“It’s shocking how hard you have to work to make it look like you’re not working that hard,” Rae Abunahla, better known by his DJ name Bootycornfed, tells me. If Abunahla’s DJ name doesn’t ring a bell, you might at least know the fast-rising party collective he runs with his friend and creative partner, the photographer Albert Hoang, brazenly called Gay Rights. As provocative as its name is the collective’s ethos and mission, succinctly stated in their Instagram bio as “reviving queer club and rave music in the heart of Toronto’s village.”
Days after Abunahla and Hoang spoke with LIMINUL, the weekend found me lining up at the doorstep of the gay bar Crews and Tangos for the eighth volume of Gay Rights, their Halloween party, startled and charmed by my capacity to still be excited by Toronto’s village scene. This would be my second time at Gay Rights; the first being Volume 7 at Cafeteria, the social club on Dupont in September, which remains a fizzy pink blur in my memory. Much later, long after the lights in Crews turned off, the doors closed, and we all went back to the regular routines of our everyday lives, I would find myself walking down the street, or through a subway tunnel, when, in the throb of whatever music was blasting through my AirPods, I would be transported back to moments from that Halloween night. Me, Lois Griffin again, in an orange Amazon micro-bob and vintage Prada frames, gyrating up a storm across the three dancefloors of Crews. A dim room with red lighting at the DJ setup and the impression of a cauldron. The most titillating remix of Toxic by Britney Spears coming down from the sky like the voice of a god.
Since their first event — Valentine’s Day at Boutique Bar — back in February this year, Gay Rights’ ethos of making the village a “destination” again, as Hoang describes, has propelled the collective. Over the months that followed, the collective seeped into the social grapevine in name and image, steadily growing into a community touchstone charged with full, fresh verve. In virtue of this, Abunahla and Hoang place Gay Rights at the intersection of camp, sex, silliness, and a kind of future-oriented nostalgia rooted in the iconic history of partying in the village.
“We never wanted to take ourselves too seriously,” Hoang says, “so I came on, and this became a kind of creative landscape, like a place of play for me.” Freed by this kind of groundlessness—or rather, limitlessness—in refusing to take themselves too seriously, Hoang, whose photographic practice is shaped by tenderness, romance, and the melodramatic, has developed an eye for moments on the dance floor where beauty, the melodrama of being queer and in relation with other queer bodies, and the silliness that comes naturally to queer expression converge to produce snapshots that verge on the surreal. Take, for instance, a picture from Gay Rights Volume 8 of a performer throwing her leg up and her head back as she lands in a dip, as if at the behest of the commentator screaming praise at her. At the front of the crowd beside the dancer, two people dressed as Alfredo and Remy the rat from the movie Ratatouille watch aghast. Remy, in a grey rat onesie, holds up a giant purple papier-mache penis like a sword, as though to knight the dancing girl. Amid the general chaos that Gay Rights defines itself in, Hoang pries out little dramas, parables, and myths of queer feeling and being such as these.
For Abunahla too, refusing seriousness and even presupposing failure as part of the campy, silly, “stupid” aesthetic opened the door to the creative leaps and bounds that Gay Rights has since become known for, and which their party-goers anticipate with each volume. “This is a testament to creative work in general,” Abunahla says, “the whole Nike ‘just do it’ catch phrase. Because telling ourselves that this party is silly, not meant to be taken seriously, and was trying to be camp on purpose allowed us to experiment and do things on the fly and not be scared to do it, even though it is scary. Whereas I feel that people often get stuck in this trap of, ‘Oh my God, I have to create and it has to be perfect.’ And it’s like, no girl—just put on the green screen suit.”
True enough, with the same camera and editing laptop, Gay Rights leaped from its first promotional video featuring Abunahla walking around the Village in a leather jacket, black underwear, and block heel boots to minute-long satirical short films, which make room for a cast, musical interludes, and the ever-poignant moral lesson.
In all this, the medium returns us to the message: this party, drawing its power from the archive itself, extends the unapologetic, insubordinate spirit with which LGBTQ+ people have struggled—and continue to struggle—for their rights, freedoms, and pleasures in a world so deeply opposed to their existence. Considering the tenets of community-making and ‘sisterhood’ coupled at the core of this message, no wonder there seems to be no shortage of people wanting to volunteer to star in a Gay Rights promotional. No wonder, by the time Abunahla and Hoang sat down for our interview, Volume 8 had already sold out online. “We do promo for social capital, to sell tickets,” Hoang says, “but we’ve already sold out. So this promo is just honestly for the LOLs.”
