My Year of Raves

March 24, 2025 | #queer, #toronto, #rave, #music, #politics, #tech, #parenting

In 2024, in my third year of being trans, I discovered that I like dancing.

This came as a shock, way more surprising than the whole gender thing. You hit your late thirties and you think: you’ve got yourself pretty figured out. And then it turns out you don’t.

Now I’m like – what else will I discover about myself?

These days, if it’s been a while I start to crave it. Big sounds, big crowds, getting dolled up and pre-gaming with friends, it’s all nice and part of the experience.

But the best part is when the music hits just right. In those moments, I close my eyes, and I move my body in thrall to the rhythm. The running commentary in the back of my head quiets down, all of my attention turns to the music, and it feels like joy and happiness is being pumped directly through my body. I am totally present, and in the moment, and in the zone. It’s meditative. It’s therapeutic. It’s healing.

It’s like exercising a muscle you didn’t know had atrophied. I feel it running down my spine.

Afterwards it brings a lightness of being, and a chill, positive attitude that takes a full day, day and a half, to dissipate. In that afterglow,¹ it feels like I fully inhabit my body. If I’d known what I now know ten years ago, I totally would’ve been a party girl; Charli would’ve dedicated Brat to me, personally.

This is the story of how I learned I love to dance.

How To Read This Essay

I sat down to write a 2024 year-end retrospective, but then I got carried away. The words kept pouring out of me. I don’t expect most people will read it in a single sitting. The end result is a bit lengthy, and I don’t blame you if it feels like a bit of a commitment.

If you’re short on time, then the one section everyone should read is What’s So Great About Dancing Anyways?, And How You Too Can Dance And Improve Your Mental Health For Great Success.

You have my blessing to start there. I hope dancing changes your life, too.

If you have a little bit more time, then I recommend reading Trans Joy, Spirituality, and The Manifestation of Freedom. If you’re really curious about the music, then skip right ahead to The Best DJ Sets From 2024 That I Have Heard.

Otherwise, I do think it reads better from top-to-bottom, in chronological order. The Universe really did send me a message.

rave revelations

The Universe Sends A Message

Back in April 2024 I was flying home from a work trip to San Francisco.

I had just spent a week with my coworkers figuring out how to architect immutability guarantees for uploaded artifacts using our system of cryptographically-signed attestations. Now I was tired and looking forward to seeing my family.

I oozed into my chair. Two movies down, I had one half-hour left before landing. I lazily scrolled through the plane’s movie selection. Have at me, Air Canada!

One of the films’ description read something like “a frustrated writer goes on vacation with her Italian-Canadian family”.

I paused.

Italian-Canadian? You don’t see that everyday. Sure, why not.

I pressed play.

As the opening scene unfolded, I sat upright. The main actress! Is she… trans? Holy crap, I think she’s trans. Do they acknowledge this? What is going on???

I spent the rest of the flight scrubbing back and forth, trying to see if it ever comes up or is addressed. Then the plane landed, the movie stopped, and the entertainment system returned to the title page.

I was stunned.

I watch hardly any movies or tv, but I feel like when a main character is trans… that’s often the focus of the film itself.² It’s as if we’re at best tragically heroic figures whose struggle for acceptance is the main arc of our lives. It’s the sort of thing that gets mentioned even in a short description – and yet here it was just a background fact, no big deal.

I stared at the film’s title page.

“Something You Said Last Night”, directed by Luis De Filippis with Carmen Madonia in the lead role. That’s funny, I thought. My name, in portuguese, is Filipe Luís. The director’s name is like, the inverse of my name but in italian. I took out my phone.

What’s your deal, Luis?

Well, it turns out that Luis is also trans, and part of her shtick is making movies where being trans is not a big deal, just a background fact.

I thought that was really cool.

I mean, I don’t aspire to tragic heroism. My life is perfectly normal: mostly picking kids up from daycare, getting them to swimming lessons on time, and in between I do some software engineering.

Eventually, transitioning your gender stops taking up that much time, and you just continue… transitioning through life, as a whole. Y’know? People act like transitioning is this big deal but everyone transitions. Yesterday you were a baby, and tomorrow you will be a babushka. People are constantly transitioning from who they were before to who they will be after.

It ought to be perfectly normal to be trans. Just a background fact, no big deal.

Okay, also, I thought she looked amazing, and that she had great clothes, so I semi-compulsively read thru some of her interviews, and creeped on her social media.

There she is with Carmen, the lead actress, and it turns out they’re buds! That’s cute. I looked thru Carmen’s insta. There she is with Julia Fox, who is maybe famous?, I have no idea.

In photo after photo, there they are: surrounded by other beautiful women, squad deep, wrapped in some kind of couture, posing in what seems to be a parking lot but is also clearly some form of party.

I tell you this because I felt a tinge of envy. Hashtag goals, and so on. I too want to be beautiful, and wear nice clothes, and be surrounded by my gossips at a party!!!

And then, squinting and zooming, I noticed that in addition to being an actor Carmen is also a rave promoter. Hence all the parking lots. And not only is she a rave promoter, but there is a queer rave coming up next month, tickets going fast.

I looked up from my phone. In that moment, I experienced a peculiar sensation. The whole my-name-but-in-italian thing was just too on the nose, too weird of a coincidence.

The universe was trying to tell me something.

Specifically, it felt like the universe was telling me that I had to go and check out this rave.

So, I did.

PHILLRAVE

I had one main problem: I felt certain that raving was Not Really My Thing.

I’d never been to a rave before. I didn’t quite know what to expect. Extremely loud music, large drunk crowds, staying up way past midnight? Eh. I identify as an introverted morning person.

Even the flyer for the rave felt intimidating and baffling (though scintillating):

I played it over and over again.

I didn’t know how to parse it. What was the music going to be like? Unclear. I looked up the headliner. Loud, fast, vulgar in an over the top way. Was this going to be enjoyable?

I’m not a complete ingénue. I might even say that this was not my first rodeo. In my twenties I’d been to nightclubs a couple times, which I found alienating, and I had attended countless indie music concerts. The kind of event where you wear plaid and stand arms crossed, perfectly still, and stare, fulminating, into the soul of the performer(s).³

If things went exceptionally well, there might be some head banging or a mosh pit.

These events were fine, and I have fond memories of many of them – though, not most. I wanted to enjoy live music as much as I enjoyed recorded music, but after years of trying it started to feel like a bit of a slog, and so I stopped going. A few times, I’d been invited along to dance parties with music made for dancing, and those were also were also fine?, but I always felt terribly uncoordinated and terminally awkward. How can you let loose when you look so awfully goofy?

Dancing! Not Really My Thing.

However, when The Universe Sends You A Message you can’t leave it on read. I prepared myself to enjoy this mostly as an Experience Unto Itself. An anthropological exploration, an ethnographic study, a cultural exchange.

I just needed a chaperone.

I reached out to my friend V., and I explained to her the situation. The airplane, the movie, the universe, etc. You and K. like to go to electronic dance events, right?

Do you guys want to come to this rave with me?

V. was touched that I asked and, as is her wont, promptly flew into organizer mode. She’s amazing that way. Before I knew it, there was a new group chat, our friends N. and L. were coming, and a calendar invite appeared in my inbox: PHILLRAVE was on.

Pep Rally – Only Fire, Mossy Mugler, Redliners, Kaylub. Hosts: Dancing For Heaven, Carmen Madonia, Karim Olen Ash, Baby Cupid (May 24th 2024)

We met at N.‘s place. The theme for the night was “surrealism/Schiaparelli” and on arrival it became clear that I didn’t really know what to wear. I’d brought some options but they weren’t really rave wear.

In the end, N. lent me a mesh top he had kicking around, I threw on a leather harness I’d purchased a few weeks earlier, and V. did our eye makeup.

It felt nice to be one of the girls, getting dolled up. I was also very pleased to be out and about past my bedtime. What a treat! What a delicious feeling.

My partner had graciously accepted to take the kids in the morning so I could sleep in. On a good night, the two gremlins who live in my house burst into terrible, irrevocable wakefulness around 6:30am. And many nights were not good, not good at all: our mornings often started even earlier. The very idea of sleeping in is foreign, and exotic.

What are weekends? Time, much like gender, is a social construct – and one my children do not subscribe to.

I hoped to both enjoy my precious moment of freedom, and not be totally destroyed when my obligations inevitably resumed. I expected I’d sniff around, be assaulted by the sound, and then be home by like, 1am.

A picture of me. I have eyeliner, eyeshadow, and lipstick on, and I am wearing a golden necklace with black mesh top over a black bra with a black leather harness, a brown belt, and black shorts.

A picture of me and one of my friends. My friend has eyeliner on and he is wearing a sexy mesh top with complex patterns.

We hung out, and leisurely consumed intoxicants, and called a cab and arrived around 2315. I’d wanted to be there earlier but as it was the place was kinda empty. Our timing had worked out perfectly.

Every time I looked around more people filtered in, and before long the rave was in full swing.

I wish I could tell you about the music, but I can’t. It was fine? It was nice.

We got very intoxicated, and in my memory it all became a fun, pulsing, euphoric blur. At some point, I closed my eyes, and danced, and hooted and hollered in tune with the crowd, hundreds and hundreds of people swaying to and fro, happy that I was out with friends.

I had a fantastic time.

I’d been struggling with my mental health. Two small kids, an interesting but time-consuming job, and turning queer in a time of creeping fascism were taking their toll on me. I’d been feeling both saturated with the needs of (little) people, and also lonely and isolated. Hashtag dad life.

I’d been feeling like my entire life was consumed by childcare, work, and more childcare, in an endless cycle, a crushing vortex of sameness. A comfortable, privileged, not unpleasant vortex, don’t get me wrong. I know, I am certain, that one day I will look back on this time and think: those were the happiest years of my life. There is a book in my heart that catalogues the many trivial ways my life could get worse.

Here and now, though, it felt like the weight of the world had lifted, and that life was worth living.

We headed outside for a smoke break, and as K. took in the people around us I saw a note of astonishment on his face. K. used to be a professional sound engineer and musician. He has many complicated opinions about music, and rhythms, and sound systems, and so on.

He is a seasoned rave veteran.

– What do you think of PHILLRAVE?, I asked.

– I’m having an amazing time, he replied. (Imagine a British accent as you read this). This crowd’s energy and vibes are so good and positive. I didn’t think these kinds of raves existed anymore.

– What do you mean?

– Fifteen years ago in Manchester, when I first went out raving, they used to be like this but then they got aggro; no one here is trying to be seen, everyone is just having a good time. It figures that the queer scene kept this kind of rave alive, he said.

I would later come to see this as a mild portent, but, this being my first rave, I nodded.

I took in the crowd. Colourful wigs, shiny lamé, crop tops and mesh skirts. Trans women resplendent in neons. Gays in ass-less chaps milling about. The steam rose off our bodies. I wanted to tell each and every one of them how beautiful they were. L. and N. left around 1:30am, and I and V. and K. stayed until 2:30.

Everyone reported having had a wonderful time, and asked: when’s PHILLRAVE2? It looks like the next Pep Rally is at the end of August. We agreed to do this again.

A Quick Note On Grace

When I tell my fellow millennials, and especially the parents, that I have been out raving lately, their eyes light up.

A person in *your* condition? You have not one but two children, right? Gosh. You don’t hear that every day. It’s hard to even imagine staying up that late.

Then, brows furrowed, conspiratorial: what do you do with the kids in the morning?

Writing this essay I found myself typing “my partner graciously took the kids” over and over again. She is the linchpin, the enabler of this journey.

