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From Here Forward shares stories and ideas about amazing things UBC and its alumni are doing around the world. It covers people and places, truths, science, art, and accomplishments with the view that sharing better inspires better. Join hosts Carol Eugene Park and Jeevan Sangha, both UBC grads, in exploring solutions for the negative stuff out there — focussing on the good for a change, from here forward.
[00:00:00] Carol Eugene Park: Hello, friendly alumni. Welcome back to From Here Forward, your favorite UBC Podcast Network podcast. Happy Vancouver Pride to Jeevan and all of our Vancouver listeners and me. The From Here Forward team is sending all the love to you this wonderful time, and I gotta say that I love Pride being staggered between June and August across the country because that means that I get to bear witness to love, always. Yay.
[00:00:26] Jeevan Singha: Aww, that was so cute. Carol being vulnerable in the chat. I agree. The more time celebrating Pride, the better. Speaking of, today we're sharing a fascinating conversation that we had with Dr. Amin Ghaziani who is a professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at UBC. He's also co editor of Context Magazine, the public facing periodical of the American Sociological Association.
[00:00:51] Carol Eugene Park: His expertise is in urban sexualities, and his most recent research endeavors led to a book that was published earlier this year. It's titled Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution, and today's conversation is all about that. So without wasting any more time, let's get lit!
[00:01:10] There's been, over the last few years, there's been a lot of talk about the decline of gay bars, so to speak. So in relation to the research of your latest book, what can you tell us about that idea?
[00:01:20] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: It's a great question. In order to address it, maybe we can start with a single sentence. The gay bar is in trouble. When I first read it, it felt to me like the sentence stumbled off the pages of the Guardian, as if in a drunken lament. A dour tone is widespread these days, in fact, as the media catches on to a global problem. While the Washington Post is almost blasé, noting that the number of gay bars has simply, quote, dwindled, the Economist, writing about London, New York and Washington, D.C. sees them as being under threat. Bloomberg hits harder, characterizing gay bars as an endangered species, while the Boston Review goes all the way in declaring the death of the gay bar. Ouch.
[00:02:06] Now, for my part, I noticed this crush of closure coverage around the time I moved to London. It was January, 2018. For a sabbatical, a friend invited me to join him at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he was a member of the faculty. And it was only after I arrived that I plugged into a conversation that it felt to me like everyone was having at that time. In the first two decades of the 2000s, a number of LGBTQ night time venues in London, a global capital of finance and culture, declined by fifty-eight percent, falling in number from one hundred and twenty-five to just fifty-three remaining venues.
[00:02:45] The two most common explanations for the closure of gay bars are both economic, and they include redevelopment, which is to say that the land is more valuable than the business. We need to keep in mind that gay bars are essentially small businesses. And so a developer comes along, buys the business, raises it, and then puts up something else in its place, usually like luxury condos or chain retail.
[00:03:09] A second common explanation is failed lease negotiations due to excessively steep rent hikes. Now an audit by the mayor's office around this time found that forty-four percent of all nightclubs and twenty-five percent of all pubs in the capital had also closed. And so what this teaches us is that all nighttime venues are struggling, but the impact on queer spaces is more dire.
[00:03:35] It was also around this time that Samuel Dueck, who is an architect turned filmmaker, coined the term closure epidemic to describe the scene sweeping London, a bit like Clubsterben, which translates to club death or a club that dies, in Berlin in similar closures in cities around the world. Our neighbors to the south and the US for instance, uh, they witnessed a forty-one percent decline of gay bars between 2002 and 2019, which is roughly the same window of time as the British study.
[00:04:08] So it's a lot of numbers floating around here in the public discourse or in the public conversation. And there's a journalist by the name of Richard Morgan. He wrote a piece for Bloomberg in which he offers perspective for all of these headlines and all of these statistics. In 1976, he tells us there were two thousand five hundred gay bars in just the United States. Today, there are fewer than fourteen hundred worldwide.
