DANCERS, ARTISTS, LOVERS: BALLETS SUÉDOIS 1920–1925 edited by Erik Mattsson. 2020. Stockholm: Arvinius+Orfeus Publishing. 320 pp. €45 hardcover. ISBN: 978-91-87543-81-4, ISBN-10: 9187543818, ISBN-13: 978-91-87543-81-4.

López’s work on muxe, third gender Zapotec performances in “Muxes Have Crossed the Border;” Enzo E. Vasquez Toral’s “From the Club to the Fiesta,” in which we are beckoned to dance in ways that gestures and nurtures futurity; and Gregory Mitchell’s examination of puta street fashion that expands the terrain of their sociality by reminding us that catwalks and clothes are aesthetics of/for queer(ed) belonging in “From Streetwalking to the Catwalk” (196). “Show” teaches us that queer spectacles are more than what we go out to see, asking us to reflect on how we want to see and be seen. Finally, after a night of anticipating, waiting, framing, and shaking, we open the door to “After.” We walk into the world with the residual lessons and effects from after-hours worldmaking, meditating about how we preserve them when the only presence left of our night are memories used for re-membering. “After” provokes thought around the lingering effects of sites and situations now gone, but that had previously held queer community and life. In particular, we confront the effects of gentrification on queer Black and Brown communities. Juana Maria Rodriguez’s examination of Xandra Ibarra’s “The Hookup/ Displacement/Barhopping/Drama Tour” frames how queer bodies and performance catalyze a call to what came before, engaging pleasure as political mourning and as a practice for re-inscription into spaces lost to capitalist greed. DJ Sedrick’s words in E. Patrick Johnson’s “Remember the Time: Black Queer Nightlife in the South” ring true in their forewarning: “Look around you. Somebody that was here last year ain’t here tonight” (232). These words evoke the memories of spaces and bodies invisibilized, departed, and removed, prompting us to think through connections we have lost to illness, to hate crimes, and to gentrification, and how Black and Brown folx carry on through erasure. Perhaps, as the final pages of the book point out in Jih-Fei Cheng’s “Keeping It on the Download,” this answer lies in the intangible, in the virtual and affective landscapes of queer belonging, and how queer subjects can live on through queer interfacing. Ultimately, Adeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera’s anthology asks us to ponder our own messy entanglement in queer nightlife: Who are we and how do we perform at every stage of the night? How can we more carefully commingle? What privileges, powers, and lineages do we hold? How do we activate queerness, and what role does performance and the body play in these processes as we make our way through the “not yet” (as noted by José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity) of utopic queer belonging? The pages of the book, rumpled by the wind, tickle my fingers as the sun sets. I think through my own “after,” sorting through recollections from my own queer congregations. The taste of tequila, glitter, and sweat are on the tip of my tongue. The night is beginning. Perhaps, I’ll go infiltrate space at the local drag show tonight, 926 Bar & Grill’s “Impossibili-TEA,” enacting a new “before” to reclaim the things lost in the “after.”