the book's framework in a “queer of color criticism,” paying homage to longstanding queer theory while inviting the chapters’ authors to elucidate trans and queer BIPOC experiences in ways that lay new foundations for queer perspectives and moments in nightlife.

Queer Nightlife offers up the millisecond-by-millisecond truth of queer constructions, from the life embedded in the sparkly rhinestone pumps a drag queen wears to her gig, to the aching feet that pulse throughout the day after the show is done and the heels come off. The authors highlight the porosity of queer exuberance after dark, engaging a format that richly breathes life into a plethora of queer spatial nooks and crannies that also go beyond commercial club venues and gayborhoods into what the book's editors contextualize as “capacious geographies” (6). These geographies span from our own bedrooms, where we choose outfits for a night out, to the connections queer people make performing and viewing online and off-line. From these multiple sites, we are invited to think through the spatiotemporality of queerness as an experience rooted in various forms of affective mobilities, activities, destinations, and aimless wanderings.

Some of the most poignant theorizations in Queer Nightlife emerge from the simultaneity that the pages reveal, allowing us to consider how queer sociality—and most importantly the Brown and Black queer sociality the book centers—is layered with and immersed in entangled sites of safety, violence, sparkle, and pain. The desire to go out finds contestation with the architectural mappings of nightclubs, dress code regulations, and the lamentable loss of LGBTQI+ space due to processes like gentrification. The book's organization is structured to highlight these nuances and makes a palpable connection between potentiality, presence, problematics, and post-futures.

In “Before,” we prep, PrEP, conjure, and remember. The authors in this section address the inextricably linked layers found in confronting sets of questions as we make choices to gather after the sun goes down. Palpable within the first few pages is the idea that we remember what came previously, in terms of lineage, genealogy, bodies, rites/rights, and reminders that there is always a before to the ongoing spillage of queer nightlife. “Before” contextualizes the preparation for queer performance: how LGBTQI+ peoples make choices to present and how these selections carry vestiges that are informed by those who came before us. Martin F. Manalansan IV's “That Magical Touch: Migrant Nocturnal Stories in Queer Jackson Heights” situates a knowing that anticipation for what is to come is often framed by what has already happened, citing the height of the AIDS pandemic as lessons for queer futures and unapologetically queer aesthetics. Yet, as Caleb Luna theorizes in “Jockstraps and Crop Tops,” the before is also framed by something like the potentiality that style and taste afford. And while these are stances we all negotiate dissonantly, Luna exposes how these choices become especially powerful aesthetics when fat femmes find divinity in reclaiming their bodies by selecting latex and mesh attire that vehemently stagnate the white supremacist and heteropatriarchal demands that permeate nightlife (40). The scholars of “Before” also guide us to think through the temporality of instances leading up to the night's main events. Emily R. Brock's “… waiting …,” for instance, proposes waiting as an appreciation for queered interruption that asks us to behave differently in the anticipation of Black and Brown futurities (50).

Next we dive into “Inside,” in which authors elucidate a nuclear hub for queer connections and ask readers to consider the constructs of spaces and community within LGBTQI+ centers. Authors illuminate clubs, parties, bodies, movements, and what we learn inside them. The dark and dimly lit spaces of places like La Hueca (113), La Gozadera (121), and Sisters Dance Bar (130) teach us about the multisensorial experience of being queer and embracing our queer identities, making sense of grief, enacting transgender dominions of existence and reclaimed labor practices, queer Black radical existence, and most importantly, joy or pleasure as affective methodologies necessary for queer worldmaking. Sabia McCoy-Torres's “Queering Dancehall in the Diaspora” teaches us about how pleasure and intimacy are enabled by queer bodies that strategically negotiate and perform wining as a way to redirect eroticism and the male gaze in order to embrace alternative femininities (108). New forms of fulfillment are enacted by sex workers who reframe relationships to their forms of labor, spiritually shifting their affective connections to work in ways that reclaim the space around them in Andrea Bolivar's “I Came Here to Work” (116). And still, as the heart of the book nudges us to embody, practice, and theorize, queer parties and clubs as “safe spaces” and “homes” are not without complications. Marginalized queer bodies must negotiate harm, binaries, and dangerous ambivalence that threaten the ways in which we remember our connections to the inside and the presentations, spectacles, and rituals that take place throughout the night.

The pages of “Show” beckon me to remember my own affiliations to queer performance. I am immediately pulled into the sensation of checking my pockets for singles, readying my bills for an array of performances that range from drag queens cleverly lip syncing at bars to queer vaqueros/as/es (cowboys) tenderly cradling each other under hovering disco balls. Queer nightlife performances range from club venues to the proscenium stage, where queer bodies can engage in processes for transformation and transitions, and where they navigate practices of witnessing. This section astutely situates how aspects of race, sex, and gender find moments of contention with the dominant, straight and/or white gaze but also how queer performances can resist through transformations and metamorphic visualizations, shows, and fashion. In “Show” we encounter Matthew Leslie Santana's exploration of transformista (drag) performances that demand revolutionary visions for gender performance and presentation; Noé López's work on muxe, third gender Zapotec performances in “Muxes Have Crossed the Border;” Enzo E. Vasquez Toral's “From the Club to the Fiesta,” in which we are beckoned to dance in ways that gestures and nurtures futurity; and Gregory Mitchell's examination of puta street fashion that expands the terrain of their sociality by reminding us that catwalks and clothes are aesthetics of/for queer(ed) belonging in “From Streetwalking to the Catwalk” (196). “Show” teaches us that queer spectacles are more than what we go out to see, asking us to reflect on how we want to see and be seen.

Finally, after a night of anticipating, waiting, framing, and shaking, we open the door to “After.” We walk into the world with the residual lessons and effects from after-hours worldmaking, meditating about how we preserve them when the only presence left of our night are memories used for re-membering. “After” provokes thought around the lingering effects of sites and situations now gone, but that had previously held queer community and life. In particular, we confront the effects of gentrification on queer Black and Brown communities. Juana Maria Rodriguez's examination of Xandra Ibarra's “The Hookup/Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour” frames how queer bodies and performance catalyze a call to what came before, engaging pleasure as political mourning and as a practice for re-inscription into spaces lost to capitalist greed. DJ Sedrick's words in E. Patrick Johnson's “Remember the Time: Black Queer Nightlife in the South” ring true in their forewarning: “Look around you. Somebody that was here last year ain't here tonight” (232). These words evoke the memories of spaces and bodies invisibilized, departed, and removed, prompting us to think through connections we have lost to illness, to hate crimes, and to gentrification, and how Black and Brown folx carry on through erasure. Perhaps, as the final pages of the book point out in Jih-Fei Cheng's “Keeping It on the Download,” this answer lies in the intangible, in the virtual and affective landscapes of queer belonging, and how queer subjects can live on through queer interfacing.

Ultimately, Adeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera's anthology asks us to ponder our own messy entanglement in queer nightlife: Who are we and how do we perform at every stage of the night? How can we more carefully commingle? What privileges, powers, and lineages do we hold? How do we activate queerness, and what role does performance and the body play in these processes as we make our way through the “not yet” (as noted by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity) of utopic queer belonging?

The pages of the book, rumpled by the wind, tickle my fingers as the sun sets. I think through my own “after,” sorting through recollections from my own queer congregations. The taste of tequila, glitter, and sweat are on the tip of my tongue. The night is beginning. Perhaps, I'll go infiltrate space at the local drag show tonight, 926 Bar & Grill's “Impossibili-TEA,” enacting a new “before” to reclaim the things lost in the “after.”