Facing the AIDS crisis and an indifferent mainstream culture at best, an outright hostile one at worst, L.A.’s Gen X LGBTQ+ community found a home for themselves in the performance spaces, and on the dancefloors of clubs like Jewel’s Catch One, Arena, Club Chico, The Palms, Paradise Ballroom, Outer Limits, and Circus. While many of these places are no longer with us, lost to forces like gentrification and the march of time, their memory continues to inform a utopian longing, a desire to come into being on the dance floor.

Gen X festival humanities curator and author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries Karen Tongson writes, “I want to explore the strange resonances and reverberations, or what I call ‘remote intimacies’ that happen across time, activated by our relationship to art, popular culture, and our sense of place, bringing us to the point of what is possible together, communally.” The line-up, which includes author RAQUEL GUTIÉRREZ performance collective My Barbarian, dance music artist Crystal Waters, and Arena’s former DJ Irene Gutiérrez, is as Tongson continues, “evocative of the queer utopias that were forged through the music and media from our shared past, conjured together for performances and a dance party that are very much about our queer here, now and everlasting.”

Part of the LA Phil Gen X festival

On the Dance Floor: LA’s Queer 90s At Zebulon Sat / May 7, 2022 - 9:00 PM 
A celebration of Los Angeles' LGBTQ+ community circa 1990