Dancing on my phone

Protecting digital privacy in gay clubs

Lon Pierson scoped out the crowd. It was a Saturday night, and of the three friends he had gone to Club Café with, two had left and one had already met someone. Pierson had gone to the Boston gay club that night to dance with his friends, but a change of plans wasn't the end of the world. He could dance with cute guys instead.

Pierson hit it off with a young man who matched his tall stature. Under flashing purple lights and to a remix of "Defying Gravity," they started to make out.

He didn't think much of this experience. Kissing strangers in a gay club is an unparalleled pleasure in this world, and though there didn't seem to be a spark between the two of them without the influence of house music, Pierson had a fun night at the club.

Then he started getting texts.

"All of a sudden, multiple people are sending me this TikTok saying, 'Is this you?' I'm front and center in the TikTok making out with this guy, and all the comments are about us," Pierson told me.

The video features a panoramic shot of the club, doubling back to Pierson. It got more than 45,000 views. And though there were relatively few likes or comments, reactions were harsh. "Must have been their first kiss," one commenter said. Others made assumptions about his character: "They've never met before and will never meet again."

I was there with Pierson that night, and I stumbled upon the TikTok before Pierson had the chance to. In order to protect his privacy, I messaged the poster, asking him to delete the video. He never replied, and it remains online.

Pierson is open about his bisexuality in social circles, but he prefers to keep things on the down low with his conservative parents. Although they aren't on TikTok, Pierson knows that viral videos can expand to other platforms.

"They're helping me pay for my school," he said. "I need their support, and I can imagine that if that was how they found out, they'd probably react a lot more negatively than if I had just said something to them, and I think a lot of people are probably in much worse situations than mine."

Every weekend, queer people across the world flock to gay bars and other safe spaces. If the owners and guardians of these spaces fail to protect the privacy of their patrons, however, they are failing to keep customers safe in the modern world.

Lucas Hilderbrand is a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. He's spent much of the last two decades researching and writing about the history of American gay bars, culminating in his 2023 book, "The Bars Are Ours."

"In the early days of bars, they really operated as a private space, insofar as the people going there often felt like it was sort of a shared understanding and a shared agreement that one's privacy would be respected in these spaces," Hilderbrand said. "​​And that really begins to change with mobile phones."

Hilderbrand has noticed two recurring uses of phones in bars over the last 15 years: digital cruising and documentation.

"You see someone cute at the bar, so you open Grindr, you open Scruff, you open whatever apps you're on," he said. "And the other is that people are taking pictures and videos. Oftentimes that's selfies, or taking pictures on the dance floor, or oftentimes people are taking videos of drag performers or other events that are happening in this space. We've become a culture where we kind of expect the possibility of being photographed or filmed with other people's devices, which doesn't mean we're consenting to it."

For those born after the advent of Facebook, privacy has largely become a thing of the past. We live in a time when tech platforms from Google to TikTok make the majority of their money by selling personal data, and social media has permeated every facet of our lives.

So spaces where privacy is protected is a bit of a welcome novelty. Enter Feral.

Flyers posted on the streets of Boston call it "a queer dance party for sativa divas & power bttms," "Tara Dikhof's all-out rager for limp wrist baddies," and, most important, "a no phones dance party for high thems & high femmes."

The party is hosted by Tara Dikhof, a Boston-based drag queen and DJ, and changes location each month. Previous themes have included Lady Gaga, Mad Max and slumber parties. The next event is themed around Shrek and Doechii. For young queer people in Boston like recent Northeastern graduate Phi Garcia, it's an oasis.

"I think the first time I ever heard of Feral, my old roommate - who is a lesbian - invited us because she said the vibes are good and that it was no phones," Garcia said. "I like dressing up for stuff, so that was kind of the draw for me."

When Garcia and their boyfriend, Northeastern graduate student Jonathan Bacdayan, arrived at Feral, they were debriefed on the rules before being allowed to enter.

Although Dikhof declined an interview, she posts the rules on Instagram along with each announcement of shows. The rules include: "no phones, photos, or videos on the dance floor," a zero tolerance policy for bigotry and discrimination, and mandatory consent before dancing or kissing a fellow partygoer. In addition to the debrief at the doors, posters displaying the commandments are on walls throughout the venue.

"It seems to me like it's a move to allow people to feel fully comfortable just living in the moment," Bacdayan said about the recording ban. "I think there are so many places we've kind of just grown accustomed to being recorded with security cameras and all that. It's almost kind of a throwback to have no recording and to just be able to know that what happens there stays there. I think it's a very comforting feeling."

Club Café's Stevie Psyclone, who DJs every Friday night and serves as their entertainment director, agrees that phones in nightclubs deter connections and social interaction. However, he doesn't believe that it's feasible to do anything about this.

"I can definitely see an argument if someone was in the closet, for example and they were there and that happened, I could see that being a problem. But also, it's 2025. How much can you do if you're not taking away people's phones?" he said, "The logistics of it sound messy. We have enough trouble policing people using their vapes in the club."

Chris Ewen, who DJs at the Cambridge club ManRay, agrees that banning phones is impractical; he hopes that it's unnecessary. When ManRay reopened in 2023 following 18 years of dormancy, Ewen and the other organizers were concerned about what an increasingly online world would mean for a club that frequently hosts goth and fetish-themed nights. He's been pleasantly surprised.

"There has been a lovely maturity about it," he said. "I mean, that could change at any time, but our experience so far at ManRay is we haven't needed to do a thing where you have to check your phones to come in, or put a sticker over the camera or anything like that. People seem to be very aware of the whole permission versus lack of permission thing, and they have tended so far to respect it."

He's also concerned that regulating phone use would "raise the stakes on the taboo," encouraging partygoers to break the rules. Psyclone attended a party with a phone-check in New York, and though he appreciated the chance to unplug, the process of giving his phone to strangers made him nervous. He ended up leaving his phone in the car instead.

"I think if venues could get away with not including phones, I think that would be great. I think it's unfortunately a little idealistic today," Psyclone said.

Psyclone has thought about putting posters up in Club Café, like they do at Feral, but he doesn't necessarily think it's worth it, especially at a club as big.

Hilderbrand, who wrote "The Bars Are Ours," supports phone use regulation, but he doesn't want them banned outright.

"For instance, at my neighborhood bar, if someone's running late and they want to text me, that's very useful to be able to communicate, which is different from a ban on photography and filming," he said.

This is all in service of protecting a uniquely important aspect of queer life. Gay clubs are more than just a place to get drunk and make out with strangers. For decades, they have been the "primary social institution of the queer community," as Hilderbrand says. They're a place to connect with like-minded people and to briefly forget about rising homophobia in the country. If patrons don't feel safe from being exposed at clubs - whether the protection comes from members of the community or owners - they aren't actually providing safe haven.

"If we want to keep our special place sacred to us, then we have to also be gatekeepers of the safety of the situation," Ewen said.