The Ultimate Guide to This Fabulous Summer

Distinct person, female hunter, instructed by the moon: These are terms used by people from Utah to Alaska to describe Two Spirits, a term that refers to gender nonconforming Native Americans. Steven Barrios, aka Auntie Steven to younger members of the Blackfeet nation, is an organizer of what he says is the oldest consecutive Two Spirit Gathering in North America, held for 22 years.

The year’s gathering on the banks of Flathead Lake will feature ceremonies for healing and cleansing. During one, smoke from a circulating pipe is believed to carry prayers up to a creator; during another, a rite holder surrounded by a circle of participants pours water on hot rocks.

The gathering is also is home to a more contemporary ritual: the drag show. In 2015 Rocky Peterson, now 31, known as Akasha Makai in drag, snagged the gathering’s Miss Two Spirit Montana title with a rendition of “Diamonds” by Rihanna. For Peterson, the best way to pass on history to younger generations is by modernizing it.

Recently, Akasha performed a Blackfeet dance at the Haskell Indian Nations University Two Spirit powwow. “She’s classy, native and fabulous,” Peterson said of Akasha. “We’re showing people it’s OK to be fabulous.”

The Montana event is open only to native people and friends of family members they sponsor (the registration asks about tribal affiliation and interest in participating in powwow songs, crafts and drums). Whereas Westerners once effaced the Two Spirit tradition, now its misappropriation is common.

“Two Spirit is not an identity or orientation like ‘gay’ or ‘transgender,'” said David Herrera, an organizer of the gathering. “It’s a role tied to this specific cultural history.”

Last summer, after a wave of sexual assaults at Swedish music festivals, the comedian Emma Knyckare’s Twitter feed was a cacophony. Some commentators blamed the attacks on refugees. Others considered alcohol the culprit.

Knyckare, 31, who jokes about breast-feeding and infant wounds in her stand-up, decided to tweet a provocation of her own: “What do you think about doing an awesome festival together where only non-men are welcome until all men learned how to behave?”

Knyckare, along with the dozens of would-be volunteers who, to her shock, emailed her in the wake of the tweet, soon specified that the festival would exclude only cisgender men, whereas everyone else would be welcome.

The inaugural Statement Festival will take place in Gothenburg, Sweden, over the last weekend of August. Performers will include the rappers Joy M’Batha and Cleo, the singer-songwriter Frida Hyvonen and the electronic producer Tami T. It has taken plenty of planning, as is typical for a music festival of 7,000, and much philosophical deliberation over the boundaries of manhood, as is less so.

The debate around the festival’s admission policy mirrors — on a festival-size scale — other discussions happening across the world in feminist and queer communities around “no cis men” spaces.

“What about transgender people who love and embrace their masculinity?” wrote one commentator about similarly delineated parties in Copenhagen. “We preach that your assigned gender doesn’t determine who one is and then use it as grounds to include people in a separatist space.”

For Knyckare, the designation is a practical one. “Transgender men also need a safe space from rape culture and sexual assault,” she said, noting that in future years, men will be welcome, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. “The idea is, for now, that you can’t know who is a rapist and who isn’t. And we won’t be looking over our shoulders.”

In a video released by the official Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints YouTube channel in 2016, a graphic designer named Ricardo talks about reconciling his homosexuality with his faith. “I don’t have to be perfect,” the father of six says, embracing his wife. “I can acknowledge these feelings and move on with my life.”

The Mormon church prohibits homosexual acts. (“Experimentation with sexual expression outside marriage” — defined as between a man and a woman — “is a serious sin,” an official website says.) But in recent years the church has adjusted its rhetoric on the subject, encouraging members who believe they may be gay to be open about their sexuality.

Which makes the second inaugural LoveLoud, an LGBT music festival held in the Mormon spiritual center of Salt Lake City — and endorsed by the church last year — particularly intriguing.

The festival, founded by Dan Reynolds, the frontman of the band Imagine Dragons, aims to build bridges and foster dialogue between the Mormon and gay communities in Utah, according to Jacob Dunford, the festival’s COO. More than 30,000 people are expected at the event this year, where Reynolds, a practicing Mormon, as well as Zedd, Mike Shinoda and Grace VanderWaal, will play.

