Barely past my 17th birthday, fueled by cheap beer and sugary alcopops at a house party, I uttered the words aloud for the first time. Standing at the bus stop, the declaration felt clumsy, escaping my lips and landing somewhere unseen on the pavement. I glanced down, then at my friend Dan, the unsuspecting confidant dragged into this moment, and back down again. In that fleeting exchange, the truth of what I’d just spoken solidified within me. I stumbled back into the party’s chaotic blend of nu-rave music and cigarette smoke, sharing my nascent realization with each friend individually, a whispered confession in the haze. Later, the night culminated in a furtive, clumsy sexual encounter with a friend under a living room blanket, a fittingly messy start to a decade that would continue in much the same vein.
Coming out stories are a common thread in the tapestry of queer lives. It’s almost a shared rite of passage. Most of my friends are queer, and each carries a unique narrative of their coming out – some braved it in the school hallways, others waited until the perceived safety of their late twenties. Some exploded onto the scene with a flamboyant declaration, while others murmured it so softly it barely registered. Coming out has happened in tents at festivals, in hushed church pews, over family dinners, even, inadvisably, at funerals. Stories unfold through carefully crafted letters, awkward, meandering parental conversations, or sometimes, in a silence that speaks volumes. Yet, woven through these diverse experiences, a singular, unifying thread persists: isolation.
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The journey of exploring and accepting one’s queerness can be inherently isolating. Indeed, queerness itself, in its initial stages, can feel profoundly lonely. As queer individuals, we begin by coming out, often met with a spectrum of reactions, and then spend years navigating the world, repeatedly coming out, striving to carve out our space in a society not originally designed to accommodate us. Especially in our youth, our queerness often exists in stolen moments, hushed whispers in the corners of our minds. Once that seed of self-discovery is planted, it requires time and space to germinate, often taking root in the shadowy recesses of our inner world.
Two years after my own initial, stumbling foray into queerness, Robyn released Body Talk pt. 1, featuring the now iconic lead single, “Dancing On My Own.” The album, at its core, is an exploration of loneliness and isolation. In a 2010 interview with Pitchfork, Robyn herself stated, “The whole album is about being lonely, but I think it’s interesting to put that idea into a club where a lot of people are crammed into a small room.” Reflecting specifically on “Dancing On My Own,” she explained, “I’ve been touring a lot in the last three years, and spent a lot of time in clubs just watching people, and it became impossible to not use that lyric ‘dancing on my own’, because it’s such a beautiful picture.”
The first time I heard the song is etched in my memory. By then, I had navigated several major cities, a restless exploration of self and experience. Fleeting, hurried sexual encounters remained a recurring theme, though thankfully, for all involved, my technique had marginally improved. Like many young queer men, I unconsciously leveraged youthful charm, wide eyes, and defined cheekbones into a series of encounters, grasping for a connection, an intimacy that remained elusive, just beyond my reach. I was adrift in waves of unrequited affection for my closest friend, clinging to the fading edges of a life I felt I should be pursuing, a life that didn’t quite fit.
In the sweltering summer of 2010, my small studio apartment in East Bristol became an oven as friends and acquaintances gathered for a post-Glastonbury party. Around midnight, the carefully curated playlist devolved into chaos, ricocheting from the soulful sounds of Candi Staton to the post-punk angst of The Horrors, before settling on a track unfamiliar to my ears.
It began with a tremor, a pulsating, rhythmic heartbeat that drives Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” for four minutes and 49 seconds, before finally succumbing to its own yearning, fading into an ethereal silence. Looking out from my cramped kitchen, I saw him, standing across the room, engaged in conversation with someone else. The anxious pulse of the song’s hammering synth mirrored the frantic rhythm of my own heart. The raw longing and palpable sadness embedded in the lyrics became a soundtrack to my own internal landscape. The same ache that resonated in the confined spaces between the bassline echoed within the cramped confines of my apartment, and within me.
American professor David Halperin, a prominent voice in queer theory, authored How to Be Gay. Despite its title, it’s not a beginner’s manual on homosexuality – although, arguably, there’s a definite market for that. Halperin’s work delves into the unique positioning of queerness within minority or marginalized communities, particularly concerning the acquisition of history, culture, and identity. Unlike many identities, queer people largely do not grow up in queer families or with readily available queer role models within their immediate circles. Often, we have limited or no exposure to openly queer individuals in our formative years, and are presented with few realistic, positive, or nuanced representations in mainstream media.