It helps that by the fall the kids got a LOT easier to handle. But for every party in this year-end review, there was a morning spent in a park, or monkeying around at a playdate, or hanging out with grandma, that I did not have to attend, and for that I am immensely grateful. For my part, I try to pay her back in afternoons spent in the library, visits to the museum, or running around at our YMCA’s gym – but any ledger would show me deep in her debt.

Even though from time to time we bickered, and fought, and had disagreements, she also accepted that I needed a break. She is filled with grace. She is the kind of person who shines with a light that cannot be concealed. I could not have asked for a better life partner.

I am terribly pleased that we have built a life together.

Bassification: For The Dollz – Syana, Miss Bible, Marnigurl, LAZULI DOLL, Reggie Ho (June 29, 2024)

In the meantime, Pride was around the corner. Two weeks after the Pep Rally rave, Carmen shared a link to an all-trans-femme-DJ party, happening on Pride Saturday.

That sounded really cool. That felt really special and alluring. Having turned queer near middle age, I have had a very limited experience of queer spaces. I felt like I had to go and check that out, too.

I didn’t feel confident enough to go by myself, though.

Walking N. home one night I pitched him on the idea. N. is a wonderful ally, and he said sure, I’ll be your cishet wing man so you can gay it up. That was enough. But I felt like having a posse is more fun.

As we stepped inside his house, we found Y. reading a book.

A powerful bisexual, Y. was spending a few weeks in town and was staying in N.’s spare bedroom. She had scheduled her trip around Pride, and her partner I. would be joining her in a few days. Did she want to come to this rave with us?

She said Hell Yeah!, That Sounds Like Fun. Just like that, I had a posse.

On Pride Friday, my partner and I met up with some friends and went to the Trans March, and then on Saturday morning she graciously took the kids up to her family’s cottage and gave me the rest of the weekend off. On Saturday afternoon, I ended up going to the Dyke March with Y. and I. (and L. and R.) but that’s a whole other story.

Later that evening, the four of us met at my house and pre-gamed and got ready.

In a fit of inspiration, I wore short shorts, and covered my nipples with “xs” made out of electrical tape, and I wore a brand new mesh tank top I’d just purchased on Church St. I felt like I looked really hot, and everyone agreed that it was a banger look. Y. decided she was too scandalously dressed for public transit, and so we cabbed over.

Once again, it was hard to know what to expect. The event description read:

ITS ALL DOLLS ON THE LINEUP SPINNING KUNTY BEATS, HARD BASS, & SEXXY CLUB HITS!! COME DANCE WITH US!!

But what makes a beat kunty? We had no idea.

We tried to look it up, but none of the proposed definitions really fit. This word was at the vanguard of slang, and its intended non-pejorative meaning had yet to be captured by urban dictionary. N. texted his trans female cousin, who is like 20 years old, doing her undergrad, and naturally very into music. We asked her to act as our youth culture guide. She burst into laughter, and explained that it’s just a synonym for “good”.

When someone is serving cunt,⁴ they can be said to be “cunty”.

I felt imbued with language and therefore power. I hadn’t heard the term “doll” before either, but now I knew to look for it. The rave scene is for the dolls.⁵

Somehow, we were a bit early again, and the crowd was sparse. The music was insanely loud, and I could see N. wince. He’d forgotten his earplugs, and for the first little while I could tell that he was mostly “here to support Phill, I guess”. I felt a bit awkward on his behalf.

The venue was on College St, and much smaller than the former warehouse we went to in May. But it quickly filled up, and soon it became extremely hot and sweaty. The audience was young – we were definitely among the oldest people there – and very queer. Lots of trans femmes abounded.

I got very intoxicated, and loosened up. The music kept pumping, and I started to have an incredible time. I wish I could tell you more about the music; once again, I mostly recall a pulsing blur. But I can say that, by way of contrast, it leaned far less on the “oontz oontz”, and was much more pop and top-40-oriented. At some point we sang along to a maniacally distorted Shania Twain song.

We went outside to cool off, and I bummed a cigarette, and draped over Y..

I told people how good I felt. I spend so much of my time feeling ugly and unattractive, but now, in this moment, I felt gorgeous.

We went back inside and danced and danced and danced.

Eventually, it was time to go home. It had been a cool-for-late-June day, and but the humidity held enough heat to make it comfortable to walk home, despite how skimpily dressed I was. Much to Y. and I.’s delight a neighbourhood cat, thirsty for pets, followed us for several blocks. We dropped them off at their Airbnb, and kept walking.

As we crossed a major avenue, now past 3am, some dudes hanging out on the street beside a taquería catcalled me.

My body tensed – was that a slur? – and then relaxed as I realized he had said “te quiero”. For the first 0.1 seconds it felt flattering. Yes, I do look hot. Then I thought: I don’t give a fuck what you think, dipshit, keep your mouth shut.

For the first time ever I felt a bit exposed, instead of the normal “no one’s going to fuck with me” energy I carried as a man.

As he dropped me off, N. confirmed that at the beginning he wasn’t super into it – but by the end of the night he had had an incredible time dancing with us.

The whole vibes were top notch.

The Terror and the Delight of Being Known (by Instagram)

When I tell people that I’ve been out raving, and their eyes light up, and they ask me what do I do about the kids, after that then they ask: how do you even find out about raves in the first place?

The answer is you look at Resident Advisor, but mostly Instagram. There’s a whole scene on Instagram. Rave promoters commission beautiful 3D-animated video flyers with looping sequences set to music that evokes the party’s vibe. Partygoers record short videos and tag the promoters, who reshare them the day after. You want to find out about raves, you follow promoters and DJs on Instagram.

A funny thing happens when you start following rave promoters and DJs on Instagram: Instagram picks up on that right away.

I’ve always had an adversarial relationship with The Algorithm. I have tedious opinions about the virtues of chronological feeds, about not having my attention gamified, about not being subjected to stupid slop. Which had long been my main experience with recsys: stupid slop.

For years, my Instagram experience had been dumb and useless. I joined Instagram long ago, in 2011, and I’ve used it, as originally intended, to document my life and follow friends and family. The Instagram of the 2020s, as expressed by its targeted advertising and suggested content, struggled to figure me out.

I guess it picked up on some some sense of dissatisfaction?, because a lot of the time it showed me ads for graduate degrees, and green economy job re-skilling programs. Am I interested in a fast-track MBA? What about a postdoctoral program at the Max Planck-Weizman institute? What if I learned to code? Click here for a Harvard-affiliated computer science 101 course – never mind that I’m qualified to teach it.

As I transitioned genders, it got a bit better. It figured out I had new interests, that I was queer. I started getting ads for women’s clothes (yay), and HIV prevention medication (groan), and certificates in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (mega groan). My personal favourite was an ad beckoning me to “meet other women who are TTC”, which I was disappointed to discover meant “trying to conceive” and not like, hot railfans in my local area.

It was both affirming and creepy, because I never came out on that platform.

An advertisement for the Rotman School's Women in Leadership program.

An advertisement for PrEP. The copy reads: PrEP isn't just for gay men

How did it know?

This changed after Pep Rally and Bassification. As I started following more promoters and DJs I started getting ads for other raves and parties and live shows.

It started suggesting DJs and event promoters and Boiler Room sets. A number of times it straight up, no joke, started showing me ads for drugs. Click here to buy MDMA, ketamine, shrooms, and a cornucopia of designer psychedelics I’d never heard of before. Payment via Interac or Bitcoin.

An advertisement for party drugs. An attractive woman's face is captioned: Let's Roll.

An advertisement for psychedelic mushrooms. A caption atop a close up of a mushroom reads: Medicinal Mushroom Tinctures from Canada

I’ve never been so pleased with targeted advertising.

Evil Billionaires Are Feeding The Phantasm Poisoning Our Psyche

The whole scene is on Instagram, which of course is now tragic.

I started writing this essay on the last day of November, 2024. As I write this sentence it is mid January, 2025, and Mark Zuckerberg has just announced that he, personally, hates queer people.

It is clear that people need to get the fuck away from Meta properties.

I understand feeling a little bit conflicted about it, though. These people want to drive us out of the public sphere, and in some sense when we leave they win.

That’s what happened on Twitter.

On Twitter, I used to have a lovely little perch from which I participated in a lively scene that talked about local politics, housing and land-use policy, and computer programming. I followed activists and journalists and academics and politicians and startup founders, and they followed me back, and we traded barbs and jokes and memes.

Then the new guy took over, and it almost immediately became a place that felt unsafe and bad for my mental health. It didn’t feel good to be exposed to so much far-right propaganda and hate speech, and the risk of being harassed and doxxed didn’t feel worth it.

So I left.

A lot of other people left too, but many, way too many, stayed behind and stuck around. The fantasy of Twitter’s reach⁶ persisted and the most dedicated posters stuck around. The heavily addicted, certain corners of tech industry, the media and politicians never left. They played right into Elon’s hands.

I was at a dinner party the other day, two years after I left my little perch, and I overheard two guests discuss the funny hijinks they had gotten up to on Twitter. It felt disheartening to hear their gossip.

It feels like… I got pushed away from this social environment, but other people didn’t even notice I was gone. That has to have consequences for how the media and elites think about queers. If we’re no longer around, all they will see about us is hate speech.

It’s easy to imagine that this shrug is how most people will react when we start getting sent to the camps. They won’t even notice that we’re gone.

On the other hand, there is no way to win when they control every aspect of the experience. it’s simply not healthy for us to communicate on platforms that are actively adversarial to our lives.

People need to get the fuck away from these platforms.

As I write this sentence it is now March 2025, and I have had to cut out almost all of my news consumption. The constant drumbeat of anti-trans, anti-queer, anti-migrant, anti-everything news, the myriad ways in which we are being maliciously persecuted, was too much to bear.

It feels very stressful to be personally targeted for destruction.

How long has Mark Zuckerberg hated us for?

It didn’t start the minute that fucking guy won again, though certainly that’s when it became advantageous to be public about it. Unlike Elon, for whom being spitefully evil is clearly part of his authentic self-expression, I get the feeling that Mark just wants to be powerful, part of the in-crowd. Mark is evil because it’s convenient, and now because it is fashionable.

Of course, Mark has been an instrument of evil for a long time now. He’s been putting his thumb on the scale and marginalizing queer people, going out of his way to tilt the world towards fascism, for many years.

For example, it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s fault that I don’t speak to my dad anymore.

Long story short, some time in July, right before Biden abdicated, I caught my dad posting anti-queer memes to his Facebook wall. I got mad. My dad knows I identify as non-binary. What was I supposed to think?

In a fit of pique, filled with an urge to at least have something I can control, I issued him an ultimatum: please apologize, delete the posts you shared – and if you don’t, I am going to stop talking to you.

I was tired of crying because of my dad.

He told me that he was concerned for me. In his view, I am ruining my body, I will never be a real woman anyways,⁷ I am opening myself up to discrimination, I need to think about what it’ll be like for the kids. What if my partner leaves me, and I need to go back on the dating market – who will love me then?

He was above all else entitled to his opinion – and no apology was forthcoming.

This anti-queer attitude came out of nowhere. My dad’s always been a left-wing kinda guy. Rough around the edges, sure, but he meant well. Now he’s unwittingly repeating half-remembered conspiracy theories and fascist talking points. Has he ever knowingly met a gay or trans person in his entire life? Where is he getting this shit from?

The answer is he spends all day, every day, watching a constant steady stream of propaganda on Facebook. Every day he wakes up and looks at his phone and there is Facebook pushing the idea that living my life in the most joyful way possible is somehow bad, wrong, or silly. Also, the clean energy transition is actually impossible, a big con, because there’s not enough electricity to go around. Did you know that George Soros (or was it Bill Gates? it’s unclear, he couldn’t tell them apart) wants to cut down all the trees?

