On feeling fully queer in certain spaces and quietly shrinking the rest of the week.
Part of a series on queer connection.
Published on June 4th, 2026
While exploring connection, desire and relationships with queer women, trans and non-binary people for this series, we ended up, very quickly, talking about queer spaces. Bars, parties, events, communities. The people who love going. The people who would like to go more. The people whose lives mostly happen outside of them and who are perfectly happy with that.
Even with all these different relationships to queer spaces, something kept coming up: for a lot of us, those are the places where we feel most fully ourselves. Where we can flirt, build friendships, talk about anything, exist as a whole person, because there’s a shared starting point. A baseline of recognition.
It reminded me of my first queer festival two years ago. It was the first time I'd spent three days in a row fully in my own identity. Three days where I didn't have to switch register depending on the room I was in. It felt a bit like a simulation, a glimpse of what continuity could feel like, where I could flirt when I wanted, make non-straight friends when I wanted, be physical when I wanted.
Then I went home.
And going home didn’t feel like the comedown after a good party. It felt like a small injustice. Why is this freedom only available in pockets of certain moments and certain places? Why can’t I just live like that more of the time?
That’s the thing I want to write about today. Because the more conversations I have while building Pulp, the more I think discontinuity is one of the most under-named things about being queer. And even more so for non-straight women, trans and non-binary people. Gay men, over decades, have always had access to more bars, more apps where they can find each other in a minute, more visible neighbourhoods, more places where they can just show up to find each other. We have a fraction of that, often a single night a week, sometimes a single venue in a whole city. Which means a whole part of ourselves gets stored in time slots, rather than woven into the fabric of where we live, the way it is for straight people without them even thinking about it.
None of this means every queer person needs to want a “community” life. Some of us are happy in mostly straight contexts. The question I’m sitting with is whether our queerness has to live so separately from the rest of our everyday.
The festival self and the rest of the year.
Scrolling through the photos I took at that festival, I’m smiling at all the cuties I met. Genuine smile. And then comes the slow realisation: this version of me, this person who could just exist in her whole self, romantically, socially, sexually, all at once, came out for those three days and then went mostly quiet again.
This isn’t about being closeted. Plenty of the people I’ve talked to for this series are fully out. It’s about something else. Even when you’re out, that part of you doesn’t take up the same space in every room. At the festival, I expanded. On the metro the next morning, I quietly shrank.
I know I’m a little lucky living in Berlin, where being non-straight is more diffuse than in most cities I’ve lived in. More bars, more events, more people, more of that air in everyday spaces. And still, as I was listening to people, a lot of their fullest moments as queers were happening inside organised contexts. The events, the parties, the chosen pockets. Maybe some of us have built a good bubble. Or maybe a bubble is what we’ve all been told to settle for, when the real wish is for that part of us to flow more freely around the city itself.
If I didn’t want my orientation to be my whole identity, I’d want to be able to live it casually, in the texture of an ordinary day, without having to plan for it. The way most straight people just do.
What kept coming up.
This came up in almost every conversation, in different shapes.
A bi woman told me, half-joking: “I feel bisexual about once a month. The rest of the time, it's like the queer part of me just goes to sleep." Her queerness wasn't gone. She just had no place to exercise it.
A 40-year-old lesbian put it very simply: “I still have desire, but it seems impossible.” Impossible to live as a flirty, in-her-body queer person in everyday life. She told me she’s not a party person, the apps bore her, her friends are partnered, and the lesbian bar she’d been to fifteen years ago closed.
A trans guy told me: "I'd love to just exist as queer in everyday life, instead of being read as cis by default." Safety in dedicated spaces still matters to him. The discontinuity isn't about giving that up, it's about the fact that visibility, safety, and ease all end up rationed to the same rare moments.
Three different situations, the same underlying shape. The fuller version of themselves only comes out in specific contexts, and the rest of the week it has to go quiet again.
On the queer bar and the rest of the time.
Queer spaces matter. They’ve been load-bearing for our communities for a long time. They’re often where I’ve felt the safest, the most seen, the most myself. I’m grateful for them.
But here’s the question that keeps coming up. Why do we have to wait for one specific night, in one specific place, with one specific crowd, when in theory any moment can become queer if we’re in it with someone like us? I don’t always want to go to a designated queer space. Sometimes I just want to bring someone like me into the moment I’m already having.
A coffee. A show. A walk. A movie. A drink. A dinner at someone’s place. Even a hook up. None of those need to be wrapped around an event. The queerness travels with us. The problem is we don’t always know how to find each other in the in-between, so we keep funnelling those parts of our lives back into the few hours each week that have already been marked as ours.
(Less so in Berlin, where even the supermarket in Neukölln is gay, but you get the idea.)
So.
There are more of us than ever. Walking past each other in the street, in the bakery, on the bus, at the gym. The discontinuity isn’t because we’re rare. It’s because we’re often invisible to each other in the everyday spaces of our lives.
What people kept describing to me as a wish is the same continuity straight people have. Connect when you want to. Bond when you can. Run into someone who already gets where you’re coming from anytime.
What I want, and what came back in almost every conversation, is to be able to live this part of ourselves anywhere. Not only at the festival, not only at the venue, not only on the one night that was set aside for us. Just in the ordinary hours of an ordinary week. I’m not sure we’re spoiled to want this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what that looks like. Building something with that in mind. More soon.
In the meantime, I’ll keep writing about queer connection, desire and the cities we live in. About what’s working, what isn’t, and what I keep figuring out as I build Pulp.
Naomi