Long Live Queer Nightlife! (Amsterdam Edition)

Far from the gay bar with its largely white, gay male clientele, Long Live Queer Nightlife describes a dazzling scene of secret parties—club nights—wherein culture creatives, many of whom are queer, trans, and racial minorities, reclaim the night in the name of those too long left out. Episodic, nomadic, and radically inclusive, club nights are refashioning queer nightlife in boundlessly imaginative and powerfully defiant ways. Drawing on Ghaziani’s immersive encounters at underground parties in London and more than one hundred riveting interviews with everyone from bar owners to party producers, revelers to rabble-rousers, this evening we dive into the shimmering world of queer urban nightlife.

About the speakers

Amin Ghaziani is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia, and a NIAS alumnus. He is the award-winning author of The Dividends of Dissent, Sex Cultures, and There Goes the Gayborhood? (Princeton). His work has been featured widely in international media outlets, including the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, USA Today, and British Vogue.

Haroon Ali is a freelance journalist for de Volkskrant and writes a weekly column for Noordhollands Dagblad. In his book Half, Haroon explored his own conflicting identities, as a Pakistani-Dutch queer ex-Muslim. He also made the documentary The M-word, about homosexuality within Islam, for which he won a Tegel. Ali was also named Star of the Future by the COC and received the Rising Star Award at the Pan Asian Awards. His second book Spectrum, about the diverse but also divided rainbow community, was published at the end of 2023. He was recently appointed the new ambassador of Pride Amsterdam.

Jan Willem Duyvendak is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Since 2018, he is also director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (NIAS-KNAW). In 2021, he was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and in 2022 of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.