of The Dividends of Dissent, Sex Cultures, and There Goes the Gayborhood?. 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.
Ghaziani applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked a Revolution, and reported the following:
Imagine that you have handed me years of journal or diary entries. Now, watch as I select one random page from among the hundreds that animate your life. I say to you, “I wonder if I would get a good or a poor idea of the whole of your life from this one page.” How would you respond?Visit Amin Ghaziani's website.
I am delighted about the publication of my new book, Long Live Queer Nightlife. Unlike an essay or academic article, the format of a book invites the writer, and the reader, into a collaborative, long term, slow-mo relationship with a set of ideas. For me, this includes trying to understand why LGBTQ+ venues are closing around the world, how local governments are responding, moving from City Hall to the streets and asking people about their impressions, strategizing about how to exploit the structural weakness of capitalism, sharing personal experiences of exclusion from my life, connecting those experiences with the specter of non-belonging that the 112 people I interviewed bravely shared with me, seeing how queer creatives cultivate nightlife scenes defined by intentional inclusion and an intersectional queerness, and emphasizing the life-enhancing and deeply political virtues of joy.
Page 99, by itself, cannot possibly let you see or feel these powerful sinews of nightlife, particularly the underground scenes where I take you in the book.
Still, the page is interesting on its own. It involves a discussion about the Joiners, a legendary pub in East London that closed. What happened to the Joiners was not an isolated incident but, rather, part of a systemic threat of redevelopment. On page 99, you can appreciate my commitments to shifting from deficit and decline (an emphasis on closures) to asset (accenting strategies of preservation and creation). One approach that activists are pursuing, as you will read about on page 99, is a planning principle called “Asset of Community Value.” The listing gives activists priority to purchase the building and to determine its future use. Their goal is to reopen the space as London’s first community-owned and community-run pub.
Whether you start on page 99, the beginning of the book, or jump elsewhere into it, I hope you enjoy the party—and understand afresh why queer nightlife matters.
--Marshal Zeringue
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