Across disciplines, scholars have diagnosed the twenty-first century West with a peculiar affliction: analog nostalgia (e.g., Beverland et al. 2024; Schrey 2024). They note that artists and consumers revive analog media such as photography, vinyl records, and analog synthesizers to retrieve a materiality, agency, and intentionality they perceive to be lacking in an increasingly digital world.

However, analog nostalgia has been a part of Western music cultures ever since the rise of digital technologies in the late 1970s. One early analog revival scene took place in San Francisco’s queer underground around 1990, spearheaded by artist Michael Collins. Many of his and his comrades’ activities revived the analog styles of new wave music from a decade earlier: from the original songs by Collins’ performance group the Popstitutes, to drag performances of new wave music videos, to “Club Analog,” a nightlife event with the subtitle “Stop worrying and learn to love the Moog synthesizer.”

In this paper, I ask how and why Collins and his associates enacted analog nostalgia for an era barely ten years past. Closely reading their archival materials—flyers, press clippings, video recordings, and more—I argue that analog technology was crucial to this circle’s queer worldbuilding in the face of the AIDS crisis. While this analog revival could be seen as a precursor to today’s analog nostalgia, the San Francisco underground made explicit the queer pleasures of analog technology in a way that recent analog revivals, centered on hegemonically masculine discourses of control and mastery, have obscured.

The queerPassion production at the 2025 Bachfest Leipzig sheds light on contemporary European values of musical heritage, authenticity and sociality. A contrafact of the St. John Passion, queerPassion resets Bach’s music to a new libretto by Thomas Höft, highlighting tragic stories of homophobic violence in the eighteenth century (1730 Utrecht sodomy trials, a Prussian trans man) and recent times (Orlando, Chechnya, Lagos). At Bachfest, queerPassion featured under the festival theme “Transformation”: the project incorporated the professional Baroque orchestra Ārt House 17 and soloists, with a local women’s choir and gay men’s chorus singing the chorales. Leipzig thus presented a provocative context where Bach “superfans,” historical performers, the LGBTQ+ community, professionals and amateurs would intersect. Drawing on ethnographic research I conducted in Leipzig, including observations, musician interviews, and an audience survey, I situate the queerPassion at the intersection of scholarship on participatory musicking (Turino 2008, Reily & Brucker 2017, Bartleet & Higgins 2018), queer music studies (Attinello 2006, Barz & Cheng 2020, Maus & Whitely 2022, MacLachlan 2020, Hilder 2023), music revivals (Bithell & Hill 2014), and festival studies (Falassi 1987). My study explores how the utopian vision of the funder Creative Europe to “safeguard, develop and promote European cultural and linguistic diversity and heritage” played out in Leipzig: while fostering tolerance and understanding among participants and audience, the queerPassion also exposed sometimes competing artistic and ideological values (professionalism vs. amateur community-building; queer pride and identity vs. Bach reverence and historical authenticity in performance) with lively, but not always harmonious, results.

This paper explores the cultural contradictions of music festival cruises aimed at fostering community despite participation in the destructive forces of capitalism, climate catastrophe, and violence against women and children globally. I focus on a 2019 cruise hosted by Kesha for her largely queer fanbase that curated an aesthetic space physically removed from heteronormative society through an all-hours party atmosphere. I frame this as an atopic “non-space” (Augé, 1992) where attendees felt protected from such sociocultural structures in international waters; yet the very same structures take advantage of international waters to avoid accountability as the cruising industry wreaks havoc on the environment and reproduces violent, ongoing histories of colonialism. This paper engages online communities as archive and ethnographic field, blending methodological approaches to explore the potential of social media as a fruitful scholarly resource. Working from theorists including Jill Dolan, Amy Hollywood, and José Esteban Muñoz, I question the extent to which a population alienated by society holds themselves accountable for contributing to environmental damages (air, water, and noise pollution) and the exploitation of other vulnerable populations (underpaid employees from the global south, and women and children guests subject to violence with little recourse). In an atopia designed to protect community from structural marginalization, how do we reconcile such benefits with the detrimental impact on the world at large?