Going dancing. The disco has always been a central part of gay urban culture: the disco as a space to meet people, to chat, to pick-up, to have fun, to release physical tension and also as a producer of style, visibility, as it raises consciousness on identity. Many of the cultural products born in gay discos of the 1970's and 1980's (electronic music is an example) are consumed today by society at large, and the ways of relating that GLBTQ spaces have originally proposed and promoted, extend and live as ecos in the behaviors of more and more people. Brandon extends as a curious link on this chain.
In Buenos Aires, by the end of the 1990's many of us shared a strong sensation:
we couldn't find a place where we felt we could develop, unfold and expand. In the first place as gays/trans/queers, but also and this is important, as people linked by other desires and interests, that were the less visible side of our identity: our esthetic
tastes, individual experiences, artistic explorations, intellectual projects and/or political interests that don't rely on the model of GLBTQ people in mass media and does not fit into what our community generally has to offer.
Brandon strived from its beginning to explore this distance: not as a way to discriminate the insides of our own world, or a way of prestigious distinction, but to illuminate hidden possibilities. So it is about learning to transit night spaces another way, about dancing a lot of course, but trying to discover the dance floor's other purposes, listening to the best music, the newest music, without feeling we can't dare to listen to the most difficult sounds, strange, unpredictable: experimenting with our clothes, our kisses, our drinks, chatting with people, getting to know others, beginning relationships, projects taking shape.
At Brandon the English word "club" seems to conquer its original meaning, which refers to a place of activities/ attitudes/behavior/ people/ love/hate/stories rather than to the strict perimeter of a dance floor.