Kissing Kens

Between pounding red lights and slick, sweaty bodies, I find respite. A space wherein the darkness I can move unnoticed and unpoised. Going out “to be gay”, as Jeremy Atherton Lin would say, is my ritual of rejuvenation, and without it I am pent.  

Night cultures fostered my understanding of queerness, expanding how I express gay identity through movement. The queer techno community of 160k, formerly Poing (RIP), Mono, and Time is the New Space—clubs from my usual home back in Rotterdam— wrapped me in a more radical expression of self through the body. Queer identity here is fostered through more than sex, but something spatially and sonically relational. A time, place, and sound that enables expression in opposition to heteronormative standards. The liminality of night cultures is where we can detach ourselves from the everyday, indulging in the darkness as a space of freedom to aberrate from (in my case) CIS male convention, without fear of judgment or persecution. Movements through dance in a queer club are released from heteronormative guidelines; techno environments where unrestricted bodily expression cultivates a moment of respite from the otherwise poised presentation of the everyday self. 

 You don’t have to talk, you just know. You want to dance for hours and hours and make the feeling last…You can share something without talking about it, and you can communicate on different levels. 

Christina Goulding, “The Marketplace Management of Illicit Pleasure” (2008).

Coined by Manuela Piccolo, ‘night culture’ as a reframing of nightlife is a term intended to normalise clubbing and raving activities as forms of cultural expression similar to perceptions of a Victorian-era ball. Such activities are now approached more cautiously, associated with danger, thanks to what some call ‘centralised’ clubs. Zones undefined by a particular culture or community that invite not a diverse but an enforced normative and heterosexual/patriarchal context to clubbing. It is these same connotations that I think confuse many when they hear my relation to night culture as a space of self-care. When I tell people here in Sydney that I enjoy clubbing, alone or even sober, there is a sort of ghastly reaction. “Whoa, could never be me” sort of sentiments. Admittedly, solo/sober outings are not completely common, even back in the Netherlands, but the larger aversion to clubbing as a casual form of going out intrigued me, specifically among younger queer people, with clubbing and techno holding such a historic relevance in the queer community. 

Instead, the Sydney youth night culture gravitates towards Newtown, popular with queer 20-somethings and teens. Similarly, these bar-centric spaces cultivate a community of thriving queerness under the influence of live music, drag, and alcohol-induced convo. Clubs, on the other hand, are perceived as more of a one-off excursion, an occasional foray. In Australia, rising costs of alcohol and associated increases in drug use, early closing of public transit, and internet-driven expectations of clubbing are in part to blame for this reliance on bars as young queer hubs instead of clubs, but so too is the environment of these spaces. 

Sydney during the 1960s/70s sexual revolutions saw Oxford Street transformed into the gay centre of the city, with the inaugural 1978 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras cementing this. Further still, the city is, in my perspective, a globally renowned LGBTQIA destination thanks to its famous pride events, beach lifestyle, and known ‘Gaybourhoods’. A holiday or home for both international and Australian gay men.   

Gay men's position within patriarchal and capitalist embraces, however, has granted us representation and power within such mainstream integration in the city. Oftentimes, our privilege gives us more allowances and a perception of normalcy as compared to other LGBTQIA communities. Sydney's centrality on gay men as examples of progressivism and pride can be seen to have divided the community between what some call being culturally Gay versus culturally Queer, with gay men neglecting the radical histories of queerness as they are embraced into larger society under the auspice of the corporatised masculinity.  

Such is exemplified in the gay clubs, populated predominantly by richer, mid-20s to middle-aged white men cruising for a make-out or illicit intimacy. As crude a description as this may be, my first stop in what I thought was queer techno night culture (as opposed to the also very fun pop-centric clubs like Universal or Stonewall) was at Flash. Offering three floors of clubbing, two dedicated to techno/dance music, I was thrilled. The air inside drips with perspiration, heavily scented by overheated bodies. The muggy din shrouding illuminations of shirtless torsos outnumber those clad in clothes, and at every turn on the dancefloor, another couple or throuple kissing, hands clasped at the hip or around the neck. It was exhilaratingly gay. Spurred on by the beats, I too enjoyed my night, occasionally indulging in the sexual propositioning of the club kiss as well. 