Keeping with celebrating queerness, gayness, transness and the entire identitarian spectrum at their most overt and uninhibited, Abunahla makes the important point that Gay Rights operates outside the New Age club music in the realm of “gay club pop music with lyrics.” As the collective’s premier DJ (he only started DJ-ing in August last year), he dreamed up Gay Rights via a mimetic formula of comparing and contrasting Toronto’s gay party scene with other places he visited. “I didn’t really see the style of music I was playing in the city,” Abunahla says, “stuff that was relevant to our pop culture, that you could shake your ass to but also sing along to. Then, notoriously, our Village scene in Toronto is not as vibrant as some of the other cities. Like London, Berlin, or even New York, they have it popping. They may not have it in their central Village, but every time I go, I’m so inspired, like, why don’t we have this in Toronto? I also found that every time I was playing in Toronto, especially for a gay crowd, they were so happy to hear refreshing music; still gay and still pop culture relevant, but just modern, harder, clubbier. And I was like, we should just throw a party.”
How does one begin to write about an event which, at the moment of its creation, is already gone? Pounding music, beautiful people, bodies surging and jerking together, DJs lording from their booths like deities in the heavenly order of gay nightlife. One of the beauties of Gay Rights, as with any event of pleasurable queer expression, is that nights like those exist at a vanishing point. Time is always hurtling toward that inevitable moment when the lights come back on, or when a friend buckles under a wave of nausea after one too many Cutwaters, or—as in my case—when the tendons in your legs start to cramp from the nonstop jumping, stomping, and kicking on the dance floor.
I call this beautiful because the party does not end there; it simply transforms into ephemera, what José Esteban Muñoz calls “the gesture and its aftermath:” a thin but certain trace in the sway of a hip, the swish of a step, the curl of a vowel, the sureness with which we go out into the world after a night like Gay Rights. This trace, this living in the wake of euphoria such as that which Abunahla and Hoang are making space for in Toronto, means we must return to the event of pleasure to reinscribe it into ourselves. Partying, in this way, matters. For many, Gay Rights — like collectives such as Pep Rally, Ya Tab Tab, and Dancing for Heaven — carries a material importance for a community that is compelled to perform its daily life simply to exist comfortably, and must therefore also perform and imagine the lives it longs for through performance.
“The point of [Gay Rights] is to elevate the Village, and that might not be forever, unfortunately,” Abunahla says, on a more serious note, taking stock of how many businesses the Village has lost in recent years — and those teetering on the brink. Between rising rents and redevelopmental pressures forcing establishments in the Village out of business, he speaks to the precarity of Gay Rights’ mission and, specifically, to the need for Toronto’s queer community to continue showing up for themselves in virtue of their long, community-driven history. “Queer people invented good parties,” Abunahla says, “so where are they? Ballroom for instance. You don’t hear ballroom in the Village, but ballroom is a very historic gay environment, space, and sound. So why isn’t it celebrated? Why isn’t it spotlighted there anymore?”
Yet even within that uncertainty of landlords, closures, and a Village increasingly shaped by people who do not live or love within it, there is something insistently hopeful about what Gay Rights has already made possible. By hosting a party in the name of hard-won pleasures and freedoms, in the ritual circuit of continuously returning to the site of that collective struggle, Gay Rights affirms a community that refuses to be erased; one that not only bears to be reminded of where it comes from, but must also generate the capacity to support and define itself in that vein.
If the Village is changing beyond recognition, then Gay Rights seeks to be a safeguard against which queer people understand why the Village came to be in the first place; a designated space in which to gather in the most unruly, excessive, and tender fashion without being exposed to the predatory grips of social hegemony. The lights will always come on. The night will always end. But so long as the gesture and its aftermath — the trace — lingers, the community finds its way back to itself, on the dance floor, where, as Abunahla puts it, “we’re trying to minimize the straight activity.”
Jonathan Divine Angubua holds a Bachelor of Arts degree with concentrations in Political Science, History, and Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of fashion, he is most inspired by strangeness and beauty.