[00:04:38] Jeevan Singha: I'm curious as well about, you know, you talk about going to London. When you went there and explored the sort of queer nightlife in London, was there anything that surprised you or stuck out to you in that experience?
[00:04:51] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's such an important thing to ask about surprises in the writing of the research, since we cannot plan everything that we think we might like to understand over the course of its development.
[00:05:04] So one of the things that really surprised me in this book was how little presence or relevance straight people had in the story. This is quite unlike my prior book in which straight people had a major place in the narrative. And that book was called There Goes the Gayborhood, and Princeton University Press also published that book. Understand club nights, which are the underground parties that are the stars of the, of my new book. We need to think about them relative, not to straight people, but to other LGBTQ people. And this was an incredibly generative surprise that I discovered in the course of writing this book. So let me explain.
[00:05:44] Historically, gay bars have catered to cis White gay men. This is not to say that everyone else has been actively or explicitly excluded, but rather that cis White gay men have dominated for a long time in terms of the sheer number of spaces and places they have available to them, to the voices we hear and the images we see during annual Pride celebrations.
[00:06:10] Everyone else feels like a tiny minority in an already marginalized community, and they are hungry to connect in other kinds of spaces. And for good reason, I might add. One study found that eighty percent of queer Black respondents, seventy-nine percent of queer Asian respondents, and seventy-five percent of queer South Asian respondents reported experiencing racial bias from within LGBTQ communities.
[00:06:44] So here's one way to think about those numbers. Gay bars provide a refuge from the wider heteronormative and homophobic world. Today, there are people who need a refuge from the refuge. And this was a mind expanding surprise that ended up becoming a really central part of the story that I'm trying to tell in this book.
[00:07:05] Carol Eugene Park: So in recent times, how has queer nightlife changed or evolved?
[00:07:10] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: I think that queer nightlife is expanding from fixed and emplaced bars, to episodic and event based scenes, like club nights, which is what they're known as in London, or pop up parties, as we see in Vancouver and other major cities around the world.
[00:07:27] And I think that these parties are actually re centering nightlife, what it looks like. What it feels like, and who is experiencing a sense of belonging in these places. In fact, I heard that word, re center, a lot when I was doing my research, but it seems like an impossible argument to make. It's like saying that club nights are now the center of nightlife as a whole.
[00:07:47] I can't substantiate that claim, but even so, how much do organizers care about the center of nightlife? Club nights seem powerful to me because they proudly reclaim the margins. They, they have a feeling of being much more experimental than anything we would call the center. And so reorientation strikes me as a more appropriate way of thinking about how nightlife is changing because it involves an active search and an active struggle to figure out where you are located in a disrupted environment.
[00:08:20] Parties like club nights enable queer, trans, and BIPOC communities to find a place, not at the center, but their centers, plural, places of their own choosing. Nightlife is a cultural field, and as such, it can have many, multiple centers, and this is an important way in which I think nightlife is changing.
[00:08:44] Jeevan Singha: I think, um, something that came up in some of your materials was Ricecake. I went to Ricecake's night a few years ago. Like, was that just a special experience. Something about that feeling of being there. And so I'm, I am really curious. You mentioned kind of these, like, hierarchies of desirability as well in queer communities. And levels of belonging and how to foster spaces of belonging.
[00:09:06] So what role do you think these club nights have in fostering spaces of belonging in an intersectional way for queer folks? You kind of did touch on this already, but I'm curious to hear more of your thoughts.
[00:09:16] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: Absolutely. That's a great question. It's a very important question. Intentional inclusion and intersectional queerness are two key qualities of club nights and pop up parties like Ricecake. In terms of the first, intentional inclusion. Club nights are not exclusive, but they are not for everyone. They are powered by marginalized communities who have struggled to feel like they belong in places like gay bars. This gives them an underground quality. Both material, in that they're located downstairs in a basement somewhere, or off in the spatial margins of a city, and also metaphorical, in that they feel non normative and experimental.