Thanks Zuck! I love that you did this to my dad!

What a complete coincidence that your platform just happens to curate and reward evil far-right rage-bait slop, calling it “engaging”. What a strange twist of fate, an accident of chance, that Zuck happens to feed the phantasm that divides and distracts us from doing anything that might reduce the reach of his personal wealth, privilege, and power.

I believe in the sincerity of my dad’s concern for me. Long years of experience have taught me that he’s got some kind of spectrum-y neurospicy thing going on where he doesn’t really grasp how he makes other people feel. (I suspect I have inherited this trait, lol). But I look at my beautiful kids, his only grandchildren, who he now doesn’t get to see.

He doesn’t need to accept me. All he had to do was lie and be nice to me. I don’t know how he isn’t filled with a deep sense of shame.

Maybe that part of his brain rotted away too.

Collective Concerts – Caribou (DJ), Korea Town Acid (August 16th, 2024)

Collective Concerts, a local larger scale, non-rave promoter, posted on its Instagram page that they were hosting a free pop-up DJ show by Caribou, happening in three days. V. and K. saw it, and invited me along. Come out with us!, they said.

Caribou? Yeah, K. replied, he’s really into garage these days, it should be good.

My mind searched.

Caribou. Caribou. The Milk of Human Kindness (2005), Andorra (2008), that Caribou? Wow, that was a lifetime ago.

I remembered spacey, ambienty, folky indie pop.

You say he’s into garage [ɡ(ə)ˈɹɑ(d)ʒ] these days? Yeah, garage [ˈɡæ.ɹɪdʒ], K. replied.

I said sure, whatever. I was happy to be invited. I love being invited to things, even if I can’t always go. Everyone should always feel free to invite me to things.

I did zero research, and therefore went in having zero expectations, which is frankly a blessed state. I genuinely walked in thinking there might be an opening band that sounded like early White Stripes.

K. was uncharacteristically anxious about getting there on time. It was a free show, and what if all the spots were taken? Six of us, L., T., At. and V., shared a minivan ride over to Yonge St. Later, R. joined us at the venue. I hummed to myself, watching the rain drum on the cab’s windshield, excited to be out on the town with friends.

Korea Town Acid turned out to be a talented producer/DJ/musician, and not like, a bunch of white guys from Newmarket. She played very cerebral but pleasant, high energy, dance music. I started to groove with her set. The venue was kinda empty but now the crowd started to fill in.

PHILLRAVE2 was the following week, and so I was careful to not overdo it: I only got somewhat intoxicated, a couple drinks at the bar, a joint I had in my purse.

Then Dan Snaith (Caribou/Daphni) took to the stage, and he played what registered in my memory as a fucking incredible set. It blew my socks off.

Later, going through Instagram, I found these two clips that show me and my friends dancing:

It’s kinda weird to see yourself recorded through the eyes of a stranger.

It turns out that over the last fifteen years he’d really mixed up his sound, put out albums under his DJ moniker, and was currently, unbeknownst to me, promoting a new album. I only realized weeks later that, as he was took us on a cross-genre musical journey in his set, he was mixing in his own tracks from his latest record set to be released in October.

(He later caught some weirdly delusional, anti-AI themed flak for using a high quality vocoder for his sexy female persona, but to my ears it just felt very trans-coded, pun intended; I wish my voice sounded like that too. Hey Dan!, how’s it going buddy?)

It was an amazing show. I had so much fun. It was a glorious night out. We danced, and we danced, and we danced. And because it was a free show, and kind of last minute, the crowd was super chill, too.

Most importantly, this show taught me that I didn’t have to be totally wasted to be disinhibited, to let loose, and let the music move me.

That was a new experience. At my first rave, back in May, I had assumed that I needed to be smashed in order to not be turned off by the environment. And yet here I had had a great time, and didn’t have to get destroyed to do it.

I had yet to fully internalize this lesson, but I noticed it right away. I was ready for PHILLRAVE2.

A Quick Note On The Kind Of Summer I Was Having

In order to fully contextualize PHILLRAVE2, it’s important to note that I was having a pretty shitty summer.

My mental health was not doing great. I mentioned this back in May, but it got worse. I was having a hard time. On top of the whole “creeping rise of fascism” thing, I was struggling with the stress of having two small children.

I love my kids. They’re very nice guys. It’s an incredible privilege to witness them grow up, and make sense of the world. It is wonderful to watch them explore their environment, and every day be a part of all that they are learning. Only children can teach us truly new things, only children can bring new ideas into this world.

I hope I can help them make the world a beautiful place.

Mostly, though, my kids weren’t sleeping. Every day they woke up at a random time in the middle of the night, or started our day somewhere between 430 and 6am. They punished us for our hubris, for the crime we committed by bringing them into a cruel and uncaring world.⁸

I came to see my malaise as a series of intersecting stressors.

The kids were very little, and required a lot of exhausting, hands-on, active supervision. They weren’t sleeping well, which destroyed a lot of my peace and quiet: after the third day in a row of very little and interrupted sleep, your emotions become unglued. Because I was tired, I was short-tempered with the kids which in turn frustrated my partner. She got mad at me. The children, sensing weakness and experimenting with the power of words, would say mean shit to me, and express a strong preference for their mother.

The only way to defend yourself from this kind of sleep terrorism is to go to bed as soon as you are able, as soon as the kids are put to sleep. Which is… fine, but it also removes any ability you might have had to lead a life or existence that is not completely dominated by a ceaseless childcare-work-childcare loop. Between early parenthood and a remote job I often found myself feeling lonely and isolated.

The days stretched into oceans of time. And in the background: the planet is literally on fire, evil right-wing billionaires are intent on crushing us, the political system is melting down. On my worst days it felt like I had nothing to look forward to.

Well, almost nothing.

Now I had raves.

The Renunciation of Beauty (PHILLRAVE2)

I’d purchased six tickets for the end of summer Pep Rally event as soon as they became available. V. started a new group chat, and before long K., R., B., Os., L., C. and F. found ourselves at N.’s house. A fun party started right away.

The girls got dressed up, and compared notes on mesh and sparkles, and helped each other put on our makeup. The guys, clad in tees and Hawaiian shirts, sat around, and drank, and competed in silly feats of strength.

The gender divide was obvious, and I thought: how did I go for so many years without ever feeling beautiful?

I used to low-key hate clothes, whether acquiring them or making sense of how to wear them. I had enough social grace to avoid looking like a complete slob, but I felt hopeless at making any sort of larger statement. Clothes shopping was stressful, always a terrible chore. I couldn’t tell if something looked good, I felt incapable of colour coordination. It all looked and felt bad. To compensate I bought clothes as infrequently as possible.⁹

Then I started wearing women’s clothes. Staring at myself in the full length mirror in the thrift store, hiding my face behind a mask, somehow it was obvious whether something fit, or looked good. Pairing colours came naturally. I realized that all along I had always possessed every cognitive skill necessary for doing well in this task. I had just never been able to access it.

Now I enjoy shopping for clothes.¹⁰

Women’s clothes are so much more fun and colourful! And by extension, in some aspects… so are women. We were making ourselves pretty, more beautiful, ahead of this party while the men continued to just… exist.

It also made me think: has any other single individual man had a more powerful, a more durable, and more negative, impact on his gender than Beau Brummell?

Everything I know about this topic comes from episode 10 of Avery Trufelman’s Articles of Interest, so I’ll try to keep this brief.

In a nutshell, Beau Brummel was the guy who made the suit fashionable.

He was at the forefront of what was retroactively called the Great Male Renunciation: a “major turning point in the history of clothing in which men relinquished their claim to adornment and beauty”. Out went silk breeches, powdered wigs, and elaborate, brightly coloured garments and in came dark colours, pants and the ever present suit – which dominates men’s fashion to this day.

His chief innovation was to introduce a rigid conformity, a pseudo-militaristic uniform, that stood in contrast to the ornate fashion of yore. In the aftermath of the French and American revolutions, he adopted a way of dressing that seemed more democratic, more like how the common people dressed but he did it in a way that “oozed wealth”. The quiet luxury of his time.

In 2025, we’d say he was just ahead of the vibe shift.

He switched up the status signifiers. He replaced richness of material with richness of detail. Now, you can signal how wealthy you are not by how loud and fancy your fabric is, but by how much time you spent worrying about minute details. The placement of buttons. How the pockets were cut. Being able to recognize who made it by the way it was stitched together.

All the while pretending that you didn’t actually care, while projecting an image of effortlessness.

Beau’s shtick was a kind of macho projection, and somewhere along the line bright fancy colours and visibly giving a shit went from being manly and regal to being gay and effeminate. By the end of the episode, Avery ties the Great Renunciation to the persecution of Oscar Wilde.

Has western culture been fixated with not being gay for two hundred years?

I don’t think feminine beauty standards are healthy, by any stretch of the imagination. They’re exhausting. They’re oppressive. Trying to meet these standards has destroyed many women, cis and trans.

I was a borderline slob for a long time. It should be OK for women to be slobs, too.

It’s just fun to get dolled up. It’s fun to wear sparkles, to feel hot, to ask your friend for help with your eye shadow, to give and receive compliments, to shimmer and shine.

We had a baller crew. We went out, and hit the town.

Pep Rally – Safety Trance, Chippy Nonstop, Young Teesh, Joselo, Ana Luisa b2b Sofia Fly, Lady Shaka, Pxssy Palace (Nadine Noor & Mya Mehmi), hvn, Redliners. Hosts: Ms Myles, Karim Olen Ash, Carmen Madonia (August 24, 2023)

We got there around 11pm.

Upon arrival I imbibed some intoxicants and we lined up to get in. I realized only as I met the bouncer that I’d forgotten my ID at home. I gasped in horror as I realized that I might have to cab home.

The bouncer took pity on me: I’m clearly not underage. I’m almost, I’m basically middle-aged. I can practically see the top of the hill I will soon be over. Had I been cool enough to have sex as a teenager I could have fathered a child who today would be old enough to get in.

The bouncer looked me in the eye, and said: so you’re telling me that you lost your ID inside the club, right? That’s what happened? Your ID is inside the venue? You were here earlier but you lost it inside?

It took me two beats for it to click, and then I blinked, and I said Yes, That’s Right, I Was Here Earlier And I Lost My ID Inside The Club – and he let me in.

A wave of relief washed over me, leaving in its wake a nervous energy. I had had such a big gasp of anxiety that I made a bee line for the bar, to calm my nerves.

We got very intoxicated.

I’d expected to be back at the same warehouse we’d been to in May, but the promoters switched out the venue at the last minute to a suburban banquet hall.

Once inside, it was obvious that it was intended to host dinners, and weddings, and mitzvahs. A large textile covered movable wall separated the rave into two spaces, each with their own DJ and sound system, bottlenecked by a single door frame.

It had a weird energy. The music was top notch. Cool lasers flickered across the high ceilings. Testy-looking euros, clad in tracksuits, obviously related to the normal operation of the venue, worked the exits and gave us mesh-clad queers a bit of side-eye.

Soon hundreds of people would be dancing.

We lingered at the edge of crowd where it was easier to move, far from the front.

At this party I only caught glimpses of her but I’ve seen her dance many times now, both in person and in clips posted online. In my mind’s eye it all blends together.

There she is, right at the front. She’s staring at the DJ, standing so close she could reach out across the table and touch them. She’s up on a raised platform dancing for our entertainment. She’s standing off to the side, near the speakers, cooly pulling on her vape. She’s behind the DJ table, facing the crowd, chatting with a friend.