As fun a space as it may be for some gay men, myself included, the audience and rumoured lack of AC—to promote said shirtlessness (so I've been told by a resident DJ)—imitates a male fitness advert mixed with a club. A space with few deviations from the idealised masculine form and presentation. Almost plastic in its manufactured replication of heteronormative patriarchal gender expectations. 

This can in part be related to a post-AIDS body ideal, which stigmatises and distances itself from gay bodies of “fragility”, reminders of the visible sickness caused by the epidemic. In response, muscular fitness and extreme wellness cultures became new standards. Physiques built from the sculpting of the body away from a stigmatised gay and into these built clone-like forms. In Sydney specifically, where I've found visual cultural capital is gained not so much by style (as I am used to), but rather, the display of the body, this is further prevalent. The beaches, fitness lifestyles, outdoorsy vibes, and hot weather in general perpetuate the exhibition of the body as a vessel of societal aesthetic appeal, perhaps more so than other places. Even Palms, an Oxford Street club popular with the gay Bears, I found to be similarly focused on exhibiting a shirtless homogenised physique as the normative bodily expression. Centred around such ideals, clubs become spaces of fraternisation and peacocking of these sexually standard/stimulative bodies, and less about the expression of identity.  

Combined, the impact of AIDS and Sydney's body-centric culture has created a club atmosphere of what I call ‘Kissing Kens’. Environments of (hyper)masculine manufactured bodily exhibition and intimate motivations in a space that has otherwise historically been a space of queer movement and release. Such differentiation between gay and queer spaces is further promoted by the patriarchal prevalence of our position, one that lets us be queer but not so alternative to be pushed to the periphery. Whilst these gay clubs cultivate a tight-knit community, they seem to have taken ownership of Sydney's techno landscapes that elsewhere have been used by a larger queer community to find release from heteronormativity and social expectations. Now these night cultures are enforced through a new homosexual body exhibition standard. The aversion by other young queers to clubbing as a form of release is thus unsurprising, as the dark spaces and trancelike liminality of the dance floor hold a different intention in Sydney. One bound less to what Glencross describes as follows:

Reverberations of industry presented in a techno track […] provoked deep revaluations of the nature of repetitive labour, of hedonism as a healing power in a post-industrial society [...] Offering an expression and a reconciliation of our ideas, the dancefloor—at its best—remains a site of reflexive praxis and transformation.

Admittedly, these environments are not new. Douglas Crimp’s Disss-co (A Fragment) (1975–76) explores the popularity of NYC gay clubs like Flamingo, whose exclusivity and secrecy were staples in gay rituals. Gay Bar Why We Went Out (2021), by the aforementioned Jeremy Atherton Lin, similarly divulges some gay clubs and their proliferation of gay standards and cruising environments (not to say cruising and propositioning kisses are bad, just that they have become central in the techno music scene as opposed to dance/expression). It is in this text that he references this idea of going out “to be gay”, where, in a space relinquished from straight expectations, you may act unabashedly queer. 

Whilst I struggle “to be gay”, or express queerness, in my respective manner amongst the ‘kissing ken’ crowds of Sydney's gay techno scene, such spaces do and have always worked for a certain subset of gay men. Sydney’s Newtown night culture may just be the space for alternative queer praxis and transformation that I am merely not accustomed to. Perhaps then it is not my place to divulge or recommend a solution. Rather, my hope is that this investigation can incite reflection on the environments these clubs invite/exclude. Examining how gay men uphold patriarchal standards and assimilation into heteronormativity over queer cultures and expression, and calling to action perhaps others to reconnect with night culture as alternate opportunities to release. Divulge in the darkness and its freedoms as a chance to dance and to move in ways beyond that of kissing kens. 

Maybe then gay clubs can hold an olive branch, an invitation, to the rest of Sydney's queer communities to enjoy the praxis and transformation of the techno dancefloor.