[00:09:59] A related idea, as I mentioned, is intersectional queerness. Club nights prioritize the bodies of people who don't normally feel like they can go to a public space and be centered. I have in mind groups like racialized, trans plus, gender queer, non binary individuals. It was in London that I, personally, found my way to the center of a dance floor that centered me in return. And it was one of the most powerful experiences of belonging that I have ever experienced.
[00:10:33] Carol Eugene Park: So a big theme throughout your works is the prioritization of joy. And depending on who you are, some people might have a more pessimistic view of that. So why was it important for you to take the approach that you did in your own research?
[00:10:49] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: I think this is a lovely question, and it's vital for us to create spaces where we can have serious conversations about joy. Joy is something that we need to contend with in a much more serious manner rather than dismissing it as something that's hedonistic.
[00:11:07] Personally, I have lost count of the number of studies that I have read in my home discipline of sociology about suffering and social problems. About bigotry and bias, about discrimination and inequality. All of those arguments are accurate and absolutely essential for guiding us toward a more just world.
[00:11:29] And yet, having fun and feeling joy is what sustains us as we grapple with the tough stuff. Stef Shuster and Laurel Westbrook, both of whom are sociologists, call this a joy deficit. When we singularly focus on what makes life miserable, all the pain and the problems, then the things that make it pleasurable vanish from view.
[00:11:56] Put differently, negative experiences are only part of the picture. Never its whole. This is why I think we need to insist on joy. Not as naively disconnected from a world in which there is suffering, but as a collective salve to that suffering. Joy is life enhancing and deeply, deeply political. When we go out and have fun with our friends, really important things are happening.
[00:12:20] Those moments create a shared emotional energy that promotes group pride and communal attachments. Having fun and feeling joy brings us closer together. And as it does, we model positive relationships with each other. Joy can also bloom into a broader politics that can move us beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.
[00:12:43] That last phrase that I just recited, beyond romances of the negative, and toiling in the present, I borrow from a performance theorist, José Esteban Muñoz. That's how Muñoz describes it. We must dream, he says, and enact new and better pleasures. Nightlife is where this happens.
[00:13:05] Jeevan Singha: I, I love what you just said. Joy is deeply political. I love that. I think that that's not a context that we're provided a lot of the times, particularly in moments of, you know, political resistance and activism and organizing and the role of joy often gets sidelined. So thank you so much. That was beautiful. I am curious, personal question, you know, as someone who's been studying queer nightlife. What, in your opinion, is a hidden gem in Vancouver's queer nightlife scene? Like, this is a UBC alumni podcast, so tell the UBC alumni where to go.
[00:13:41] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: I'm the party guide. I don't want to play favorites. And there are many hidden gems, actually, in Vancouver, and part of the fun is finding them. But still, I'm happy to promote one nightlife collective in Vancouver that you've already mentioned in our conversation, and that's Ricecake. Ricecake celebrates their queer Asian and Pacific Islander experience, and they have featured more than a hundred queer Asian artists from DJs to dancers and drag performers. That same energy is happening with QNA in LA, New Ho Queen in Toronto, Bubble_T in New York City, and Club Koi in Miami.
[00:14:22] Ricecake also reminds me of a party that I just attended last weekend in New York. The party was called Color Me Queer, and it was organized by Salga, which is a queer desi group. And that party, in turn, reminded me of Hungama in London to bring the conversation back full circle to the city that inspired my book.
[00:14:42] Hungama is an Urdu word that loosely translates to a celebratory chaos or commotion. It was my first ever queer Bollywood party, and it was the place that I described earlier in our conversation as gifting me with the experience of directing me to the center of a dance floor that centered me in return.
[00:15:03] So Ricecake, I think, provides a similar powerful experience for the queer Asian and Pacific Islander community in Vancouver. It is absolutely a gem, and I would, uh, encourage listeners to be mindful about the group, and I say mindful deliberately, rather than go and attend specifically, because we need to think about our place in the larger field of nightlife. And just because an event exists, doesn't mean that all of us should flock to these events any more than the organizers want everyone to attend these events. And so, you know, club nights are not exclusive, but that doesn't mean they're for everyone.