Like royalty, she is posing for a photo.

She’s wearing short shorts and an ironic cropped vintage t-shirt. Her face is completely painted in gold, and under the billowing black apron she’s fashioned into a dress she’s only got a thong to go with her knee-high boots. She’s wearing a blue mesh shirt topped with a big blue birthday-present bow, and the balloons she was wearing as a bra have since popped. She is completely wrapped in Saran wrap. As she moves, a large novelty plastic butterfly bounces off her chest.

At the front of the rave, by the DJ’s, Carmen Madonia dances frenetically.

She sashays. She twists and twirls. She swings her arms from side to side, and above her head. She folds her hands along her torso, and whips her hair from side to side. She is just getting started. She is slick with sweat.

At these parties, Carmen is a demiurge who through her dancing creates a sacred, healing space. With her movement, her energy radiating outward, she manifests a different, better world.

How else can you describe the scene surrounding us?

Something about that spike in anxiety led me to have a more introspective time. I spent most of the night with my eyes closed, letting the music wash over me, just taking in the vibes.

I looked around, and saw my friends having a great time. L. declared that she wanted to make out with a girl and moments later that is what she did. Everyone was having a great time, and they were having a great time because of me.

I don’t know when this experience became transcendent, but it did.

Moving my body to the joyous sound pumping around me, I came to several conclusions. This is straight from the notes I took on the dance floor:

rave revelations

the world is a better place because i am in it
no one person can fix everything in the world. no one person can fix all of the problems that face us. there is no one solution. but we each can make the world immediately around us a better place.
the world is a better place because my babies are in it. they’re both destined for great things. i need to help them do all the great things they are destined to do.
the world is a MUCH better place because [my partner] is in it. she radiates goodness, she has a light that cannot be concealed. she can shine more light on the world if i am in it.
i am beautiful, and the people who are attracted to me are the good people in this world. being attracted to me is a sign that you are free.
we can’t be free until everyone is free. we owe it to the future to make it a more free place as much as the past gave us the freedom we have today.

Isn’t that cringe? I love it. It actually happened. Who cares about being cringe?

It’s hard to overstate how profoundly healing this rave was.

It didn’t like, fix my mental health struggles overnight. That’s not feeling sad works. But it also kind of did???

In my mind there is a clear before and after this rave, and my partner agrees. I noticed right away, she noticed right away. I woke up the next morning with a spring in my step, and life got easier. My life coach later told me that it feels like I’m operating at a higher energy level.

It’s like I needed to let my brain fry on euphoria for a couple of hours.

Very importantly, this rave also coincided with a developmental shift in the children: they suddenly started playing nicely together.¹¹

My kids went from being able to go five minutes unsupervised without fighting with each other to going twenty minutes unsupervised without fighting with each other. If you don’t have children that might not sound like a big deal but it’s a huge difference. From one week to another, the background ambient stress levels in our house measurably decreased. It got a lot easier to take them solo. Weekends are still not restful, but I can at least read the paper.

I mentioned earlier how I suffered from intersecting stressors. Several of these stressors eased at the same time: it got easier to deal with the kids, and they started sleeping more, so I stopped being so cranky, and my partner wasn’t as mad at me for being mean to them, and I’d been going out and seeing friends, so I had things to look forward to doing.

It’s as if the superstructure of my psyche got shifted, like, 5 degrees towards a more positive orientation.

I wish each and every one of you reading these words could experience half the peace I got from this rave. I got more out of this one party than all of the therapy and counselling I’ve ever tried to do. This rave was like months of regular exercising, daily meditation and a gratitude practice all rolled in to a tidy two or three hours.

I just emerged feeling really good about my place in the world.

Me and two friends are standing together, my arms around them. We're all dressed to go out dancing. I'm wearing a mesh tank top, short shorts, a leather harness and my nipples are covered with electrical tape.

A photo from the party itself. Red lasers are shooting out and you can just about see the outline of a crowd. Everything is slightly blurry.

We went outside to smoke, we went back in, my friends all seemed to be having a blast, we sobered up from our intoxicants, and we were back at N.’s by 3am. Folks continued to hang out on his back porch. A real party to close out the summer. Thinking of the day ahead, when I had to relieve my partner from the kids – and pack for our flight to Portugal – I bid everyone adieu.

As I got ready and crawled into bed, I heard Set The Roof (Miss Jay Remix) ringing in my ears, the chorus and beat drop echoing in the empty halls of my brain.

Raving Is About The Music

This is a good segue. I’ve glossed over it so far, but raving is all about the music.

A good DJ set takes you on a journey across history, genres, and tempos. It builds you up, and tears you down, and does it all over again. Or keeps you on an edge of tension. A DJ set is an active performance, and the best DJs read the energy of the crowd, and change up their mixing to match.

I don’t know how to describe the music, though. For that matter, I only have a faint idea of how mixing works, and what DJs do exactly to the music they play.

And whose music? Who are the artists making the songs being mixed? While you’re at it, how do DJs cop new releases? How do promoters know which DJs to book? Who are the tastemakers? Where do they hang out online? What is the cultural machinery at play, and how do the people who make raves experience it?

I don’t know!¹² It’s still a bit of a mystery, it’s all opaque to me. I now have a bit of felt experience, but only a limited intellectual grasp of the scene. I mostly only see what people post to their Instagram, and I only read what they write in their event flyers.

There are a few reasons for this opacity. Nobody posts set lists, or even set times. When I am out dancing, I’m too busy having fun. Above all else, it’s because I am old, and out of touch.¹³ But I also think it’s a reflection of the death of the open internet? I feel like a lot of these conversations must have moved to private group chats, dms, and discords.

Recently, a friend told me she was going to see Zulan, and that it should be a good time. Who the hell is Zulan? Zulan is a female DJ in her early twenties. She sold out a 400 person venue for how much idk but I saw a resale ticket go for $70. She has 165k followers on Instagram and 370k followers on TikTok. Her videos - all clips from her DJ sets - have millions of views. She’s not, like, a celebrity by any means, but she is definitely a little bit famous.

Judging by her Google results, though, she barely exists. It’s as if no one has written an article on her or reviewed her music. There’s no website with glossy photos, listing tour dates. There is a DJ Zulan in Apple Music but that is an entirely different person from ten years ago. She has posted just one recorded DJ set on Youtube. She seems to exist predominantly within TikTok – and her private discord server.

Compared to how the internet used to work this is super weird!!!

At any rate, this means I’m entirely at the whims of the local scene, the local promoters, the local DJs. I just look up whoever is playing in town, and listen to their recorded sets. Fortunately, they have good taste: they have enriched my life in ways they will never know (unless they read this essay).

Which is to say: if you, dear reader, have firm opinions about THE BEST DJ SETS OF ALL TIME then please by all means share them with me. Send an email to phillmv -at- okayfail.com .

The Best DJ Sets From 2024 That I Have Heard

With that in mind, for your listening pleasure I hereby present, in no particular order, a series of DJ sets recorded or posted in 2024 that I have enjoyed listening to.

Caribou/Daphni @ Lost Island 2024
This set is pretty similar to the one Dan Snaith played on August 16th. I suspect that free pop-up show was a tester. A real trip across genres, mixed in with his latest album.

(Alternatively, if you don’t have Apple Music, see Caribou @ The Cause. I haven’t listened to it yet but tbh Caribou @ Boiler Room: Belfast also looks very good)
Juliana Huxtable @ WHOLE 2024
From cerebral minimalistic techno to baile funk. She played in Toronto for METAMORPHOSIS XV, and the promoters linked to this set.
DJ g2g @ Sojourn 2024
Frenetic, high energy, joyous. They played in Toronto for DANCING FOR HEAVEN, and clips from this set were part of the promotional material.
CoralKILL @ Boiler Room: Austin
Emrys/LAZULI DOLL promoted a show at the Comfort Zone that CoralKILL headlined. I didn’t go, but it piqued my interest, and so I listened to this set. It’s a good time.
Charli XCX @ Boiler Room: PARTYGIRL
2024 was undoubtedly the year of Charli XCX. I myself am not a big Charli fan, but she has an undeniable charisma. We lived through brat summer. She wasn’t powerful enough to get Kamala into the White House, but y’know, such is life.

The thing about Charli is that she came up through the rave scene in the UK, and her ascension to the top of the mainstream made 2024 a propitious year to get into raving.

Raving was briefly in the zeitgeist. Maybe that’s what I picked up on.

The album as released has its moments, but I think to truly understand “brat” you need to watch this set. It was recorded in February, and album itself didn’t drop until June. Here you can tell “brat” was made for remixing. In a single hour-long set, Charli teases her upcoming songs without spoiling the actual release, mourns SOPHIE, spotlights a single by Julia Fox, and has AG Cook and George Daniel take over the decks.

As joshhart775 wrote in the Youtube comments, Charli was

Born to be a rave dj, forced to be a pop diva

It’s very good, and avant-garde, and noisy, and fun. Ironically though, in my humble opinion, of all the sets I’ve listed here it’s the hardest one to listen to. It’s kind of like, a particular moment in time.
Litney @ DANCING FOR HEAVEN Pride 2024
Litney opened for DJ g2g’s show on Nov 30th, and I thought she was so much fun that I looked her up. There’s this one specific moment (at 18:20) that I love, where she plays a remix of Tinashe’s “Nasty”. I’ve heard it played two or three times this year, but I’ve not been able to track it down.

What’s special about this remix is that it turns a sultry, slow paced, R&B mid-chart hit into an incredibly fun and empowering reclamation of the word freak:

Is someone going to match my freak?
Is someone going to match my nasty?
I’ve got stamina, they say that I’m a FREAK
[repeating on the beat] FREAK FREAK FREAK FREAK

Who hasn’t worried if there is someone out there who will love you? Who hasn’t felt like a freak some times? Hell yeah, I’m a freak.

Maybe it hits different for straight people.
Young Teesh @ Boiler Room: Toronto
Young Teesh is so good! There’s this moment early on, around 6:00, where she turns a baile funk track, isolates a sample, loops it, and then drops into the next track. It’s a lot of fun.
BAMBII @ The Lab LDN
This story is a sign of how uncool I am. If you thought I had any claim whatsoever to being in touch with the underground, allow me to thoroughly dispel that notion.

We had just strapped the kids into the car, and started driving home from grandma’s, when we turned on CBC Radio 2. A programme highlighting this year’s Polaris Prize nominees was on, and it was playing through BAMBII’s Infinity Club in its entirety.

I used to be the kind of person who diligently listened to the Polaris Prize long list, so I could tut-tut, and judge the short list’s choices. Now I’m not, who has the time? This chance encounter was my first introduction to BAMBII.

I know, I know, ugh! The CBC? What’s next, getting music tips from Margaret Atwood???

When WICKED GYAL came on, I immediately became obsessed with it. It’s so good. It’s dirty. It’s kind of threatening. It feels extremely Toronto. To go by the radio hosts, BAMBII is the patron saint of Toronto raves. The hosts had many other interesting things to say about Toronto’s party scene, and the importance of raves to the queer community, but since there is no transcript I can’t be arsed to quote them here.

The album’s good, but short. I felt a need to look up more of her sound, and found this set she recorded in March. It slaps. It’s very good. It’s got a bit of everything.

METAMORPHOSIS XIII: Quetamine, Rata, Cal Trax, Zellers (September 13, 2024)

After the transcendental experience I had at PHILLRAVE2, I started to feel a need to go dancing. Something broke in me, something special happened that night, and I wanted to come close to experiencing it again.

