International Playground Collective

While pedantic, it’s important to state that, with CGI worldbuilding, there really is no world being built, only hacked dioramas that disappear as soon as we look away.

It’s easy to feel stuck between straight clubbing’s policing of norms and hostility towards otherness, and the sort of commercialised gay culture represented in Manchester’s gay village or London’s Soho, which has coalesced around its own set of norms, aesthetics, and assumptions, which are often no less strictly enforced. DIY collectives are fundamentally built on pluralism, by coalitions of individuals who can acknowledge their collective needs and dreams, while understanding and embracing their differences. The dynamic inherent to clubbing in general is that we, as consumers, pay to enter into a culture that’s dictated by those that hold the purse strings. But by offering a clear route of empowerment to ownership, collectives and co-operatives also empower us to create the culture, from the ground up. It’s only in this way that the idea of queer community, with its specific connotations of togetherness embracing difference, can be genuinely meaningful.

A city doesn’t have to be thriving economically for scenes to emerge (New York in the 1970s: highly creative but crime-ridden and shabby). It just has to be a place where creative people can afford to live and work, where they feel free, and where there are common spaces for them to gather (bars, restaurants, bookshops) and to see or hear each other’s work (galleries, venues, museums).