By Suraj Singareddy ’25
Managing Editor
“Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” – José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopias
When people look back on their first years of college, I assume they often see a period of intense and rapid change. Students escape their strict parents, blossoming from introverts into raging party animals They go full Cinderella and find their true self — or at the very least, a different self.
I, on the other hand, stuck to the work hard/play Netflix weekends I was used to. It was enough for me, and I was content. I was also scared of the adults and the cool kids I now had to share a school with. Everyone seemed to know their way around. They knew what to ask the bartender for, and they knew how to navigate parties with no familiar faces in sight. After one disastrous night at Edon (not truly disastrous, just very…very…awkward and overwhelming), I decided to write off partying completely. There wasn’t much there for me anyways. Talking with drunk friends was no match for some snacks and a tiny dorm room tv.
And so, the rest of the semester passed in a similar fashion. I continued to be both amazed and confused by how some friends continued to go out each week, making 3am vomiting and hangovers a regular occurrence, all for the sake of not missing out. I attempted woads once, enjoyed the dancing, and then never went again. By the time spring rolled around, though, the coziness and structure that my room had once provided began to morph into boredom. My weeks were spent going to class, attending club meetings, eating dining hall food, and then coming home to something fun and safe.
It was a mature schedule, I suppose, more meant for a 30-year-old than a teenager. However, maturity doesn’t just mean responsibility, it also means a completion of growth. And I was not done growing. The structure of it all began to chafe against my need for something new and exciting. Here I was, a 19-year-old, already settled with (hopefully) decades of my life still to go.
There was no potential for chaos in my life. Everything was decided, and everything was planned. It would go according to the meticulous schedule I’d laid out, and in no time at all…I’d be dead. Because, of course, that is how all things go. When that realization hit, I began to feel something shifting.
It was an expanding, burning space within my chest, filling up more with each second that passes after one weekend ends and the next looms in the distance. It’s a need to escape, to see some other plane of reality, where time is undecided and where things have the space to grow.
It’s a need to party.
“Queerness as utopian formation is a formation based on an economy of desire and desiring. This desire is always directed at that thing that is not yet here, objects and moments that burn with anticipation and promise.”
Over the summer, fueled by the discography of Arca and Charli XCX and armed with the queer theory of Jose Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopias, that burning feeling began to burrow deeper. My visions transformed — from ones of drunken walks home, G-Heav sandwich in hand, and happiness fueled by friends and food, into something more foreign.
Sparks of light came to me in the night. Wild beings stepped out of the shadows in the corners of my bedroom, asking me to imagine a new world. Those creatures of the night roamed dance halls as shadows, only truly existing in that split second when the spotlight hit their skin, setting the glitter smeared over them ablaze. Their world was an electric, hyper-pop fantasy of neon, illicit looks, and glitched-out ecstasy, and I desperately wanted to be part of it.
During my quiet months at home, I occupied myself with daydreams of the night, imagining myself into 2am raves at abandoned warehouses humming with sound and color. Bodies pressed up against each other in an incessant thrum that I echoed back. We move as one.
Muñoz states that “the dance floor…demands, in the openness and closeness of relations to others, an exchange and alteration of kinesthetic experience through which we become, in a sense, less like ourselves and more like each other.” That closeness, loosing yourself in closeness — sexual or otherwise — was what occupied the majority of my desire. I simultaneously longed for that sense of inescapable contact that had filled my first year — not a moment alone, continual interaction, forced proximity — and for something deeper. I wanted the oneness that occurs at a special meeting of movement and perception — when everyone moves to the same music, or you’re drunk enough to think they are.
Then, in the midst of it all, magic happens. His face flashes in the light — one half illuminated and shimmering, the other half bathed in shadows. Our eyes catch on each other, and the club lights perfectly illuminate us as the rest of the crowd dims into silence. We’re both caught in communal movement, and amid all the joy we manage to find a higher level of ecstatic contact. An inseverable tether forms between us, pulling us closer and closer like two binary stars, burning bright in this dark and living space.
Muñoz says it’s that moment, the “moment that burns with anticipation and promise,” which allows us to glimpse other worlds, other ways of being, as the ecstasy of that moment ripples out through our lives.
“The anticipatory illumination of art and culture…cuts through fragmenting darkness and …will provide us with access to a world that should be, that could be, and that will be.”
What truly exists within a night out is pure, unadulterated potential. The heroine of Masaaki Yuasa’s “Night is Short, Walk on Girl” — a movie which I watched late one summer night, and has stayed with me in the months since — experiences this acutely. For her, what begins as an easy night out at a wedding reception slowly morphs and merges and twists into a surreal night of drinking, partying, and connecting. She swerves from bar-hopping, to an epic drinking battle, a used book fair, a guerilla theatre production, and then finally to traversing the streets in the early hours of the morning, taking care of all who’d gotten sick in the process of sharing their night with each other. The entire time, the only thing really guiding her is her feet. They act as almost separate objects, directed by an unmistakable and illogical sense of direction. They’re guided by fate.
That’s what a night out is really about — leaving time to come into contact with fate. When was the last time, during the school year, that you truly had hours ahead of you with plans that could change on a whim without consequence? For me, a serial over-scheduler, that answer is almost always my last night out. It’s only a few hours, yes, but it’s a few hours in which anything could happen. It’s a few hours in which I give myself permission to do anything, guided only by a sense of want and desire that tugs in my chest.
Desire and fate are interlinked in this way. Chance meetings lead to those ecstatic, burning moments, revealing new desires in a growing cycle. They bounce off each other, spinning and spinning and spinning until you’re completely in their thrall. That pure infinity of fate and desire is a nearly inaccessible but endlessly rewarding space. To get there requires a complete abandonment of the intellectualizing, which is what gave us all entry to Yale in the first place and is encouraged as a path to success at this institution. It requires us to give into the subconscious, the improbable, and the irrational.
If one can achieve this, then they will have experienced something spiritual, something magical. They will have had, in my opinion, the perfect night out.
The world of partying and going out is another dimension filled with body glitter, a hyper-pop soundtrack, and colorful creatures that exist on the same frequency as the strobe light. As chaotically beautiful a world it is, it’s also filled with the inevitable opportunity for mistake and misery, and yet something in us still pulls us towards it. We go out, without care for the pitfalls that lie in front of us, for the opportunity to experience our impractical fantasies — desire, destiny, fated encounters, and endless possibility. We go in search of magic, and every once in a while, we manage to find it.
Endnotes:
All quotes used in this piece are from Cruising Utopias (2009, NYU Press) by José Esteban Muñoz.