I felt this desire to go out, and I wanted to figure out what I liked about it.

I saw this event get cross-promoted, and I said, sure, why not. The music seemed appealing, the venue was nearby. My partner graciously agreed to take the kids in the morning.

Also, it was another T4T rave. All the DJs, and most if not all of the organizers, were trans, and it’s meant to be a place for trans people to hang out, to do their thing.

I figured this was a chill and low-stakes event for my first solo rave, and I was right.

Not having a crew to pregame with, I arrived early.

It was sparsely attended, which is normal for 1030pm, though even at its peak it never got packed. There’s not that many of us – and it wasn’t the only queer rave going on that night. Earlier that day, I had briefly experienced FOMO about a larger Pep Rally rave happening at the same time. I was nervous about going all by myself, and it felt too hard hit up a large party.

I didn’t quite understand yet that I enjoyed dancing. Was I going to like the music? Was I going to have fun? Was I going to feel weird or awkward? By the end of the evening I’d had a few drinks, and a joint, and found a way to lose myself in the music. I had a few really great moments just grooving it out.

The music was good, and the night low-key. I quite enjoyed Zellers and Quetamine’s sets. The venue was pleasant, on the smaller side out on Geary. As to the crowd, looking around, I mostly saw coy twenty-somethings year olds looking for a safe space to be themselves in. Lots of enbies and trans boys, suspenders and white shirts. Two trans women in their thirties made out. A fellow wore fox ears and had a tail that glowed vibrantly in the dark.

I thought it was cool to be in a space with so much freedom. What a beautiful event. How wonderful and unique this space is.

Typing this out, it occurs to me that for some people starting out it might be the only place they feel comfortable expressing their identity. It’s one thing to be in a majority-queer space. It’s a whole other level to be in a majority-trans space.

I called it a night around 130am and minutes later I arrived at Gus Tacos, where I sat on a stool, munching on a quesadilla, smiling at my reflection.

Raving Sited In Its Context: An Economic Analysis Of The Material Conditions Of Dancing Given Long Term Trends In Redevelopment And Land Use Policy

Nah, I’m fucking with you.

This is the kind of thing I used to spend a lot of time writing about, as a hobby.

Right now I am trying as best as I can to not think about it because I know it would make me feel sad. That’s why I’ve even avoided saying much about the venues, the physical spaces these events take place in. I know these buildings are all owned by local tech mega millionaires and real estate developers and trust fund kids.

It’s too obviously transient, ephemeral, temporary.

I am plagued by intrusive thoughts, though. An idea, unwanted, will pop into my head: what if I used most of my life savings and used it as a downpayment for one of the last remaining suitable commercial buildings and turned it into a dedicated queer venue/nightlife spot?

I don’t have the time or energy. I don’t have the relevant professional experience, I’ve never worked a bar. I understand that in practice it’s actually a minimum wage job you work twelve hours a day at. I’ve read my jwz, I know you spend most of your time dealing with plumbing issues, that insurance is a nightmare, that bylaw enforcement is impossible.

It’s a huge money pit.

But it’d be cool, right? Someone’s gotta do it.

BAMBEENO (Bambii + Young Teesh + Nino Brown + Special Guests) (September 28, 2024)

After hearing about her through the CBC, and really enjoying her album, and then listening to her set at the Lab LDN, I felt pretty excited to see BAMBII perform. A few weeks later, she promoted this birthday party on her insta, and I convinced L. and Os. to join me.

Long story short (lmao), the night before the party I broke a toe in my left foot. It sucked. It was extremely painful and swollen. I couldn’t bear to squeeze my foot into any of my shoes, and could only wear sandals.

I still went.

I had built it up in my mind. I wanted to go out dancing with my friends. I felt extremely disappointed that I might not be able to go. I decided that if I kept the weight off that foot I could still enjoy myself, do a little two step.

L. and Os. were troopers. They kept their reservations to themselves. They were like: ooookay buddy, whatever you think is best, we’re here for you 😬😬😬.

With the understanding that if anyone were to step on my injured foot I would fucking die, right then and there, on the spot, we cabbed over and arrived just before or around midnight. We had an okay time, it was fine, it was… an experience.

It left me wondering: are the kids okay?

The crowd skewed young, gen z, early to mid twenties. The minute we set foot in the venue we raised the average age by a few years. It was still relatively queer, but there were definitely more straight people than I was used to. Later, we stepped outside to cool off and take in the scene, and admired our fellow audience members.

A few things jumped out at us. Os. observed that the youth were not in sync with each other, whether in style or in movement. The young adults around us all looked like they had grabbed a random assortment of clothes from their parents’ closet; there was no obvious fashion subculture. And everyone danced to their own beat, in their own way.

Back in Os.’s day, oh fifteen plus years ago, going to the club was an exercise in knowing the latest dances. The idea was that the whole dance floor would, in unison, Crank That Soulja Boy, or Pop, Lock and Drop It, or do the Harlem Shake. For generations people went out to vogue, to twerk, or to do the twist, all together, as a group.

These days everyone is an individual.

This extended to the music. Some guy was DJ’ing when we got there, but it sounded like someone was anxiously skipping through a Spotify playlist. You like this song, yeah? WELL, what about this totally different song then? A chorus would hit, the song would play for a minute, a minute and a half, and then – boom, next song, across genres, across time periods, zero effort to mix anything together.

I’ve been told The Youth enjoy it because it’s how they consume music, alone in their bedrooms, chatting with their friends on discord and snapchat and tiktok and what have yous. As an Old Person it was jarring and alienating.

Out on the dance floor, things were worse. I finally understood what K. had alluded to back in May. Nobody seemed to be here to dance, or even to have a good time. They milled about, looked for their friends, and jostled for position. People were here to be out, for its own sake, to be seen going out.

This is an exaggeration, but it felt like people spent most of their time looking at their phone.

At one point, shockingly, someone standing on a little platform turned on her cellphone flashlight and used it to scan the scene around her. When you’re adjusted to the darkness, it hurts to have a bright light shined in your eye. But she wasn’t looking for a friend, or for an item dropped on the floor. She was livestreaming the show on tiktok or instagram or whatever. I couldn’t believe it. It was so rude and disrespectful.

What would possess you to do that?

In everyone’s defence, this event was billed as a birthday party. So maybe that was the scene: a party! You go to a party to see and chat with your friends. The music is almost incidental. It’s quite likely that we were interlopers with weird expectations.

Anyways, eventually BAMBII took over and she killed, as she so often does. We got to dance for a bit before going home, and I hung up my dancing shoes until my foot healed.

Berghain / Kater Blau (November 3, 2024)

Berghain, for those who are not in the know, is the kind of night club where you can line up for hours and hours and, when you finally get to the front of the line, the bouncer will glance at you, ask in German how many?, and then shake his head and say no, and point you away from the line.

That’s it. No hard feelings. You’re free to try again tomorrow, or once the bouncer’s shift is over. Once it opens on Saturday night it does not close again until dawn on Monday morning, or something like that.

However, if you do get in you will find yourself in a temple dedicated to a) techno music and b) having a riotously gay time. For a DJ, getting to play there is a career accomplishment. It is a cultural institution, both figuratively and legally.

It’s a whole thing.

We went there because V. was speaking at a conference in Berlin, and she asked if anyone wanted to come. Five of us joined her: K., L., F., C. and myself.

I had a really good time on this trip. Berlin is a beautiful city, and we ate wonderful meals. The Germans are a funny people, they contain multitudes. They clearly love both following rules in an orderly fashion but also letting their freak flags fly. I enjoyed tempting them into jaywalking.

I also very much enjoyed how tall their women are. In Toronto I’m taller than most men, never mind women, but next to the towering amazons of Berlin it felt like I didn’t stand out. Out on vacation I had time to put on a bit of makeup every day, and this trip coincided with the first time laser hair removal had left me without a noticeable beard shadow. Already a vain creature, I spent the week admiring myself in mirrors and reflections and selfies.

Who is she?

On this trip I “passed” for the first time. A bathroom attendant, seated next to the men’s, took one look at me and pointed me down the hall towards the women’s. It’s such a trivial moment, but it felt great, I was immensely pleased. Can you imagine? That such a simple gesture can leave such an impact on a stranger.

Later, we’d go to museums, monuments, and restaurants, and I wandered around the city, and met with local coworkers. But our mission was clear, and our hearts were pure. The conference, the sight seeing, that was all fine, but the group chat was named “berghainers”.

Due to our awkward timing (we arrived on Sunday and left on Friday) we only had one shot. F., C., L. and I were on the same flight. We arrived at noon, dropped off our bags, ate, freshened up, got dressed and headed out to Berghain via the subway around 6pm. V. and K. would join us later.

We waited in line for what turned out to be a good half hour. At first we were jovial, tired from our flights but excited to be out and about. The woman in the straight couple in front of us whined about wanting to get in before she turned fifty. The line snaked along a metal railing that ran towards the entrance. I stretched my neck, and went for a casual walk up and down the line. A goodly percentage of people were being rejected.

What was off about their vibes?

There was no apparent rhyme or reason for who got turned away. A beautiful woman walked away, fuming on her phone, while a frumpy looking fellow in a baseball cap got in.

Different websites speculate on the rules or offer advice on how to get in. Don’t wear colours. Wear sensible shoes. One comment I read, somewhere, proved to be the most illuminating: they’re looking to see if you’re going to fit in with the party that is happening inside.

Dressed in our winter clothes, the bouncers had no means of judging us except by reading our auras.

As we approached the front of the line, the mood shifted. We stopped chit chatting and spoke in whispers if at all. C. said it felt like a funeral. People put their phones away, and we stood quietly. I was ever so slightly under dressed and began to feel cold. Since they apparently don’t like large groups, we pretended to be two groups of two. Silence reigned. They make you wait a bit before they make a decision.

The couple in front of us was turned away, it was finally our turn.

I breathed to control my nervousness, and projected my best nonchalance: Who, me? I don’t need to dance here. I am good either way.

~~I stood there and served cunt. And I ate.~~

The bouncer asked L., and she replied “zwei”. He paused for a single beat, said OK, wait right here, and then pointed us in the direction of the security screening.

Behind us, F. and C. were immediately rejected. This was a bit sad, but our plan had been to roll with the punches. A couple hours later, V. and K. – who arrived to find no line up at all – were also rejected. We speculated that L. and myself were the queerest looking of our group. Before we’d arrived, V. suggested that I was the most likely member of our group to get in: Berghain is a queer-oriented club, and in its early years was a gay male hang out.

A picture taken from the line to get in to Berghain. The building is in the background. It is night time and you can see a long line up of people.

A picture of me, after we got back from dancing.

It turns out that I’m queer enough for Berghain. Who knew?

We giggled as we walked in. Holy shit, we got in!¹⁴

A very nice man in the security filter emptied my pockets and placed stickers on all of my phone’s cameras. Was this my first time? OK, so, if the stickers fall off, no problem, come and see us – but we will throw you out if you take pictures. I paid my 26€ and received my wristband and then we were in the coat check line.

People around us rapidly shed their clothes. Underneath my coat I wore a tank top over a mesh shirt and tights with shorts; soon I felt over-dressed. The vibe had flipped completely. Everyone was giddy, and wore a big smile – and barely anything else.

You can’t really talk about Berghain without talking about its architecture. All happy warehouses are alike, but Berghain truly is unique, and it couldn’t exist anywhere else. Who would build it? It’s an absurdity. Before it was abandoned, the building, made to colossal dimensions, served as a coal-burning power plant. Huge concrete structures, clearly meant to hoist industrial equipment, dominate the entrance to the first dance floor.

