| Event | Honcho Campout |
| Date | August 15-18, 2024 |
| Location | Four Quarters Sanctuary, Artemas, PA |
| Attended | Thursday afternoon – Monday morning |
| Performers | Sarah Schulman and Dorgham Abusalim, Ann Artist, Octo Octa b2b Eris Drew, and many others |
What Does the Rave Mean for Palestine?
I came into Honcho Campout feeling jaded, only recently semi-recovered from a months-long depressive malaise, conflicted about attending a festival in the woods and pursuing so much pleasure in such huge gulps in the midst of a genocide. The death count in Gaza was over 40,000, and queer nightlife’s response on the genocide in Palestine had been mixed at best. At least three people told me they decided not to go to Sustain-Release this year and opt for Honcho instead due in part to Aurora Halal breaking the Berghain boycott this summer, DJ Voices’ treatment for speaking out for Palestine, and the festival’s general inertia to support the issue. It’s no accident, I think, that the emotional timbre of the S-R coincides with this: it’s the sort of I’ve-got-mine, all-American self-sustaining mindset of rave professionalism.
Honcho is very different in tone, though it still exists in a sort of semi-DIY interspace. Its tagline is that it “celebrates those doing the heavy lifting in their local music & cultural scenes.” This feels very true: everyone I know who attends is involved somehow in creating queer nightlife, and almost everyone in my camp had a hand in volunteering at Campout itself. The festival was born of the same-named monthly queer party, the flagship of Pittsburgh, and a locus of Rust Belt and national dance music talent famously held on a floor of an operational gay bathhouse, where on any given night, ravers, tweakers, muscle queens, pups, and bemused DLs wearing just a white towel all mingle. The festival itself, Campout, is held on a pagan land sanctuary in central Pennsylvania, where for four to five immersive days and nights, several thousand queers swirl together. It’s debauched and community-oriented, in the great beautiful tradition of queer gatherings. The ethos is one of care, and the dancing is superb.
This year, the genocide in Palestine was centered in the festival, in both top-down and bottom-up ways. Top-down, it’s to the Honcho boys’ great credit to have created a space for historical and political dialogue in the midst of the programming, something they’ve now done for multiple years; this year also featured a talk on imaginaries of land and queer primitivism by Ben Miller and Nikita Shepard. To clearly send the message that rad politics should have prominence amid the pleasure is a strong move, both for ravers who already combine the political with the pleasurable in their lives, and those who might not casually attend such discussions otherwise. As organizers it’s an important use of power in culture creation, both to send the signal that this kind of thinking is as important as the music, as well as to materially carve out the time and space for discourse. (In February, Honcho signed onto the DJs Against Apartheid statement, but at the time of the festival, still hadn’t added their name to PACBI, which more effectively signals a boycott of Israeli cultural output. They since have—more on that later.)
Bottom-up from participants, things naturally took a more radical tone. There was an anti-Zionist Kabbalat Shabbat, a spontaneous Israeli flag burning of a flag snatched from a world flag camp decoration, and Ann Artist’s moving drag performance of a bloodied Amerikka, complete with US flag pulled from her ass and burned in a circle of candles, ending in a triumphant waving of a Palestinian flag that brought tears and chants and a full-body swell from the crowd.
Can, or should, we be asking our ravespaces to take clearer stances and actions on Palestine, in the vein of Campout and beyond it? Can a movement ever be centered from the dance floor?
The centerpiece of the official programming was the interview between Sarah Schulman, whose 2016 book Conflict is Not Abuse discusses the 2014 Israeli assault in Gaza, and Dorgham Abusalim, a writer who was born in Gaza and lived there until he was sixteen. The talk was billed as “A Conversation on Queer Aesthetics, Solidarity, and Liberation,” and at least 200 people packed and expanded the gauzy open structure where it was held. Sarah’s warm resting smile belies her plainly incisive way of speaking, as cutting as she writes. She and Dorgham patiently explained pinkwashing—a term she helped popularize—without holding back their anger in explaining why liberalism’s obsession with marriage rights should supersede bombs indiscriminately killing all kinds of people.
Sarah grounded her portion of the talk in describing her involvement in ACT UP, the grassroots political group that was largely responsible for bringing the AIDS crisis to the public eye—really, forcing it to not look away. The members accomplished this through the decentralized, anarchistic-rooted concept of affinity groups: small clusters of people who organize themselves to plan a teach-in, or a demonstration, or write an article. Sarah emphasized that there was frequent disagreement about the approaches themselves; allowing for space for non-cohesion and alternate approaches rather than a single party line was essential. Conflict is Not Abuse highlights this as a strength of organizing, that in allowing for friction and disagreement, we open ourselves up to analyzing the ways we replicate power dynamics interpersonally, and the ways that tolerating the distress in that process can expand into a life of integrity. And much as we need different strategies, she said in the talk, we also need solidarity: we don’t all need to adopt the same strategy or action, but we need to be in agreement about our politics. Having a shared set of values allowed the relatively small group of ACT UP to succeed, as a critical mass with a clear message.
