The Art of KCF: Ritual Pride
As a baby queer Wednesday nights at Flannigan’s were my weekly ritual. Some weeks, we’d gather at someone’s house or apartment to pre-game and then we would make our way to the restaurant/turned club to dance the night away. Some weeks we’d start our night at Flanny's ordering bar food in the restaurant portion of the building and then when the music started blaring we’d stumble our way to the room with a stage, writhing our bodies around a pole that was structural support but we made it ours for that one night a week. Like many small college towns, Lawrence, Kansas didn’t have a dedicated LGBTQ bar at the time. And so, we found ourselves at the “Gay Night” celebration as our mid-week ritual. I suspect that the gays were relegated to Wednesday nights because in a college town a bar can make money any day of the week given the right marketing. We obviously weren’t going to get a prime weekend spot, and even Thursday, the weekend-eve, would mean too much queer for the patrons whose money mattered more. Folks would get kicked out all the time from fights that would break out, and I always wondered as security continued to increase their presence if that was necessary or if the same level of policing happened on the non-queer nights too. I was never at Flannigan’s unless it was Gay Night. But, I was at Flannigan’s religiously my senior year of college. Many of us accepted the way the owners targeted the community for economic pandering purposes in exchange for the opportunity to dance, make-out, and make a space ours for that fleeting weeknight. It was our home in so many ways.
Lawrence clubs were known in the early 2000s to kick out queer folks who were “making scenes” around town, and so we had our special places that accommodated queer activity better than others. Thursdays we often found ourselves gathered at Henry’s. And Saturday nights one might make their way to the Replay for more debauchery or The Bourgeois Pig for a quiet, upscale date with someone special. Not all queer folk of course, my first girlfriend wasn’t a big fan of the clubs. I would go find her where she liked to spend most of her nights, at Amy’s cafe where she’d be drinking coffee into the wee hours, reading books as she balanced a cigarette in-between her fingers, turning pages as she suggested music for the coffeeshop playlist that made her feel cool. The Sundays cover of Wild Horses would be wafting out with the smells of coffee grounds, while I was moving to Britney Spears’ Toxic down at Flanny’s. Two queer landscapes connected by the love of finding oneself in music. Both within the bounds of a small college town. Both filled with queer spirits who were intent on making a scene one way or another.
Flanny’s was where I learned I loved making out on the dance floor. It's where I grew crushes on townies from Topeka who were clearly unavailable. But, there is something so delicious being surrounded by people who are also dejected by their family members, or who can only find their true freedom on the dance floor. At Flanny’s when the lights were pulsing and the remixes were bouncing off the walls you could absolutely be who you wanted to be, not the version of you that sometimes creeped atop you like a mask, the you who had to pretend to be someone not quite yourself with your roommate, or your classmates, or your family. It was the place where we became family to each other. In 2016 following the worst mass shooting in US history that took place at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando so many writers and artists mourned the loss of life that took place in our safe(r) space. The intersection of queer and Latinx identities meeting in the space of LGBTQ dance floor calls to mind the ways Latinx family gatherings often include dancing in living rooms, on patios, wherever the music can play and the bodies can crowd. Given these traditions many of us have, finding that space for queer folks becomes sanctuary.
Protecting those who gather in those sacred spaces is what one might say kicked off the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City 51 years ago. I’m grateful that the narrative is shifting to ground the Black and Latinx transgender women who kicked off these riots that many in the queer community harken back to as our radical legacy. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are often credited as “throwing the first brick,” I’m excited to see Stormé DeLarverie’s name gaining more memory. There’s this excellent episode about her life on Code Switch (a replay of The Nod podcast episode They Don’t Say Our Names Enough); historians now point to the police brutality she endured as club bouncer as the true spark of the rebellions. Regardless of the specific details of the spark, police violence against the queer community is well documented and continuing. While we think about club spaces as only party sites, we all would do well to remember that LGBTQ club spaces are sacred. Further, for those of us who occupy queer racialized identities, we always recognize that at any point we may have to defend these spaces, our communities.
I live in the country now, in rural West-Central Minnesota far from the stages of my youth. The mostly gay clubs in the Twin Cities are 250 miles away. We’re also in a pandemic which means it is not safe to be in the spaces many call sancturary in large masses, sweating on each other, screaming to our favorite show tunes together, tipping drag queens with folded up money in our teeth, shaking hips to the top 40 remixes or twirling each other around easing between Salsa, Bachata, and Reggaeton on the dance floor. In “Stages,” Chapter Six of Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz writes about queer utopia as a practice of hope through examining this concept of stages through Kevin McCarty’s “representations of illuminated stages at gay bars” and independent punk clubs. Muñoz argues that McCarty’s photographs serve as a utopic possibility of hope for queer folks, in transgressing time through space these empty stages signal to me the history and memory of what has happened in these queer sites along with the magic of queer freedom possibilities. Even though, this year I’m not celebrating Pride on a dance floor with my heart beating to the rhythm of the bass and someone's tongue down my throat, I'm grateful I've had the chance because of the work of Black and Latinx queer and trans foremothers. This Pride I am reveling in the power of the riot and the reacquaintance of many who were once disconnected from the power of the possibility of radical queer revolt.
Questions to Ponder
What are you dancing towards?
What lessons might you take from Queer Pride to inform new paradigms?
How have stages functioned for your life to prepare you for your current you?
Have you thanked a queer person today?
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