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The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for “stranger intimacies,” and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on “everynight life” through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists. The book’s four sections move temporally from preparing for the night (how do DJs source their sounds, what does it take to travel there, who promotes nightlife, what do people wear?); to the socialities of nightclubs (how are social dance practices introduced and taught, how is the price for sex negotiated, what styles do people adopt to feel and present as desirable?); to the staging and spectacle of the night (how do drag artists confound and celebrate gender, how are spaces designed to create the sensation of spectacularity, whose bodies become a spectacle already?); and finally, how the night continues beyond the club and after sunrise (what kinds of intimacies and gestures remain, how do we go back to the club after Orlando?).

2026 Dance Studies Association de la Torre Bueno First Book Award Shortlist Finalist

In 2015, Mexico City declared itself a “gay-friendly” city and followed up with a gay tourist guide and new laws permitting changes to gender markers on legal documents, sanctioning same-sex marriage, and allowing joint adoption of children. At the same time, patterns of violence and discrimination against women, trans, and queer people have continued throughout the country. In Queer Relajo, David Tenorio argues that while Mexico City aims to bring visibility to queer sociality, the benefits of legitimizing queer space remain unclear. 

Combining readings of film, digital media, and performance with drag autoethnography, Queer Relajo quite literally plays with how relajo (or playfulness) structures the spaces of queer nightlife in urban contexts by revealing how nighttime intimacy can minimize the paralyzing effects of violence and precarity in a neoliberal Mexico. Considering the political implications of when a queer/trans person is present at night, Tenorio argues that queer feelings of play are not only essential to sexual liberation, but also resist neoliberal commodification and heteronormative extraction.