Fascists have an inherently easier task: they cohere around a collective, if false, nostalgia for the past, while those with visions of liberation are tasked with co-creating many different possible futures—and not all will succeed. This approach to organizing, to get people together who don’t agree on everything, is another way of looking at Honcho itself: as a gathering with potential for shift. Looking back, it began as a gay man-exclusive event and opened to all genders/sexualities after four years. It’s also true that the way things germinate affects their growth, and it’s equally the case that Honcho did not begin from a radical or politically twinned space, the way that some independent parties and festivals are today, such as Dripping (founded in 2023), which has vocally integrated support for Palestine into their ethos. And still too, a gathering can start one way and end another as it increasingly becomes institutionally set in its ways—for example, MichFest, which began as a radical, working-class lesbian music festival and took a dire turn for the transphobic in barring trans women from attending.
When it comes to considering the role of the rave, there’s also the question of how and whether it makes sense to try to situate the political in the music festival. I’ve had lots of conversations with friends over the past few months about the role of pleasure in a time of so much horror. There’s the humanistic and aesthetic approach: that we need joy as a human quality to sustain us, that deep pleasure raises our floor and gives us a compass toward what’s right—or even perhaps that an ethical-metaphysical tinge of harnessing PLUR, an ethos of joy, toward a higher goal. And there’s the simpler, pragmatic, utilitarian approach: that every community is an opportunity for organizing, that bringing together trusted groups of friends (yeah, and frenemies! your bitch of an ex!) is key for making a movement happen.
I think feelings and aesthetics have a very important role to play in the revolution. I see important affective continuities from dance floor energies to other kinds of intensities that we feel when we encounter injustice—these similarities exist between the dance floor and the street. Beyond art’s place in making the political appealing or socially aspirational, aesthetics are a fundament of queer attraction in the first place—how else do we flag?
Excuse my bluntness, but there’s also an important, practical quality of how aesthetics function as social currency and status. Just as gays shift their hemlines to keep up with the trends, using a festival to twin a political opinion to a captive audience is important; many people have not come to the festival or a dance floor for this, and it’s an opportunity to leverage the aesthetic capabilities of the space as a way to usher in those who wouldn’t necessarily encounter these beliefs in their algorithmic bubbles. There’s always an audience outside of the conversation itself, who are peripherally invested but mildly intrigued. From Sarah’s own conversation with Dorgham, I overheard ripples—even just the fact of Sarah’s existence as a thinker—spreading throughout the week, in conversations around the campsite or in line for coffee.
But I think ultimately an over-focus on aesthetics is pissing on the wrong tree (pup joke). I think it’s going to be hard to make a rave a site of change unless liberatory practice is woven more closely into the heart of the thing, regularly, in the way that basic solidarity was required for ACT UP’s success. In ACT UP, there was a core political understanding: to push the state to support people with AIDS, and to support people with AIDS where the state failed. A fundamental liberatory politics just isn’t baked into most raves these days. A friend pointed out recently that you’re equally likely to find people on the dance floor to dissociate as much as to connect. Another friend, in discussing this question of whether a rave has potential for liberation, described it as the difficulty of “reversing the party”: raving as a direct outlet from political work could continue or sustain that energy, but channeling disparate notions of pleasure into activism doesn’t have a clear path or lineage.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, both for those affective and practical reasons. Campout is an important space for pleasure. And pleasure is truly not something I take for granted. I love walking around a day or two into the festival and seeing so many gays with deep relaxed smiles as they stroll (ok, fast walk) through the trees, the way they never do on the streets, the way our trauma of continued existence keeps us highwire with the world and each other outside of these woods. We need pleasure, and for queers, especially BIPOC and trans people, being able to feel joy is radical because it gives us the dignity of more than survival.
Aesthetics, and the pleasure they bring, can’t be the sole site of change, though. There’s a dangerous way I see raves and nightlife as having the strong potential to prop up dominant culture—even, or especially, behavior that feels like divergence from the mainstream. Sure, doing drugs and carrying till noon might feel subversive precisely because these things are happening in opposition to the standard Upwardly Mobile way of doing things. But many of the people who are operating in these fields of aesthetic resistance have no enactment of political resistance, because the aesthetic functions as a release valve to the world of the working stiff, one that in fact props it up and allows it to continue to exist. Is this more of a concern with a place like Sustain where there is no fundament of resistance to hold onto at all, or at a place like Honcho, where we can lean into the temporary utopia? I want to say it’s the former and not the latter, but is that because I have a better time at Honcho and fuck more there?
