Far from the gay bar with its largely white, gay male clientele, Ghaziani travels underground to a dazzling scene of secret parties, called “club nights,” where culture creatives, many of whom are queer, trans, and racial minorities, reclaim the night in the name of those too long left out.
From 2006 to 2016, the number of LGBTQ nighttime venues in London, a global capital of finance and culture, declined by 58%, falling in number from 125 to only 53 remaining venues. An audit by the mayor’s office showed that this closure rate compares with 44% of all nightclubs and 25% of all pubs. Thus, while all nighttime venues are struggling, the impact on queer spaces is more dire.
In Long Live Queer Nightlife (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr Amin Ghaziani argues that bar closures disrupted the field nightlife and consequently encouraged the visibility of other forms of fellowship. The idea of a “disruption” is shared among organisational, social movement, and cultural sociologists. It describes an unsettled moment of time, either anticipated or unexpected, that alters our routines and the ideas we take for granted. In these moments of disruption, new possibilities arise for how to put the pieces back together. To see how this happens, Ghaziani asks not only why gay bars are closing, as others have, but also how people are responding. How is nightlife changing? How is it persisting?
Join the conversation, a book launch celebration with Dr Amin Ghaziani, to find out why and how this is happening in London—and around the world.
Meet the speakers:
Dr Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is also co-editor of Contexts, the public-facing periodical of the American Sociological Association. Dr Ghaziani is the award-winning author or editor of six books, including The Dividends of Dissent (Chicago), A Decade of HAART (Oxford), Sex Cultures (Polity), Imagining Queer Methods (NYU),and There Goes the Gayborhood? (Princeton). His work has been featured widely in international media outlets, including The New Yorker, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, USA Today, and British Vogue.
Dr Ryan Centner is a sociologist, a geographer, an urbanist, and a development scholar whose diverse research portfolio revolves around a core interest in urban transformation at the nexus of social, spatial, and economic change. He focuses on how the built environment as well as people’s conditions and experiences are linked together, always with a view to how shifting broader projects and circumstances mediate these.
Dr Jana Melkumova-Reynolds is a cultural sociologist whose research straddles together theoretical and methodological approaches from the social sciences and from the arts and humanities. Her areas of expertise include time and temporalities, cultural production, material and visual culture, and disability studies. Her work in these areas is underpinned by feminist and queer epistemologies and methodologies. Embodied and emplaced, it is rooted in phenomenology and draws on affect theory and ANT.
Professor Suzi Hall is Professor of Sociology at LSE and Head of Department. Her research and teaching explore the intersections of global migration and urban marginalisation. Suzi’s focus is on everyday claims to space and how political economies of displacement shape racial borders, migrant livelihoods, and urban multicultures. She is author of The Migrant’s Paradox (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) and City Street and Citizen (Routledge, 2012).