[00:15:45] There are other ways of supporting these kinds of underground scenes. As we recognize that there are groups of people who need a refuge from the refuge and are looking for places where they themselves can finally be centered because it's an experience that many segments within LGBTQ communities have not had. And I absolutely applaud Ricecake for creating that experience, for creating multiple centers of intentional inclusion and intersectional queerness for communities here in Vancouver.
[00:16:15] Carol Eugene Park: I don't know where this is going to go, because this is just thoughts, and this might turn into a question. Who's to say? But what you're, what you said about, it's not exclusive, but you know, not everyone has to flock. That reminded me of the first time that I ever went to a gay club, in, in university, and I'm a straight girly.
[00:16:33] And so for us straight girlies, we love the gay bars because for us, it's a refuge. But for so long, question that I always had was, what is my place in, in that nightlife? Like I, as a woman do feel safer here, but what is my presence kind of deemed for other people who are here? So I'm just wondering, you know, for straight people who are curious. Who want to be allies, but have no idea how to, what questions should we ask ourselves, or thoughts that we should consider before entering these spaces, or wanting to support them?
[00:17:04] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: That's a very difficult question, but a very important question. Part of the reason why it's difficult is simple but powerful intuition that just because you feel safe in a place does not mean that that place was designed for you.
[00:17:19] And this is why there's been so much international conversation and controversy about the presence of straight women in gay bars, specifically. And how that affects the culture, vibe, and tone of those bars and the experience of safety that some gay people have in that place when there are larger numbers of straight people in that space.
[00:17:43] Part of another thing that's so interesting and slightly surprising about these parties is not just how little straight people, uh, were present in my conversations about these parties, but similarly, how little the notion of allyship comes up in these parties, when you compare it to, for instance, gay bars or gay neighborhoods with club nights, which is what I'm studying. Club nights as part of the night life scene rather than gay bars. There are a number of new recent books. Marvelous books that have been published about gay bars, and I would encourage listeners to find their way to those books, including The Bars Are Ours, by Lucas Hilderbrand, Who Needs Gay Bars, by Greggor Mattson, and a number of others.
[00:18:26] But I'm looking at club nights. And the way to think about allyship and belonging and majority involvement in minority spaces in the context of these pop up parties is, perhaps, through an example of a particular party in London that's called Pussy Palace. They created an international controversy in light of some of their ticketing policies that they introduced.
[00:18:48] Now, Pussy Palace is an event that centers individuals who identify as queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and as people of color, or QTBIPOC for short. They throw wicked parties. And so people hear about them, and they want to go. So they created a new tiered ticketing policy. And so if you are QTBIPOC, then you would pay something like ten pounds to get in. If you are queer and White, then you might pay twenty-five pounds to get in. If you are straight, cis and White, however, then they were charging a hundred and twelve pounds to get into the door. Now, they cannot enforce that because it would be illegal, but when you arrive in the queue and you see what the ticketing policy is, it draws your attention to the fact that maybe this space is not for you.
[00:19:47] Similarly, there is a party that has a presence in both London and in Paris called Riposte, and on one of their Instagram feeds, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a series of images, uh, related to their party and its increasing popularity. This is the post.
[00:20:10] Dear cis straight people , why are you here? And then you swipe. Would you like me to read it?
[00:20:17] Carol Eugene Park: Yes, yes.
[00:20:17] Jeevan Singha: Please.
[00:20:18] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: We want to speak directly to the cis straight people who attend or are thinking of attending and request that you ask yourself, why are you coming to Riposte? If your answer to this question is anything but self exploration, support for your queer friends, and support for the queer artists who make Riposte so incredible, this is not your space, and you are not welcome.