“This was up until recently so taboo,” said Dunford, 23, who is gay and who left the church in 2015 because of its policies. Soon after, he helped found Utah County’s first LGBT resource center, with the aim of preventing youth suicide and homelessness.

“I want that kid hiding under his bedsheets to be livestreaming this on his iPhone,” Dunford said of the festival. “This is nonstop affirmation. We’re not invisible.”

LGBT Asians have a long history of political activism. A coalition marched at the inaugural 1979 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. In 1965, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, an aide to Martin Luther King Jr. and later an AIDS activist, participated in one of the earliest public homophile equality protests.

Yet anti-Asian racism in gay social life can be prevalent. “If you are Asian or African do not join the group because it will be blocked from this group,” read a message recently sent to applicants of San Diego’s 18,000-member Muscle Bear Facebook group.

“Here those things melt away,” said David Chan, 28, a recent host of the queer Asian dance party Bubble T. He could have meant it literally: Mary J. Blige was playing, the crowd was downing CBD-infused Jell-O shots, and sweaty fishnet bumped against fish-shaped inflatables in the Standard Hotel’s rooftop pool.

The occasion was Haute Pot Pride, and the crowd was on theme. One attendee wore a “Showgirls"-esque headdress made of shabu shabu strainers.

Bubble T, held monthly, was founded in 2017 by five friends: Stevie Huynh, Karlo Bueno Bello, Nicholas Valite Andersen, Pedro Balneg Vidallon Jr. and Paul Tran. “We’d been going out in New York for years,” said Huynh, 34, a makeup artist. “But this was something we’d never seen.” As its Instagram bio specifies, Bubble T is where “Asianz rule but everybody’s welcome.”

Chan, a printmaker, said, “I didn’t have that many queer Asian friends before this. You’re always tokenized or fetishized.” The community he found at Bubble T, and at other queer Asian parties that have sprung up in its wake, like Onegaishimasu, motivated him to come out to his mother in the spring, when he went home to Singapore for the first time in years.

“That’s something I never would have done, but I had the backing and support of these beautiful people, my chosen family,” he said.

For gender and sexual minorities, language is often a first step toward acceptance and rights. For witches affiliated with Reclaiming, a pagan activist tradition, it is also a type of magic. (Magic is “the art of changing consciousness at will,” according to one witch camp website.)

The Reclaiming tradition, named for its emphasis on resurrecting ancient spirituality, originated in the Bay Area in the 1970s among pagans with ties to feminist and anarchist communities. They spell-protested the nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon in the early 1980s and formed a coalition in the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987.

Though the movement focuses on goddess worship, Reclaiming in recent years has moved away from binaries. “Masculinity and femininity don’t make sense in a compost heap,” one witch wrote in 2010.

Reclaiming witches gather in camps around the United States, Canada, Britain and Australia each summer. Their rituals draw primarily from pre-Christian Europe but often are aimed at supporting the activism of indigenous landholders.

The camps range in vibe: One in Vermont offers a “pixie track” for children, another in British Columbia describes itself as sex-positive and provides a temple space where attendees can find privacy.

“I think there’s a big yearning for spirituality among radical communities on the West Coast,” said Briar Sparkle, 36, who works for an organic farm and had been involved with anarchist and environmental activists in Southern California for years. They first attended Witch Camp while dealing with the trauma of being arrested at a protest. “It’s great to have fun at festivals — it’s why any kid loves summer camp — but where are the levels of political awareness?”

Last year, on the eve of the conference he has organized for eight years, Ian Coleman messaged a few of his Facebook friends with an odd request. “I need you to out me as trans,” he told them. “My event is suffering because people don’t think they can go to the bathroom. They don’t trust me when I tell them it’s safe.”

Despite Texas’ recently passed bathroom bill, the hotel in Dallas was ready to accommodate the crowd of masters, slaves, sirs, bois, daddys and puppies in whatever bathrooms they would like. (It was, after all, also hosting their workshops and oral history discussions.)

With such a diverse crowd, why focus specifically on women’shistory? “Because you can go out and find the men’s history,” Coleman, 52, said. “You can’t find the women’s.”