Sixty years ago John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev feuded so that today we may party.

The interior is a maze, or at least it felt that way. Getting around was complicated by the fact that the place was packed, surprisingly so for a Sunday evening, with over a thousand people dancing and milling about. We got drinks, and roamed the place, and got lost. There are three dance sections with different vibes on different floors that you can access through different staircases. Everywhere the exposed metal and concrete and the industrial scale of the environment contrasted with the soft flesh on display.

And what a display, what a party! It was a real bacchanalia, in every sense of the word. It was wild, a feast for the senses. Most people wore hardly anything at all. One of the bartenders was simply naked. Fetish gear abounded. On the third floor, there were these little nooks where people were having sex. Out on the second floor’s dance area, again so completely packed with people you could hardly move, I saw two women who had been kissing spontaneously join a group of three men who had been kissing.

The air was thick with tobacco smoke, and the ground covered in broken glass from beer and club mate bottles – which was utterly disgusting, the only sour notes detracting from the otherwise incredible atmosphere.

As to the music, eh. I think I discovered that I don’t like techno that much? There was hardly any room to dance. L. had a good time, the music was more her style. We were in there for three hours, and I don’t think the bpm ever changed. Just a constant endless oontz oontz building anticipation that never resolved.

After being turned away, K. and V. had retreated to the nearby Kater Blau. Feeling like we’d gotten our fill of the place, we left Berghain and joined them.

Where Berghain is industrial and gothy, Kater Blau – a sprawling wooden shack on the waterfront – felt more slacker bohemian. People wore hoodies and their normal street clothes. We stood out in our all black getups.

I’m glad we went: we caught the tail end of DJ Lilli Move’s set, and for that one hour I danced more vigorously than all the time we spent at Berghain.

Feedback And Suggestions For Rave And Party Organizers Should Any Happen To Read This

More parties should tape attendees’ cell phone cameras. There is something really cool about being forced to be present in the moment.
Make codes of conduct, and expectations, more explicit, by telling people about it at when they walk in. You can do it while taping up their phones.
Record more sets! I’d pay extra to end up with a recording of the night I can listen to later.
More events ought to aspire to “dress to sweat”, seeing that in an event description makes me irrationally excited.
Y’all are wonderful and I love you.

Blocking Out The Angels (PHILLRAVE3)

I roped in H., a new friend from work. I had sat next to her at a coworker’s going-away party at a Korean bbq, and by the end of the meal I was like: you’re cool, let’s hang out more.

A couple times she’s suggested that I join her heels dance class, which I thought was a) incredibly flattering, and that b) I am not powerful enough to get away with it. I am simply not gay enough (yet) to try to move that sexily while surrounded by cis women. One day.

We convened at N.’s house. H. joined myself, V., K., L., R., and Gh., and later Os. met us at the venue. Pre-gaming and dolling up now took on a kind of ritual feeling. H. was very good at directing us how to pose for pictures:

A picture of me. I'm posing sexily, wearing a white mesh top, with a black leather harness, and black shorts with a black belt and black tights. My nipples are crossed out with xs but I drew those in later, in an image editor

A picture of me and my friends, dressed to go out dancing. Everyone is dressed sexily.

Where K. was the seasoned veteran, the (relatively) sober boyfriend, the Rave Dad, I took it upon myself to be the Rave Mom.

I had researched and ordered vitamin supplements for the night ahead and, aware that people often forget to protect their hearing, I liberally distributed pre-packaged earplugs from a giant box I had purchased from Amazon.

I had last purchased earplugs eight or nine years ago, and had finally run out. Looking around for a new supply, I came across a review that clinched the deal.

As a way to bless our evening, right before we called our cabs, I commanded everyone’s attention and performed a dramatic reading:

Heather from Canada wrote:

I’m an incredibly delicate sleeper and have been using earplugs for about 30 years. No matter what I buy, the process is always the same: roll it up tiny, bend my ear in 12 different directions trying to shove it past the curve, realise it isn’t blocking noise, rip it out and try again, rinse and repeat until the earplug no longer squishes down at all. If I’m very lucky, occasionally I’ll get it in so far that it blocks noise perfectly, but then it hurts so bad I can’t sleep. Presenting me with a Sophie’s Choice of either enduring the increasingly nightmarish ear pain, or trying to sleep with my tender drums exposed to the godawful symphony of night like a medieval peasant.

I know good earplugs exist. Every time I’ve had an MRI the ones they give me are perfect. Firm, easy to roll, turn soft in your ear canal so there’s no pain, and they block noise amazingly well. I’ve asked techs, doctors, and staff where they get them, but nobody ever knows. They just appear out of the ether from the perfect earplug dimension. Sometimes they’ll send home with a few pairs, though. The sleep I get those first 3 weeks after an MRI is amazing.

Last month I bought this giant box so I’d have enough to last me a while. The minute I opened the first pack I knew I’d found them: my orange whale. All my earplug dreams, realised. There’s a choir of angels singing and I can’t hear a single note. I could sleep through a plane crash. I no longer want to kill the flock of Canada geese that lives behind my house. I even slept through my cat horking on my blanket.

I immediately threw out all my other pairs. They’re dead to me. This box of 1100 foam plugs is now the most important thing in my life.

TL;DR A++ 5 stars.

Format x Pep Rally: HERRENSAUNA with CEM / MCMLXXXV / TYGAPAW / Chippy Nonstop / Measure Divide (November 22, 2024)

Examining the flyer, I had guessed we were in for a night of (Berlin-themed) industrial techno. After my experience at Berghain I wasn’t super keen but – whatever. I was keen on going out with friends. The night’s theme was “sex siren”.

We arrived sometime before midnight, and before the warehouse had that many people in it. In the late November chill I felt cold so scantily clad. We proceeded to get very intoxicated, and tried to get our dance on.

I didn’t really enjoy the first hour or two. As expected, the music wasn’t super my vibe. It felt stressful to listen to. I felt anxious, somehow. I tried, and tried, but I couldn’t really get into it. And the crowd… the crowd was not really what I had expected.

To be fair, we’d had some warning. The description said:

This event is a collaboration with Format, [a non-queer promoter] so it will be a mixed crowd, so keep that in mind.

I guess I’d never been to a non-queer rave before, so I didn’t know what to keep in mind. Later, Gh. said that it had seemed queer enough to her: there was no shortage of gay men making out. Various members of our crew would report that it felt like many other club or dance floors they’d been to. But here and now the energy of the crowd felt different, it felt off.

For one, people (mostly men) kept bumping into me.

That’s hardly uncommon on a packed dance floor but there was an aggressive edge to it that I didn’t appreciate. It seemed to be happening more often than at previous events. We’re not stage hogs, we were nowhere near the front. And yet as I tried to focus on the music I felt much more interrupted as people (mostly men) went back and forth, to smoke outside, or hit the washroom, or I guess try to get closer to the stage.

For another, we had to be more situationally aware.

Some dude tried to put the moves on Os., and she wasn’t into it. We had to like, dance around her to shield her from the guy. The other women in our group took this as par for the course, welcome to womanhood, it’s like this everywhere. It simply felt taxing to worry about our crew, to actively check in, and interpret complex social dynamics while wasted.

There were just way more straight people (men) around. Are the straights OK?

Eventually, around 1230 or 1am, the DJs switched, and the music was much more my speed. Most of our crew peeled off to go home, but I finally got to be immersed in the music.

I closed my eyes, and got my dance on. I went home around 230am.

Trans Joy, Spirituality, and The Manifestation of Freedom

On November 20th, two days before the Format x Pep Rally rave, the Trans Day of Remembrance was observed.

Tapping around on Instagram, I came across a speech by the trans performer and writer Alok Vaid-Menon. It’s a wonderful speech. I won’t quote the whole thing, but here is a snippet:

I feel undone by the irrevocable fact that the people we love die
and that society is structured in a way that refuses to talk about it

it’s easier to play pretend, that we are immortal,
that we are proud, that we aren’t lonely

I believe unprocessed grief is the fuel of homophobia and transphobia

behind every bigot is a broken heart

because we have no spaces to grieve and be witnessed in our pain,
we take it out on ourselves and on one another

[…]

so that when they see us, gender non-conforming people,

we who make freedom real
we who remind the world that heaven is a practice, not a promise

they have to reckon with a crucial distinction between life and mere existence,
confront the fact that the walking dead is not just a tv show – it’s a lifestyle

it is easier to demonize us than it is to feel the pain
it is easier to say that we are dangerous than it is to
confront the intimate danger right there in your home

from the people who try their best to destroy you and call it love

For two days two lines from this speech had been ringing in my ears:

we who make freedom real,
we who remind the world that heaven is a practice, not a promise

I felt it did a wonderful job of capturing the spiritual dimension of our experience. Where we exist, freedom reigns. Where we move, the light bends towards a more caring and just society.

It’s no surprise that fascists target us first for destruction. We are symbols of love, joy, and kindness. By simply existing we show that there is an alternative to submitting to their misrule.

As I’ve mentioned earlier trans lives are often portrayed as tragic, almost doomed, quests for tolerance and acceptance – but I think that is merely a reflection of the discrimination we have faced and continue to endure.

I’m not going to lie to you, there are downsides to being trans. I am, certainly relative to my old self, much more vain and obsessed with my appearance, that is true. Becoming trans has definitely increased the amount of anxiety I experience, and that anxiety has increased dramatically after January, 2025.

I am also incredibly lucky and privileged. While I am no longer on speaking terms with my dad, I have yet to experience any real hardship or harassment from my queerness. I have a wonderful spouse who loves me, two healthy kids, stable housing, close friends, and a career in a high-income profession.¹⁵

However!

The thing about being trans is that being trans is great. It’s incredibly joyful. It’s fun.

On good days I wake up and examine myself in the mirror, the morning light pouring in through our bedroom window, and I’ll think: who knew I could look and feel this cute?

Who knew that was a thing I’m allowed to do?

I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I have access to a wider range of emotions. I have a deeper understanding of human sexuality. I feel more attractive. People show me kindness in ways they never did before. I feel good about myself in ways I didn’t know were possible. I live in a state of grace.

Why would anyone want to take that away from me? Why would you deny that from anyone?

Dancing at the rave on November 22nd, finally enjoying myself near the end of my night, I opened my eyes and looked around me. In this whole sea of people, where a majority of the crowd were men, I found myself ringed by women.

A dozen women, of one sort or another, formed a circle around me.

It’s not like I was the centre of attention, quite the opposite. (I swear that I am not an egomaniac!) To my left, I observed a very butch woman very pointedly look away from me, as if she was making an effort to ignore me. Behind me a gaggle of straight women were almost entirely concerned with taking selfies.

Governed by an invisible law of statistics it’s probably not unlikely for something like this to form spontaneously, somewhere, in any given crowd.

It just felt very noticeable, I took note of it. Wasted as I was, in that moment, Alok’s words echoed in my mind: we who make freedom real, we who remind the world that heaven is a practice, not a promise.

It felt as if my presence, my dancing with abandon, had manifested a safer space, a space where we all could be free – and that is what had brought them near.

Dancing For Heaven – dj g2g, RICO RICA, LITNEY, HVN, Ard1n, Chinelo, SEXMP3 (November 30, 2024)

I’d had an OK time at the Pep Rally event but I was left feeling a bit unsettled. It was as if I hadn’t gotten enough dancing in. I had all this pent up dance energy and it needed to go somewhere.

I’d listened to DJ g2g’s set from the Sojourn festival, back in July, and I thought they were incredible. I was pumped about the music but I’d been hemming and hawing about going buying a ticket.