[00:20:45] Riposte is fundamentally a queer party, and if you haven't directly been invited by a queer person, please consider why you are choosing Riposte over countless other parties. No clothing, dancing, playroom, we are not a play, kink party, or performances are an invitation or excuse for predatory behavior. It is unbelievable that we're needing to spell this out, but if you can't control yourself by these rules and feel unable to check yourself, regardless of the alcohol or substances you've taken, this is not your space.
[00:21:26] On a more positive note, we are so full of love and appreciation for the beautiful queers who make Riposte what it is and continue to support and enjoy our parties. Your place and comfortability here is so much more important than any amount of ticket sales or publicity. If you witness or experience any concerning behavior explained previously, please don't hesitate to tell our incredible welfare team or security. Cis straight attendees with a reason to come, stay in control, stay respectful. Check pronouns, and enjoy our beautiful party.
[00:22:07] And I think reading those two things provides some really concrete and philosophical advice to your earlier question about how we can think about allyship in the context of this underground alternate party scene.
[00:22:22] But I think the insights are generalizable, even for straight people who want to attend or go to gay bars, and I think that's a way in which we can begin to think in more complex ways about allyship and majority involvement in minority spaces, particularly for segments of communities that are feeling like they're already marginalized within marginalized scenes.
[00:22:48] Carol Eugene Park: That was iconic. I'm inspired.
[00:22:52] Jeevan Singha: I'm going to apologize in advance because I was a sociology major, so I'm nerding out a little here and you are one of the cool profs I never had a chance to take a class with, so great to be chatting. I'm curious, you mentioned when we were talking about joy earlier, I'm thinking about what the process must have been like for you as a researcher as well, like on a more individual level for you to kind of bridge this academic process, um, which at times can be, you know, quite rote and depending on how it's practiced can be, you know, it's a difficult process at times. But then also bringing in joy with the topic that you chose to explore here and the angle that you took.
[00:23:31] What was it like for you to. embark on this kind of research. What does it mean to you and your personal practice to bring joy into your academic research?
[00:23:40] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: It was an absolutely transformational experience for me. Now, sociology is a problem centered discipline. And so often, because sociologists are interested in the systematic study of social groups, and that because sociology's core intuition is that we are social creatures, and that we are group animals. It makes sense that so much of our object of study is about things like suffering or inequality or discrimination, bigotry, bias, inequalities. And it's vital that we do this work collectively and systematically, because it is only through doing that work that we can then propose social policies for how to make the world a more just and equitable place. I say this because I want to be very clear and unequivocal that my emphasis on joy is not to diminish the importance of doing work that highlights any things like inequalities and discrimination and bias. But instead to bring better balance in the emphasis of joy.
[00:24:52] I feel that there's a disproportionate amount of emphasis on things like suffering, that we need to flip the coin to its other side and see joy and be perhaps not so quick to dismiss it as being hedonistic or analytically less valuable or worst case, invaluable. Because as I said, it can be on the contrary, life affirming and deeply political. That's where it comes from, uh, in terms of my immersion in a particular discipline that has a particular orientation and a way of seeing the world.
[00:25:30] But I think as well there's a second place from which this emphasis also bloomed, and that's more personal. I've come to have a sedimented set of experiences over the course of my increasingly longer career, and that comes from a corner stone of academic research. Touchstone of academic research is, as you likely know, the peer review process.
[00:25:57] The idea is that you produce something, and that you submit it to a journal editor or book editor. And then it proceeds through a double blind peer review process in which other individuals who are experts in your area of study evaluate its merits, its strengths and weaknesses. And in the course of that conversation, there is an editorial outcome about whether it's rejected, whether it requires revision, whether it's conditionally accepted due to small number of tweaks, and then finally accepted.
[00:26:27] I do think that peer review is vital and imperative, and I absolutely support it and champion it. However, peer review can also come with a kind of ruthless critique and attacks on other scholars work. No research product is perfect. We always have the capacity to critique it. And this is something that you may recall from your undergraduate days at UBC when you can have an informed but critical conversation about potential shortcomings of something that you've read in an effort to do additional research in the future and ensure that we are always producing new knowledge. But sometimes critique can become unkind and it hurts. I also think that critique can be a vacuum of the generative. It can be limiting. And after more than a decade of being critiqued and psychically and spiritually exhausted from that sense of relentless critique, I thought it would be healing to emphasize joy.
