The Sacred Power of Music & Dance For Gay Men

You know that moment when the entire dance floor comes together, and every gay man knows the lyrics? It feels as if, for a moment, you’re all there together, our differences dissolved.

It has a name, and I’m in love with it:

Collective Effervescence

For three and a half minutes, everyone drops the mask they’ve been wearing all night and becomes their true self.

It’s a truly thrilling moment, and for me it’s truly sacred…

Music and dancing have been woven into queer life for generations. Our clubs and dance floors have been places where we’ve found each other, expressed ourselves, fallen in love, got our hearts broken, made friends, flirted outrageously and danced until the sun came up.

They’ve certainly been a huge part of my life as a gay man who grew up in London.

Some of the most important moments I’ve had as a gay man happened on the dance floor and in clubs. I found freedom there. I found versions of myself there that didn’t always feel welcome elsewhere: the flamboyant one, the sexy one, the ridiculous one, the masculine one, the feminine one, the one who wanted to throw his arms in the air and scream the chorus to a song he’d heard 400 times as though Donna Summer had written it specifically for him: “Last Dance”, anyone? Heaven!

There’s something beautiful about being surrounded by people who understand a part of you without needing it explained.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I spend a considerable amount of my life watching gay men dance…

For a year and a half I’ve been running Pleasure Medicine, a sober conscious dance and connection space for gay men in London. Every couple of weeks I get the frankly excellent job of standing behind the DJ decks and watching what happens when a group of gay men slowly stops giving a shit about how they look, sound, move and express themselves.

Most guys come alone and start out composed, checking everyone out, wondering whether they know anybody, possibly wondering whether that man over there is “noticing me?”, and maybe slightly overthinking what their arms are doing when they’re talking to each other. You know what it’s like?!

And as we begin the connection workshop, the masks start melting. The games I facilitate foster deeper connection where the armour can come off slowly.

And if I get the music right in my DJ set, there comes a point when the room stops just being 40 individual gay men and starts feeling like an us. That collective effervescence enters the field…

At one of our recent dances, I dropped Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Boys Town Gang, the incredible black disco version. A bold, brave choice for a DJ to drop to a group of sober people at 2 pm!!!

But when that glorious soaring chorus broke out, suddenly everyone was singing, kicking their legs in the air, setting the inner showgirl free, letting the inner child play.

It was utterly magical.

Men were grabbing each other joyfully, laughing, dancing, throwing their arms around the room and generally behaving like a bunch of gays who had completely forgotten anyone might be watching them…

I stood behind the decks, looked at it all, and thought, “This is bloody beautiful.”

This is the real us, inside, underneath all the heaviness and hiding we carry.

Underneath all the complicated stuff that comes with being gay, I think there’s an enormous desire simply to feel free together, to laugh, to have fun and to belong with each other.

Being gay is so god dam fabulous. We fly in the face of convention. And yet many of us walk around the world so conventional, afraid of letting our faggoty freak flag fly!

Don’t come at me for the F word. Please, let’s reclaim it and make it fabulous…? Are you with me?

And this isn’t new…

Dance floors have played an extraordinary role in queer culture for aeons.

Disco, house, Hi-NRG, techno, gay clubs, underground parties, enormous super clubs and tiny sweaty basements have given us somewhere to gather, particularly during periods of our history when there weren’t always many places where we could safely do so.

That legacy still lives in us. It’s in our DNA, passed down from our brothers and sisters of disco days past…

Walk into the right club, with the right people, on the right night and something incredible, and even life-changing, can happen.

You don’t need to have a deep conversation with everybody. You don’t even need to know their names!

You’re sharing rhythm, beat, bass, sweat, movement, joy, and occasionally a moment of collective effervescence.

I’m 43 now tho, boo boo.

I still love going out, trust me! I’ll be dancing until I’m 107. Give me the right night, the right DJ and the right group, and I will absolutely be there making questionable decisions about whether I have another hour left in me at 4:00 am

But these days my body sometimes disagrees with those decisions. At 22, I could leave a club as the sun came up, eat something beige, sleep for four hours and apparently continue with my life unphased, and sometimes unwashed!

At 43, a sufficiently ambitious Saturday night can become a three-day emotionally administrative event.

And I know I’m not alone.

The interesting thing is, as I’ve got older, I haven’t wanted less dancing. I’ve wanted more ways to dance. Other options to add to my life.

I still want the club; I love a bar, adore Pride, I go to parties, follow DJs, attend festivals and occasionally get home at an hour when respectable people are eating breakfast.

And I also want to dance in the daytime sometimes. I want to dance sober. I want to properly meet the people I’m dancing beside, and I quite like to leave with the rest of the evening still ahead of me!

That’s part of why I created Pleasure Medicine.

It’s not an attempt to replace the amazing gay club life London has to offer. God no! Gay nightlife has given me far too much for me to start wagging my finger at it now…

I wanted to add something to it. Another kind of dance floor. An ‘and’ not an ‘or’.

I wanted daylight, no alcohol, no substances, no phones and a beautiful sunlit studio full of gay men.

What’s surprised me most is that I thought I was creating an event, but what has emerged over the last year and a half is a true community…

Men come back time and time again, faces become familiar, friends are made, the WhatsApp group buzzes between dances, guys go for food afterwards. We’ve somehow created this little pocket of gay London where dancing is still at the centre of everything, but there’s also space to get to know each other too.

Connecting this way gives us permission to put down the performing, the protecting and the worrying about how we’re being perceived for a few hours. And that relief frees us up not only to experience our own individual effervescence, but the Collective Effervescence too.

With Love & Pleasure, Gary x

Gary Albert is a community creator, workshop facilitator for gay men and somatic therapist. He creates sober conscious dances, connection workshops and slow dating events in London.

Learn more and book your spot here: www.pleasuremedicine.co.uk