Terre Thaemlitz/DJ Sprinkles says: “The question about whether or not there is a place for utopianism in queer politics and/or dance music scenes is quite baiting and oppressive to me.” She goes on to say that “organizing around an inability to continue accepting the unacceptable” is “better for identifying and addressing immediate material conditions of violence. Organizing around hopes and dreams is how we get to absurdly abstract notions like ‘love is the answer,’ and that dancing or making music is enough to change the world... Struggle to get real!”
Pleasure as an end state is not enough. Doing things because pleasure goes alongside them, and is deeply human, and can propel us forward—these all make sense. But pleasure as the main final outcome is not the thing to pursue. I believe—from the microcosms in the organizing work I participate in, and from reading people like Sarah Schulman—that liberation will contain plenty of discomfort, in confronting hard truths about my own biases and actions, and in tolerating and moving toward conflict in community. But that current state of non-liberation contains so much more grief at deep-set inequality, one that the very aesthetics of dance music is perhaps poorly equipped to spur me to action, at least on its own. As Ravers for Palestine put it, in comparing the ways clubs vocally supported Ukraine but stayed silent on Palestine: “Ukrainians are our menaced peers, our kin. They have complex inner lives and desires. They have queers in latex and harnesses. They could be us. Palestinian and Lebanese people, by contrast, seem to register only as distant, shapeless masses: perhaps deserving of aid (with important caveats and scoldings), but little more.”
Even as a self-identified mystical bitch who believes in the power of the collective queer body, I ultimately, carefully, land back on the pragmatism that our greatest power as ravers comes from the practicalities of being in community, and in being realistic about what we can do at the rave.
There’s a lot of power in this practical framing, one that raving naturally already includes from a social-organizational perspective. Organizers talk about how the greatest security in building a group, far beyond digital security, comes from the trust that stems from caring about fellow people, the way we can count on each other when we know and (mostly) like each other. We already know how to create something logistically and socially complex out of nothing, and to make spaces to feel things deeply alongside one another. It’s worth trying to organize, and to continue to co-create and lovingly push the strongly cohesive social places we have like Honcho—even and especially ones that are already relatively countercultural. We might roll our eyes about it, but DJs have so much clout: anarchist collective CrimethInc, in their latest guide to organizing, mentions DJs in the same breath as people who can promote radical thinking, along with mutual aid projects, Signal organizing loops, and student groups.
As Sarah says, we need friction and disagreement; we need imperfect solutions and a diversity of opinions. We’ll have imperfect allies—we want the raver who is swayed to be pro-Palestine, because all the cool people are, too. Disparate grouping of people is a strong form of solidarity; it creates solidarity.
There are many practical ways nightlife organizations can respond to the fact of the genocide and organize politically. Some of these are top-down, meaning organizers have to lead the charge, some are bottom-up, and some can be both: petitions, like PACBI; boycotts, like those of Hör and Berghain; fluidly bringing in non-dance elements to a dance space, like talks, zine tabling, and making the event fully or partially a mutual aid donation event; and, full circle back to the value of aesthetics, making the art itself about Palestine, like Jmal’s beautiful and powerful Jewish anti-zionist set for Lot Radio.
It’s also worth being clear-eyed about these efforts and what can be accomplished in a party space. Two months after Campout in August, Honcho did sign onto PACBI, a hopeful thing, a sign of integration, and an important stance to take in terms of cultural production, but also a baseline for the rest of the work to be done off the dance floor, both with the friends we’ve formed on them, and with other people. Because community isn’t just at the rave: it’s with our neighbors, our schools, our art communities, our bail fund collectives, our reading groups, in addition to, yes, our fellow creatures of the night and DJs’ Instagram posts. I say this as much as for myself as for anyone as I stare down the long tunnel of past and current oppression, struggling to build deep solidarity from the belly of the empire. To get real.
It’s up to ravers to decide how we want the rave to be.
The last official moment of Honcho came at midnight, after Eris Drew and Octo Octa wrapped yet another colossal, emotional ode to love and the motherbeat. The clapping and cheering transformed into chants for Palestine, the biggest dance floor at the festival fusing and transcending into something else for a moment, buoying me up. I need that pleasure. But what I really need is the struggle. Sometimes those things cross over and sometimes I feel something about that, something I call love.