For “the Children” Dancing the Beloved Community

This essay offers the underground Black queer dance club as a key site for an exploration of not only individual desire and autonomy, but also community. Based on auto-ethnographic experience within clubs in the U.S., and close readings of Black lesbian and gay literature and theory, this intervention is made within a particularly “queer time”—past and present, futures yearned for and denied; and “queer place”—the club, the Black queer page, stage and canvas of everyday life. Beyond encouraging an orientation toward a Black queer studies that is at once about material effects and resonant affect, I also hope to sketch some ways we might re-think recent debates on the Child, relationality, and futurity in Queer Studies, which have proceeded without the voices of “the children.”