Almost every event that happens in queer London now seems to be branded as ‘community’.

Every gathering, every party, every workshop is positioned as a space where community happens. And I think we’ve diluted the word so much that we’ve forgotten what community actually means!

An event is easy to define. It has a start time, an end time, a location, a door charge. You show up, something happens, you leave. An event can be wonderful. I love events. I go to events. Events bring people together, and that is amazing. Pleasure Medicine, my regular community for GTBQ+ men, is also an event, as it checks all those boxes.

But an event is not automatically community. And this is where Pleasure Medicine deepens what an event can really become…

Community is something that gets built over time, by intention and by everyone in the room, not just the person running it.

I figured this out about a few months into Pleasure Medicine which is a twice monthly connection workshop and alcohol free disco dance for GBTQ+ men.

I realised I was organising an event but not actually building real community. I’d put on a session, 30 people would come, everyone would have a good time, and then nothing.

No one would see each other again. No friendships seemed to form. No sense of belonging carried forward. We were strangers in a room together for a few hours, and then we went back to being strangers.

That bothered me. Because I knew, being in those rooms with all those men, that most of us were hungry for something we weren’t actually getting. We were standing shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of other gay men and still feeling completely alone.

So I started asking myself what community actually requires. And the more I thought about it, the more I realised it comes down to one thing: how people interact and engage with each other. Not whether they’re just simply in the same room. But how they look at each other, talk to each other, care about each other, and then connect with each other in deeper ways.

Most events operate on the assumption that if you gather enough people in one place, community will happen by osmosis. You show up, you look around, you see other gay men, and somehow that’s meant to feel like belonging.

But that’s not how humans work. Humans connect through interaction, through being seen, through some kind of exchange.

And the conditions for that that to happen have to be created. When you’re packed into a space with a hundred other people, and nobody’s talking, everyone’s in their own head. That’s not community but isolation in a crowd.

Running Pleasure Medicine changed how I think about all of this. When I started this twice-monthly gathering, I made a deliberate choice about what the first part of the afternoon would actually do.

Before anyone dances, before any music or DJs, we sit down together in an opening circle and create a container of safety, and then we do a connection workshop.

An hour of exercises and practices designed to get men meeting each other. Not small talk but real contact. By the time we get to the dancing and DJ set (alcohol-free, by the way), people properly know each other. They’ve looked at each other. They’ve shared depths of themselves. They’ve laughed together. And they’ve been vulnerable.

Then the dancing happens, and it’s completely different because now you’re dancing with people you’ve met, not strangers. Added to that, so many guys come back to Pleasure Medicine again and again, and this is where true community is formed. They put energy and effort into it too!

And that’s the difference. The organiser doesn’t build community by themselves. They absolutely shape whether community can happen by designing the space, by setting the agreements, by creating the conditions where people are encouraged to actually engage with each other.

I think about how many gay men are starving for this right now. We’ve built incredible spaces for sex and for partying. But we haven’t built many spaces where you can take it gentler and slower and softer, substance-free.

That’s what we need now. Not more events. More actual community. And that takes work from the organiser, yes. It takes design and intention. But it also takes the community itself deciding they’re going to show up more than once. That they’re going to invest in each other. That they’re going to come back.

Community isn’t a one-off thing. It’s a commitment. And I think once gay men experience what real community feels like, when they’ve been in a room where they were actually met by other men, they stop being satisfied with just showing up to events where everyone’s performing and no one’s connecting.

That’s the shift I’m trying to make with Pleasure Medicine. Not just a gathering. Not just an event. An actual community. And it’s working because people are choosing to come back. They’re bringing friends, seeing each other outside of the sessions, creating family, and seeing real change in their lives because of it!

With Love & Pleasure

Gary x

Come and join us: www.pleasuremedicine.co.uk