My memories live in the club. Not as recordings, but as moments that pulse behind my ribs.
One night at HERE, a DJ played this unlabelled reggaeton-hyperpop hybrid, and something broke open. Three strangers grabbed each other and screamed the chorus in sync, like it was a prayer. There’s no video, no tracklist. But I remember it — the sweat, the eye contact, the collective gasp. That moment was realer than most “saved” audio files on my hard drive.
Later I read an essay by Luis-Manuel Garcia on ephemeral memory in queer nightlife. He calls the dancefloor “a site of collective remembering.” That stayed with me. I started journaling my club nights, not as reviews, but as sensory archives — colors, sounds, heat, how my body moved when the bass shifted.
Now I see the club as more than a party. It’s an embodied database. Queer history doesn’t always live in institutions — sometimes it lives in glitched remixes, chants, and foot stomps. Maybe memory isn’t about what gets stored — maybe it’s about what gets felt.
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