The Night is Still Young: A Cross-Disciplinary Forum on Queer Nightlife Studies

Since 2020, a wave of academic and trade books has brought unprecedented attention to queer nightlife. Whereas this special issue of TSQ advances queer nightlife as a site for continued study in sociology, this forum opens a conversation between ten leading scholars who have often carried out their work in distinct social science and humanities fields, including sociology, geography, ethnomusicology, performance studies, religion, and media studies. In a spirit of academic generosity, they become interlocutors who exchange stories, analytical frameworks, and investments with the goal that they might learn from each other; they bond over shared nightlife and research experiences, including ethnographic methods and attention to affect. This forum poses questions and insights that will enrich how future scholarship can build toward more rigorous, capacious, and imaginative queer methods – within and beyond sociology.