Tracks Queer Immersion, by Sally Andarge

One of my most memorable new experiences when I first got to college was going to Tracks for the first time. I remember being nervous and not knowing what to expect, especially considering the way my parents had conditioned me to believe that queerness was sinful growing up. This semester I went back to Tracks Night Club for my Queer Immersion experience and am so glad I had a good foundation in queer theory this time around. As strange as it may seem, it felt as though I could recognize a lot of the common themes we had discussed in class this semester.

            One of the first things that I recognized this time around when I entered that space was how hypersexualized everything felt. One thing that I recognized was that the sexualization occurring was very different from the “vibe”, for lack of a better word, that I’ve seen in traditionally straight spaces. Although, I recognize that this may just be a result of my newfound awareness of societies hyper-sexualization of queer folks, I believe that the expressions of sexuality and sex positivity were very intentional. When I first walked in with my friends we saw that the main dance floor faced a stage where there were two people dancing. They would sing along as popped, locked, and dropped to the beat of the song. I noticed that they were dressed in clothes that left a lot of their bodies exposed and impressed at their interactions with the audience as they twerked up and down the stage.

            I think I was shocked, initially, at the sexualized energy in that space. Our in class discussions about how the over sexualization of the queer community was used to further marginalize them had really stuck with me and I was having trouble understanding why this was voluntarily occurring in a queer space. But then I remembered one discussion in particular about how sex positivity in queer spaces acted to reclaim queer sex as a natural thing, as opposed to the stigmatized subject the normative society has made it out to be. It was great to see theory that I had learned in class being applied so directly in that space.

            About an hour into dancing with my friends, the music began to die down and our MC for the night walked out on stage. She came up on stage to introduce the first drag queen that would be performing that night. A drag queen named Chanel Banks Misdemeanor came out on stage dancing to Beyonce and owned that stage! Although I wasn’t thinking about the drag show as direct protest to binary gender expression in the moment, it was great to witness that first hand. Not only was their refusal to conform to traditional gender expression beautiful, but they were also being supported and cheered on by the audience. The audience burst with applause and began hyping her up, yelling things like “you go girl” and “f*** it up!”

            I think that moment made the LGBTQ+ community real to me. It was so different getting to be in that space and witness queerness in all its humanity, as opposed to reading about it in class.