[00:27:34] Jeevan Singha: Thank you so much. That was a beautiful answer.
[00:27:36] Carol Eugene Park: Did you have anything that you wanted to say that we didn't ask you about or any plug?
[00:27:41] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: Sure. I'd like to, perhaps I can let readers know that I am delighted and incredibly humbled by the early reception of my book, so far. It was published just in late March 2024 by Princeton University Press. It was selected for review by the New York Times, which has taken my breath away because so few books, let alone books by academics or books published by academic publishers, are selected for review by the New York Times. There are two lines that I really love from the review. The first is that, the sociologist Amin Ghaziani wants to turn a funeral into a party. Such a great line.
[00:28:22] And the idea there is that I'm trying to redirect the conversation from the deficit based approach that emphasizes the closure of gay bars to the evolution of nightlife into these underground scenes called club nights. The reviewer also said that Ghaziani shines as an academic, which really fills my heart, you know, with so much joy and gratitude. I was also invited onto the Getting Curious podcast with Jonathan Van Ness, which is stunning to me.
[00:28:54] Jeevan Singha: That must've been so cool. I've been meaning to listen to the whole conversation.
[00:28:58] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: I had an hour and a half with JVN. And they're so warm and compassionate, kind, and it was really extraordinary.
[00:29:06] Jeevan Singha: Very cool. That's awesome.
[00:29:08] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: And finally, I was invited onto a conversation with NPR's Marketplace Morning Report, which is listened to by ten million weekly listeners. And I'm incredibly grateful and humbled by the fact that I'm clearly, I'm writing about something that is resonating with people, uh, and that hasn't been discussed widely.
[00:29:27] Jeevan Singha: That's so great to hear. And I think from our whole team, like congratulations on all the response, um, and thank you so much for being with us today.
[00:29:35] Dr. Amin Ghaziani: My pleasure. Thank you for the invitation to be on this program. Follow me on Instagram or X. My handle is Amin_Ghaziani, to keep up with developments related to the book and other things about nightlife more broadly.
[00:29:50] Carol Eugene Park: I mean, how do you top that? I do have to repeat Dr. Ghaziani's words about joy. Quote, joy is something that we need to contend with in a much more serious manner rather than dismissing it as something that's hedonistic. I mean, talk about a mic drop. That was not only insightful, but he was so funny.
[00:30:07] Jeevan Singha: So funny and a great storyteller. I loved how he illustrated the shifting landscape of queer nightlife in a really thoughtful way. And that point about joy is so true. I mean, joy is a part of how we relate to one another and how we navigate life. I, I honestly think it can be revolutionary to take community joy so seriously.
[00:30:24] Carol Eugene Park: I mean, I would like to acknowledge that I am very embarrassed that I said, and I quote, I'm a straight girly to Dr. Ghaziani. Like, I said it and then I felt my body shrivel up because that is very embarrassing. Um, but in all seriousness, I was blown away. And I did put a request in at my local indie bookstore for a copy of his book. So. I can't wait. Also, support your indie bookstores. Uh, Jeevan, any last words of wisdom about joy, about allies, about straight girlies?
[00:30:56] Jeevan Singha: Yeah, straight girly was crazy, but you opened up a really interesting conversation about who queer nightlife is for. And I think I'll leave all the words of wisdom and straight people PSAs to Amin, and I'll leave you all with wishing you a very, very happy Pride.
[00:31:11] Carol Eugene Park: Thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you catch our next episode by subscribing or following our show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're feeling your feels, please drop us a review. You can find me on Twitter @CarolEugenePark.
[00:31:25] Jeevan Singha: And me, @JeevanKSangha. From Here Forward is an alumni UBC podcast produced by Podium Podcast Company.