Queer Nightlife, co-edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Rámon H. Rivera-Servera, has been selected as a finalist in the LGBTQ Anthology category for the 34th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. Lambda Literary champions LGBTQ books and authors, and this year’s finalists were selected by a panel of over 60 literary professionals from more than 2,300 book submissions—the highest in Lammy Award history. Queer Nightlife (University of Michigan Press, 2021) is a collection of essays and interviews that “celebrate the expressive possibilities of a world after dark.” Finalists and winners for the 34th Annual Lammy Awards will be celebrated in an immersive virtual award ceremony on Saturday, June 11th, hosted by drag queen and visual artist Sasha Velour.
More on the book
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 Nightlifeextends 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?).
Listen/Watch
You can listen to an interview with Kemi Adeyemi and her co-editors about the book on New Books Network; or watch this conversation with Kemi Adeyemi and Kareem Khubchandani, who were back-to-back recipients of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) Fellowship, awarded to scholars poised to make a significant contribution to LGBTQ Studies.
In the News
Prof. Adeyemi is quoted in a March 2021 Seattle Times article on the history of local LGBTQ nightlife and the struggle of clubs to stay afloat during the pandemic: As Seattle’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues face closure, the community could lose crucial safe spaces.