The leather subculture originated among gay men in the mid-20th century. Early on, women who wanted to participate were often ostracized; today, images of Tom of Finland hunks remain its calling card.

At its core, though, leather is about power exchange. Roles like dominant and submissive are not aligned with any particular gender or orientation; they are identities that determine sense of self and interpersonal relationships, says Coleman. (Inhabiting these identities full-time is also what distinguishes leather from, for instance, BDSM)

S-and-M may be “written on the genetic code of all (some?) of us,” reads a 1979 booklet distributed by Samois, the first lesbian sadomasochist organization. Samois, a San Francisco group that is far less known today than, say, the Village People, helped give birth to the now ubiquitous idea of sex-positive feminism in the 1980s, as it defended itself against critics who argued that leather, along with pornography, perpetuated patriarchal power structures.

Forty suspenseful minutes later, she makes the cut. Two others are eliminated. (One dress is “too sexy”; earlier in the episode, a smile with visible braces was accused of revealing a “lack of commitment.” More tears!)

The live broadcast is an entertainment event for 15 million Thai. Unlike many LGBT riffs on pageantry, including ball culture and leather- and drag-focused titles, Miss Tiffany’s adheres scrupulously to hetero-normative conventions.

There are swimsuits and sparkly evening gowns; contestants are thin, young and gorgeous; any camp seems unintentional. But the effect on Thailand is subversive, said the managing director, Alisa Kunpalin: “You see that transgender women are pretty, and maybe you want to learn more about their abilities and challenges.”

When Kunpalin started Miss Tiffany’s 21 years ago, in the resort city where her family ran a cabaret show of the same name, transgender women were regularly harassed by law enforcement and denied the majority of jobs, she recalled. Today in Thailand, although the service and beauty industries regularly hire them, traveling abroad can be humiliating (it is impossible to legally change one’s gender on passports and official documents). “We believe if understanding changes, the law will eventually change too,” Kunpalin said. This year’s Miss Tiffany’s contestants include a doctor, a ballet dancer and a boxer.

In July, Spain nominated Angela Ponce for the Miss Universe pageant; she will be the first transgender woman to compete in the pageant. “If everyone is equal in the future, we’ll stop doing Miss Tiffany’s,” Kunpalin said. “There’s no point in grouping people more and more. We’re all human beings.”

Dance music has roots in queer Midwestern spaces. Today, a crop of underground house and techno parties in the Rust Belt region is adding a new chapter to that genre’s history.

“It’s amazing that you can pull something off with this level of diversity in the middle of nowhere,” said Shane Christian, a 22-year-old DJ from Cleveland, of Honcho Campout, a weekend-long party in the woods of southern Pennsylvania. “Everyone’s there for a reason, and the energy is so palpable.”

Now in its fourth year, Honcho Campout has become a cult destination for those who prefer weird and intimate dance spaces, much like the regular parties at Hot Mass, a gay bathhouse turned after-hours club in Pittsburgh, out of which the event was born.

Think of it as an antidote to the selfies-in-the-VIP-section festival: cameras on the dance floor are discouraged, booze sales are cut off at midnight while subwoofers go till sunrise, and tickets are kept affordable.

Lineup-wise, this year brings DJs from Los Angeles’ Spotlight Party and San Francisco’s Honey Soundsystem, as well as from Chicago, Detroit and Washington. “It’s kind of a DIY annual report of the queer dance scene,” said the organizer Aaron Clark.

Early Honcho parties were populated largely by men; for its first two years, the party was held at Roseland, a clothing-optional gay resort in West Virginia. The current location, the Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary, was chosen with expanded queer inclusivity in mind.

You can still get naked. “I’m not usually at ease with that at queer parties because I’m so self-conscious. I’ve had dysphoria since I was a kid,” said Eris Drew, 42, a house DJ from Chicago whose music includes references to shamanistic techniques as well as to 1990s rave culture, and who played Campout last year. “But I felt free dancing with my partner. My body wasn’t ridiculed or even overly focused on. It was the lunar equinox, and you could hear the drone of the insects melding with the kick drums. It was magical and healing.”