WORK! From Home

• Published in: Performance research 2023-03, Vol.28 (2), p.121-124
• Main Author: Moore, Madison
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Dance; Disc jockeys; LGBTQ studies; Live performance; Nation, Carry; Pandemics
• ISSN: 1352-8165; 1469-9990
• DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2023.2260717

On 7 November, 2020, legendary New York queer nightlife DJ duo The Carry Nation held a virtual dance party on Twitch, the interactive live-streaming service that emerged during the pandemic as an important venue for live performance. The party was called ‘WORK from Home’, and the flyer is telling: a yellow piece of paper with a stock image of a white woman wearing a headset, smiling into a webcam — presumably having a meeting.As Twitch became a major platform for live performance globally alongside early lockdown measures, in the New York queer underground The Carry Nation was among the first to embrace virtual parties. The crux of these virtual parties, however, was the ‘Zoom Room’ where the real party took place. The Zoom Room: a series of constantly rotating squares, and in them people in various states of undress are dancing, making dinner, talking, vibing, getting tattooed, performing, drinking, having sex, applying makeup, chilling in their living room, on the sofa, in their beds, sometimes with friends or partners, sometimes alone, dancing on stripper poles, stripping on camera, making cocktails and hanging out while the music plays.‘WORK! From Home: Queer Nightlife on Zoom’ explores this queering of the Zoom link as noted by the queer dance and sex parties that emerged during the pandemic, from The Carry Nation to Scruff. How did Zoom, a corporate conference meeting tool used in part as a way to weed out candidates for academic positions, become a primary source of queer worldmaking, cruising and connectivity? Is a Zoom party a ‘party' or is it something else? In the essay, I show that the speed at which queer nightlife moved from Bushwick, Hackney and Friedrichshain to Zoom highlights the significance of queer dance floors and the pursuit of pleasure as acts of queer worldmaking.