Due to some quirk in our overly burdensome licensing bylaws, promoters often don’t announce where the venue is ahead of time; I was weary of committing to potentially traveling back and forth across the city. I also felt that getting another morning off from childcare in back to back weekends was Asking For A Lot. But my partner gave me the green light, and when I messaged the promoter they promised the venue was in the west-end – so I said fuck it.

I bought a ticket. This set in motion what would end up being the most fun 24 hour period I experienced in 2024.

By coincidence, a friend of mine was throwing a Christmas cocktail party. We got a babysitter and my partner and I we drove to his apartment. There I had a very pleasant time seeing old friends and enjoying a few drinks. After an hour or two my partner drove herself home, and around 23:30 I called myself a cab.

I arrived at exactly midnight. The music was a jam, and the venue, a former auto body shop? on Geary, was bumping with maybe two hundred people. The crowd skewed young, around 25, and was maybe 40% queer. Lots of gay boys and straight couples making out, girls leading girls by the hand. A gaggle of trans women danced as a friend group.

I had a fucking incredible time. I found myself dancing as soon as I got there, and on and off I danced for about 2h45m. Litney’s set was so good, a lot of pop-oriented fun. DJ g2g was amazing. The music was high energy and infectiously joyful. It felt like the music was speaking directly to my muscles, and the beat was pounding movement into my soul. I moved my body, and I felt a sense of connection.

I had a therapeutic experience at this show. The event description read “dress to sweat”, and it delivered. By the end of the night it felt like a rhythmic sauna.

For the entire following day, it felt like I had stretched an especially important muscle that runs down my spine. I had a spring in my step. I found myself on the verge of dancing at any bit of stray music. It felt like I was unusually in sync with my body; at my Sunday night ultimate frisbee game, I played one of the best games of the season.

I went home just before 3am, slept for about five hours, showered, briefly kissed my kids goodbye, and then hopped on my bike and went to meet up with V.‘s birthday celebration. She’d rented a van and took a dozen of us on a gastronomic tour of Scarborough. It was tremendously, delightfully fun.

Because I’d gone from party to party to party the whole day gained a dream-like quality.

Vibing In Queer Spaces

Listen, I’ve been gay for about five minutes. What do I know? Not much!

I’ve never seen people walk at a ballroom, or attended a support group, or gotten drunk at a sapphic strip club night. I’ve marched in the parade, but just barely.

On the other hand, I’ve navigated straight spaces all my life and ever since I became visibly queer I’ve felt very aware of all the ways I don’t fit in. As I write this it is almost spring 2025, and since my inaugural rave described above I have now been to seventeen raves, dance parties or DJ shows.

Here is a vibe for downtown Toronto in the mid 2020s:

In queer spaces there is less tension. It feels like a safer, more chill environment. People are there to be out and about, to have a good time, to be themselves. It’s a milieu where people feel free to authentically express themselves, to wear their heart on their sleeves, but which also has a lot of respect for boundaries and consent.

The men don’t seem to be bubbling with unchecked aggression in quite the same way.

The most palpable difference, in my experience, comes down to how space on the dance floor is negotiated. I feel like I am simply given more room to move to and fro. I can take a step without immediately bumping into somebody. It’s as if the people around me are more careful, and letting me be.

I don’t think that’s necessarily universal, or a rule. It depends on how packed the venue is, the mixture of the crowd. Berghain was utterly crammed full of people and we were elbow to elbow the whole time. It’s just a vibe.

Here is a means of contrast.

In January 2025 I went to a Jamie XX DJ set, Chinelo opening, where the crowd was definitely mostly straight. For most of the main set I happened to stand in front of a guy who stood perfectly still the entire time. Arms crossed, rigid and unmoving, he seethed at me whenever I violated his personal space.

A week later I attended a party that I worried might turn out 80% gay male and which to my surprise and mild horror ended up being 95% gay male.¹⁶ The promoter oversold the show, and it was packed to the gills. Parallel to the party’s sexual hierarchies, I felt like a piece of furniture.

I tried to stay out of the way, but for the two hours I spent there, in their quest to be closer to the action – closer to the other sweaty, shirtless men – shirtless man after shirtless man kept respectfully, disinterestedly, but firmly nudging me, bumping into me, or gently moving me out of his way, much like you would move an inconveniently placed chair or table.

I did not enjoy the super gay male party; they prevented me from dancing, and I emerged from the experience a staunch believer in lesbian separatism.¹⁷ Yet, I never felt unsafe. I was annoyed but there was no tension. I felt more uncomfortable around one single dude at the Jamie XX show than I did from all the gay guys who were trying to move around me.

Now I am very curious about what a predominantly femme space would be like. Those parties exist, but they seem to be way less common than the gay-man or mixed-queer-space shows.

On an intellectual level what I enjoy the most about queer spaces is how crystal-clear the politics are.

This isn’t to say there isn’t conflict or disagreement. Queers love having different opinions, splitting hairs. Do you know how many gay flags there are? There are a LOT of gay flags.

Overall, though, these disagreements feel… sectarian at best. Leninists squabbling with the trotskyists, who are arguing with the anarcho-syndicalists. In 2024 you could find on DJ’s profiles and in their stories exhortations for freedom, for justice, to save the Congo, to save Gaza, to end the war in Sudan.

Overall, there is very little ambivalence or ambiguity about where the right side of history is. It feels plain to see:

No one of us can be free until everybody is free.

In a world filled with doublespeak and insincerity and evil – it’s a breath of fresh air, it’s invigorating.

METAMORPHOSIS XV: Juliana Huxtable, Marnigurl, Ms.Myles, Zellers (December 21, 2024)

I don’t remember why I wanted to attend this party, only that I had the opportunity to do so, and that I did. It was giving good vibes, and the line up seemed rad. At the time I assumed this would close out my year. I’d already started writing this essay, and thinking more carefully about what it is like to go dancing.

Going to a T4T rave was also a wonderful pretext for meeting up with A., a fellow trans woman I met on Mastodon,¹⁸ at a wine bar across the street from the venue.

She sat down across from me and immediately started explaining in great detail arcane differences between two obsolete programming languages. For marketing purposes, I occasionally position myself as something of an expert in computers but I know true greatness when I see it. I sipped my wine and basked in her presence, and we hopped over to the rave closer to midnight.

We caught the tail end of Zellers’ set. I have immense respect for his poise, his choice in music, and the fact that he seems to be the driving force behind these particular T4T raves. What a service to the community. I salute him.

We took in the audience. The venue was half to two-thirds full and there was great pleasure in people-watching. It’s incredible to be in a space that is not just queer but predominantly transgender.

Your assumptions are turned upside down and inside out when the average person in a large group is trans. A. and I joked about “cisvestigating” the crowd: Is that man cis? He seems too comfortable here. Is he an egg, or just with his girlfriend?

Juliana Huxtable took the stage. I had no view of the DJ table, but she is supposedly a wizard, mixing across four decks simultaneously. Despite not being super into techno, I felt she laid out an incredible minimalist techno set that I greatly enjoyed. Marnigurl followed up, and matched Juliana’s energy quite well.

We danced and danced and danced. Eventually we both got tired, and A. and I parted ways shortly after 2am.

What’s So Great About Dancing Anyways?, And How You Too Can Dance And Improve Your Mental Health For Great Success

What’s there to say about dancing? To dance, you just gotta:

Find good music
Play it loud¹⁹
Focus on the sound
Move your body in any way it feels good to move

I am not trying to be facetious, but that’s it, that’s all it takes, that’s the whole trick.

I’m not saying it’s easy: it took me five or six raves to figure this out. But I’m very happy that I did: I genuinely think it’s made a huge difference to my mental health.

Honestly, it’s better than therapy. It’s healing.

It’s like a palate cleanser for your mind. When I’m down in the dumps, when the world is weighing me down, when I’m stuck in my own head – getting a good dance in provides me with a much needed reset. These days I find that going out, whether by myself or with friends, and dancing once every 3-4 weeks keeps me afloat in a way that no other intervention has.

When everything lines up, dancing is very meditative. It might be helpful to think of it as literally a form of guided meditation, but with a thumping beat instead of an ASMR whispery voice leading you through a body scan. The music and the way I am moving my body – what is happening right now – occupies the whole of my attention. It feels like my whole being is acting in concert.

OK, so, let’s unpack this. Let’s take it step by step. How does one dance?

For starters, only you can judge what makes music “good”. Earlier in this essay I provided some DJ sets to choose from but it’s entirely a matter of personal preference. It has to be fun, for you. It has to make you want to move your body. What works for me might not do it for you.

All I really know is that around a certain bpm, with a certain kind of melody and rhythm, it begins to click, and I can vibe along with it. My friend K. has a theory that everyone is born with a bpm their brains are tuned to, and it’s all a matter of finding your bpm.

If you don’t find yourself nodding along, then it’s not good enough. Keep looking.

It’s OK if things don’t click right away. Not every song in a set is a banger. I find that I have to “warm up”. I let myself wallow in the sound for a bit, let the beat percolate in my brain. After about fifteen minutes I’m feeling looser, and limberer, and more ready to dance.

When it comes to dancing, the movement itself, I feel like the important part is moving in any way that feels good to move. You have to lose yourself in the sound, and let your body take the lead. I find it helpful to close my eyes. “Dance like nobody’s watching” is a dumb cliché but it is also REAL. Loosening up is a lot easier if you’re a bit wasted but it’s probably not a hard requirement.

Fortunately, you can do this from the comfort of your own home. You can dance by yourself, alone in your bedroom with the door closed. All you really need is a pair of good headphones.

When I dance, I focus on the beat, the beat beat beat beat, the beat beat beat beat, and I start to sway my body along to it. It can take a minute before the beat starts to cut a groove inside my head. I direct all of my attention to the sound, and I start to anticipate what happens next.

I become absorbed in what the song and the DJ are “doing”.

I don’t have the language, the understanding of music theory, to describe it, but a melody might repeat for so many bars, and then cut to a different melody, or rhythm, or whatever. Where is the DJ taking us? Are they mixing in a a different song, fading in a different tempo, or getting ready for a beat drop? A good DJ set builds tension and releases it, and starts over again, and when it is mixed well you can hardly tell how you ended up at your destination.

Once I’m in the zone, this feeling of anticipation, of being fully immersed in the sound, can be a significant source of pleasure. Here’s an example:

Early on in Marnigurl’s set on Dec 21, 2024 she put on a pulsing techno track with a vocal element that just repeated the single word “purpose”. Purpose purpose purpose purpose, purpose purpose purpose purpose. It’s on a lower bpm than I usually enjoy, but I zone in. That single word floods my brain:

What is my purpose? What is your purpose? What is our purpose?

I take a half step to and fro, in time with every other beat. I don’t know what it is about the rhythm, or the melody, or whatever, but I can feel this tension, this stress, building in my body, in my shoulders. I have to move my arms to relieve it. I reach for the sky, and I wave my hands in the air. The pressure keeps building.

When will this pressure release?

I sway, I oscillate, I move my arms above, in front, and around my body. In the space between me and every other body, in the flashing darkness, I do what feels right to do, what the music moves me to do.

Eventually, the beat drops, the next song is mixed in, and I am filled with relief, a sense of joy, euphoria. In these moments I am entirely present. I enter a flow state not unlike the best parts of playing sports, or having sex, or even the hyperfocus I sometimes get when programming or making art.

When I am in that flow state, it’s as if the music is interacting directly with my emotions. The running negative commentary in my head shuts down. I feel the joy from the rhythm and the melody coursing through my body. Everything feels connected. Being present, being entirely in the moment, feeling like you’re in communion with the people around you.

