LITTLE GAY BROTHER.
While Little Gay Brother has burst with popularity over the past 12 months, the queer club night was first started back in 2012. It began its life at The Secret Garden Party, carving out a safe space at the music event for queer festival-goers and allies who simply just want to dance the weekend away to good music.
Little Gay Brother’s ethos of inclusivity, freedom of expression and losing all of your inhibitions was so infectious that it didn’t take long before they transported their party out of a muddy field and into nightlife venues across the UK. With a cast of DJs, dancers and drag acts, the Little Gay Brother family create an environment of fun and freedom wherever they go.
This year for Pride in London, Little Gay Brother will host a Queer Carnival on 6 July. The Pride rave will take place in two parts; The Street Party from 4pm to 12 will be an open-air rave in Flat Iron Square, just a stone’s throw from Soho. There will be an outside stage, drag queens on treadmills, high-energy dance shows, live singers, you name it.
That will be followed by The Afters at Omeara. Their glorious team of international resident DJs will take over the rave caves of OMEARA from 10pm to 5am. The party raises money and support for Stonewall UK on their 30th anniversary.
“It’s important for Little Gay Brother to have a banging party that also celebrates diversity and raise money for our community,” explains Clayton Wright, founder of Little Gay Brother. Here we speak with him about the evolution of Little Gay Brother, why it’s vital to create a safe space for all queer people, and how they take a stand against homophobia they encounter at festivals.
What was Little Gay Brother created in response to?
We’re here to remind people that house and dance music came from the queer community, it’s fun, empowering, and we should celebrate that together – unified by our love for that music. Since 2012, we’ve gone to festivals across the UK and internationally, putting the fun back into dance music stages; working with major talent like Pey Gou, Honey Dijon, Seth Troxler and Patrick Toppling. When our dancers and DJs take-over a stage at a festival; we introduce crowds to queer people that they might not have interacted with before, we party without any inhibitions and show them how to as well, we expand their minds and teach them to respect each other, to love their individuality, to be proud, we enhance the music and give crowds something to look at other than a DJ. We change the whole feeling of that festival.
How would you describe the club night?
It’s really difficult trying to replicate our festival stages in a club, but we do, and it’s chaos (boarding on carnage), it’s joyful and ridiculous. It’s a party without prejudice, and the people that come to support our parties are lovable, friendly pleasure seekers. We always have a lovely time, and we’ve learnt... when we are enjoying ourselves, the crowd is LIVIN! Our club nights are intimate, so there is no barrier between the performers, DJs and the crowds. We’re all in it together and that makes it very exciting. You never know what is going to happen, and that makes the atmosphere electrifying.
Why is it vital to ensure you create an inclusive space for all members of the LGBTQ community?
Little Gay Brother is made up of amazing people from different backgrounds, ethnicities, gender identities, and sexualities. This is our queer family, and we won’t segregate or separate from them. Our community is colourful, beautiful and diverse and we want to celebrate that. We’re a festival collective; we’ve always worked to bring people together, so it’s important for us to create spaces where everyone feels welcomed, comfortable and respected.
How do you make sure Little Gay Brother is a safe space for LGBTQ people to express their queerness freely?
The Little Gay Brother dancers create a vibe on stage, letting guests know they are free to express themselves as we do on stage through our lewks and dancing. There is usually the odd naked moment, which always happens when we get really into it! The queerness is definitely free-flowing. Throughout the night, we look out for people, we check in with people, we welcome them, party with them, listen to them and make sure everyone is having a lovely time. The most important thing we do to facilitate this freedom of expression; educate venues and security staff on queerness, making sure they understand it and allow it to flourish in our space. We have a robust respect policy, which we’re always updating with the help of other organisations like Stonewall to make sure we are fully inclusive. Then, we take this to festivals, venues, bars, clubs, security teams we’re working with to make sure they sign up to our ethos. In the past, we’ve had our strules with horrid security staff; and at festivals, we’ve been subject to awful homophobia. We take freedom of expression very seriously. We’ve sacked whole teams of security staff at our nights because we felt they weren’t welcoming or understanding enough. We’ve turned sound systems off at festivals and picked bigots out of the crowd on the microphone, telling them that their homophobia is not welcome in our venue. You’ve got to take a stand against the shit and educate.
What’s the wildest outfit you’ve seen at a Little Gay Brother club night?
We love a naked person. The human body is beautiful and it takes guts to stand there in all your glory. It doesn’t have to be about sex, it’s just freedom of expression. We’d like to see more of it.
How would you say queer nightlife has evolved over the past decade?
In the last decade, we’ve lost a lot of very iconic and important LGBTQ spaces. It’s sad, but the queer community is resilient, and we’ve moved on. We’re always evolving and this has forced the change we’ve seen in the club scene. Now, you can see the rise in popularity of the Queer Brands; Sink The Pink, Pxssy Palace, Adonis (just to mention a few), communities that are not tied to one venue, they move around, travel to festivals, and remind us all that we should be free to express ourselves as queer people everywhere. We don’t have to hide in the one bar. These new LGBTQ spaces are more positive and inclusive, they are more diverse, welcoming to womxn and trans people, and slowly the scene has started to shed the shackles of toxic masculinity. It’s still hanging around, but we have a responsibility to check this behaviour. It’s down to club promoters to work together, to recognise the problems the scene still has like racism, gender equality on line-ups and fight against this. I can see this change happening.