Instead, our education in queerness happens in the dimly lit corners of bars and clubs, in the fleeting anonymity of darkrooms and bedrooms. We learn from those we love, often those whose affection is not reciprocated in the way we desire or deserve. We learn from our collective traumas, from our shared experiences of loneliness. From these fragments, we piece together a cultural lexicon, incorporating fragments of music, art, and poetry. Queerness manifests in public spaces – on streets, in parks, emblazoned on pixels and billboards – but it truly flourishes within the sanctuary of clubs. In these spaces, we can collectively paint our queerness onto each other, across the walls, onto the ceiling, creating a shared canvas of identity. Through a canon of anthems, curated and embraced collectively, we envelop our queerness in the thick, pulsating air, and are, momentarily, consumed and held by it. From the moment of its release, “Dancing On My Own” was undeniably absorbed into the musical vernacular of an entire generation of queer individuals.
Robyn performing live, bathed in purple light, highlighting her status as a queer icon and the emotional intensity of "Dancing On My Own."
Image via Wikimedia
In 2013, a club night named Dancing On My Own (DOMO) emerged. After several iterations, it found its home in London’s Resistance Gallery and quickly gained a devoted following. Five years after my own tentative coming out, three years after first being captivated by the song in that cramped apartment, “Dancing On My Own” continued to resonate deeply. It accompanied me through the cycles of manic highs and depressive lows that life throws, and now it had resurfaced, this time in a new, tangible form.
DOMO was not just another queer space; it possessed a unique alchemy. The Resistance Gallery was tucked away behind an unassuming door on a quiet London backstreet. It bore the hallmarks of a typical small East London venue: a compact bar, a makeshift DJ booth, a stage adorned with cheap glitter curtains, and a smoking area enclosed by barbed wire and walls embedded with shards of broken glass. Yet, once a month, this unassuming space transformed into a vibrant queer utopia.
Seeking to understand the magic of DOMO in retrospect, I reached out for photos and anecdotes from those who had experienced it. Repeatedly, people responded with thanks for the nostalgic reminder, but lamented the lack of photographic evidence. This was partly due to the sheer intensity of the night; as the temperature in the room climbed, it wasn’t uncommon for half the crowd to shed layers, dancing in their underwear. In such an environment, indiscriminate photography was understandably discouraged. My friend Izzy humorously described it as having “more boobs than Playboy, except not in an oppressive problematic way.”
The sweltering, pulsating mass of bodies certainly contributed to the night’s exuberant atmosphere, but it wasn’t the core of its appeal. The true essence of DOMO lay in Izzy’s follow-up message: “I only went once and I spent all night kissing Lauren (my straight pal), it was my first kiss after my shitty, abusive ex-girlfriend and my sparkly Converse stuck to the floor and I’ve never felt more alive.”
It wasn’t solely the kissing, or even the sticky floors, that made DOMO so extraordinary. It was the space in between. It was the creation of a space for shared trauma, for the collective experiences of everyone in the room to converge and be held, supported by the liberating act of dancing, seemingly alone, yet together. It was this club night that solidified for me the profound importance and inherent relevance of “Dancing On My Own” to the contemporary queer experience.
At every DOMO night, without fail, the final song played was always “Dancing on My Own.” Even now, writing this, I can vividly recall the moment the lights would brighten, subtly timed with the lyrics of the song. I remember witnessing the pure joy radiating from the faces around me, voices raised in unison, belting out the familiar lyrics, friends embracing, sharing one last sweaty kiss as that erratic, heart-like synth finally faded into silence.
But I also remember observing the undercurrent of sadness in people’s eyes as they dispersed into the night. Queerness, in its truth, can be tinged with sadness. It encompasses loneliness, moments of bleakness. Yet it is also undeniably beautiful, exhilarating, breathtaking. And so too is “Dancing On My Own.” When we, as queer individuals, dance to it, wherever we may be, we are dancing on our own, but as a collective “own” – united, however fleetingly, against the world, finding solace and strength in shared vulnerability.
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