Occasionally, a negative feeling, or memory, or an otherwise intrusive thought will pop up: is someone staring at me? Am I doing something wrong? What about that thing, that argument, that encounter, that conflict, that happened earlier?

In this state I can hold space for it. The negative feeling washes over me as I return my focus to the dancing, and the euphoria. This is the healing part. It’s as if it helps me process negative emotions.

It’s like it charges up a battery. It puts me in tune with my body. It clears my mind. It feels like my brain is a piece of dirty laundry being vigorously scrubbed against a washboard. It resets my emotional state. It’s like a kind of exercise, but for your nervous system: your whole being has been moving in sync, in a way that it is not used to. It brings life into balance. The day after, I feel light-footed, and calm, liable to jig if I come across a lively tune.

At its peak, it’s like I’m breathing in light into a chamber that is normally kept dark.

Every now and then someone at a rave will approach me and say something nice about my dancing. (My partner says I’m a very good dancer, but she’s biased). I love and crave external validation, please compliment me at every opportunity, but every time it catches me off guard. It feels a bit baffling, I was the opposite of whatever a “dancer” is for too long. It’s not like I am moving with any kind of intentionality, direction, or coordination. There’s no aesthetic consideration. If anything, I am trying to really hard to not think about how I look.

I’m just moving how my body wants to move. I dance because it feels good. I imagine this is what people are picking up on. Maybe it’s just fun to see someone else have fun.

Why did it take me so long to figure this out? How did this powerful yet readily accessible experience escape my notice for all of my twenties and most of my thirties???

It’s not like they invented raves yesterday.

Before, I guess… I just didn’t enjoy being perceived? I felt awkward. I worried too much about how I came across. I never got a break from the running negative commentary: Do I look goofy? I’m so uncoordinated. I hate dressing up.

Is this how you dance? Will the girls like me? Is this too effeminate?

Do I look gay?

I really do think a low-key homophobia played a role. In some aspects, cis het masculinity is defined in contrast to the femininity it dominates, and it’s very scary to step outside of its tightly scripted boundary. (Being un-masculine can be so threatening to other men that sometimes they’ll enforce this boundary with violence).

Will I be rejected? Will anyone love me? Will someone try to fight me?

Then I started transitioning, and two things happened:

I wanted to look more feminine. That’s the whole point. It stopped mattering if people thought I was gay. I’m inescapably gay now. I’m turbogay
I got a lot of practice in not caring about what other people think

I was very nervous the first time I put on a bra, and stepped outside. I had been thinking about going on estrogen, and I wanted to know what it felt like to move through the world with breasts before I grew them myself. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remove my facial hair, and so I needed to know the difference between looking “fruity” and looking undeniably gender-non-conforming.

It took effort.

I had to intentionally ignore a lot of ideas I had learned about how to navigate the world, ideas that screamed at me that what I was doing was wrong, or shameful.

I quickly discovered that the vast majority of people are busy minding their own business 🤷‍♀️.

Something similar happened with dancing: it’s fine if I look goofy. No one cares anyways. Lots of people find me attractive.

Above all else: this is fun.

NYE… for the lovers – ARIEL ZETINA, AFTRMTH b2b KUSCHELN, CHINELO, GRRLCRRSH, MARNIGURL, OMG.BLOG, PHILLIPPE. Hosted by Dylan Glynn, Fan Wu, Jeremy Laing, Lena Petersss, Ms Myles, Nicoy Davin, Rico Rico, and Solar (December 31, 2024)

In the post-holiday haze, after so much time cooped up inside with the kids and seeing family and so on, I felt a need to move my body. I’d had a wonderful time two raves in a row, and I felt like… ooooh I could squeeze another one in. I saw a couple folks cross-promote this …for the lovers’ rave, and I said sure, why not.

The event description read:

Join us, body to body, beat to beat; two rooms of sounds, sights, and feelings for queers and their guests. Femmes to the front; boys, make room!

What better way to send off the year?

First, my partner and I went to a new years’ eve party. We got a babysitter, and biked downtown in the lightly misting rain. By this point I was well underway writing this essay, and I couldn’t help but talk about it with my raving friends. Chatting with Gh. I told her about how I was reflecting on my experience, the joys of dancing, approaching it as an outsider, etc.

I mean, what even is the difference between a party and a rave? I haven’t figured it out yet. Who can say?

Gh. brightened, and told me about a book she’d read: Raving, by McKenzie Wark, a media studies professor who turned trans in her fifties and then really got into the scene. According to Wark, the difference between a party and a rave is that raves are for people who need it.²⁰

I experienced a tingly feeling of recognition. Oh, yeah, that makes sense to me. I might be in that category, the people who need it.

I also felt slightly annoyed at being “scooped”. I thought I was daringly writing an overly-long outsider’s take on discovering raving within the queer community in middle age, blah blah gender, joy etc etc, but noooo.

This biddy wrote a whole book before I even went to my first rave. How dare she! 😝

My partner and I bid our friends adieu, and biked home shortly after 11pm. I got dressed and hopped in a cab, where I celebrated midnight, and arrived at the venue at 12:04.

I checked in my coat and sniffed around. The venue, a former warehouse, had been split into two rooms, and hundreds of people milled about and danced and chatted. Satisfied with the vibes I headed towards the smoke pit to have a joint. It was quite cold, wet, and uncomfortable.

A fellow asked me for a lighter, and I obliged. We started to chat but he struggled with English. Recognizing his accent, I suggested we could try in Spanish – but I warned him that my Portuñol wasn’t very good. Oh! he replied, he had spent a year in Portugal, so that was no problem. We began communicating with perfect comprehension, code switching between English, Portuguese and Spanish. His name was Jan?, he was from Argentina, he had been in Toronto for a couple of months, he loved the music.

With a twinkle in his eye, he asked: ¿Qué pensaste de Juliana Huxtable? Increíble cómo usó cuatro decks para mezclar, no?

I blinked. We had both been at the same show ten days earlier. I was wearing basically the same outfit, lol, and he had probably recognized me the moment I lent him my lighter. In fact… had I danced with him at the DJ g2g show?

I started to shiver, so we headed inside. We took our first selfie of the year. I wanted to catch Marnigurl’s set, and we headed to the larger room. Jan made a beeline to right in front of the crowd, and found us a spot right by the DJ table. There we caught the tail end of Chinelo’s set (very good), and watched Marni set up.

I’d never been right at the front before. I’d expected to get shoved around but in this crowd - clad in mesh and neons and shiny, a rough gender parity prevailing - I was mostly given the space I needed.

I knew this was absurd, but I felt a weird kind of responsibility being up so close to the DJ. Hundreds of people swayed back and forth behind me. I was a speck in an ocean, but I was used to being completely invisible speck. What if I harshed her vibe? I closed my eyes and tried to zone in as much as I could.

A dolled up sparkle demon, with a fulsome beard and glittery eye makeup, emanating very powerful vibes, danced just behind the DJ table. He approached me to say something like, “I like your dancing, you can tell you’re into it!”. I later found him on Instagram:

A screenshot from Instagram. A blurry picture shows a headless torso wearing a sparkly dress and pink high heel boots. A caption reads: I'm the sparkle demon at the rave. no my heels will not slow me down. yes you are beautiful. yes i love u

At some point Jan went and got a drink, and then so did I, and I lost track of him. I didn’t feel like shoving my way back to the front, so I didn’t, and I found a different comfortable spot mid-crowd.

I danced.

I had a pleasant time. I wish I had chatted more with folks. I didn’t vibe as hard as I had before, but that’s okay, not every set or party is going to connect with me at a deep level.

At some point, around 2ish, I opened my eyes and looked up. As folks peeled off to their next party the room had somehow become majority gay men. An ocean of shirtless men undulated around me. It was time to go home.

A new year had begun.

Yes, I know what that sounds like, but I promise you it’s not drugs. ↩
While writing this essay, I skimmed through the List of feature films with transgender characters from Wikipedia, and I feel like I took psychic damage from doing so. For decades (decades!) our only representation on film was as a by-word for freak, psychopath, or tragedy. Even in sympathetic films (Transamerica, Everything About My Mother, See You Then, Emilia Pérez) trans women are often dead beat fathers. ↩
I remember when this song came out, and feeling personally called out:

Now the kids are all standing with their arms folded tight
Kids are all standing with their arms folded tight
Well, some things are pure and some things are right
But the kids are still standing with their arms folded tight
Arcade Fire, Month of May (2010) ↩
I am not a part of the drag community, but my understanding is that when a drag queen looks so fabulous, so powerful, so gorgeous that she passes for a ciswoman, she is then “serving cunt”. Any gender can “serve cunt”, as long as they look fierce and confident. ↩
A “doll” is a femme trans woman. ↩
It was always a fantasy, even back in the good ol’ days. There’s something quite broken and insidious about how a lot of beat journalists simply turned to their mentions in order to drum up quotes for a story. The tiny fraction of humanity insane enough to spend time on Twitter has always been extremely unrepresentative of people at large. ↩
I’m not sure I identify as a “real woman”. Can someone explain to me what, exactly, a real woman is? ↩
It is a terrible sin to make a child: where before there was nothing, now there is a vast capacity for suffering. This is the true reason why babies emerge screaming. ↩
Once I realized that skinny black jeans were flattering they became the only kind of jean I owned. I bought a couple pairs every year or two, and called it done. I did this for ten years. ↩
Up until very recently trans (and, to a lesser extent, gay) acceptance has been contingent on a particular medicalized narrative. Don’t hate us: we’re born this way. Once you realize you’re trans there’s a kind of pressure to interpret your experiences through a lens of gender dysphoria and fit yourself to the “in the wrong body” narrative. I’m not super into it, I don’t know that it applies to me. I much prefer the angle of trans joy. But it’s easy to interpret this experience under that lens: maybe I just hated looking like a man, and didn’t know it. I didn’t even understand what part of this experience felt bad and stressful. ↩
Kids do that, they go through these sudden developmental leaps. One day they are non-verbal, and the next they spit out a few syllables. One day they use two and three words at a time, and then suddenly they speak in full sentences. ↩
I’m sure I could figure this out if I approached it as a research question. I could probably just ask someone. Is there a Raving Weekly Magazine that publishes coveted year-end best-of lists? Probably. It just hasn’t come up organically. It’s just not getting linked to. ↩
This insanely long essay notwithstanding, I don’t have a lot of free time. Once the kids have been put to bed, doing the dishes, and reading a little bit from a book is often all I can do before passing out. ↩
I thought it was extremely funny that within my first year of raving I ended up going to Berghain. It’s like I discovered that I like rock climbing and then a few months later I find myself going up the Matterhorn. ↩
I do worry that, in their rush to obey and conform to the current fascist turn, the industry will start discriminating against me, but while I am sure I have reduced my access to new lucrative opportunities I’ve yet to feel the impact. ↩
I’d never been in such a male-dominated space before, which for someone who works in tech is saying a lot. I marvelled at the drag queens hanging out, and I thought: on some sort of gender spectrum you and I are kind of alike but also extremely different. ↩
I gotta start training my voice, so they’ll accept me on the island. ↩
Isn’t that a wonderfully 2024 sentence? ↩
Don’t damage your hearing! I extremely recommend wearing earplugs when going to shows. ↩
This is a half-remembered second-hand anecdote, so apologies if I got the phrasing or attribution wrong; I’m intentionally avoiding reading it until I’m done writing this essay. ↩

# 2025-03-24

Phill Mendonça-Vieira

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