By Casey Stepaniuk
If you’ve been following some of my other posts about queer parties in Vancouver, like Denim Vest and Queers and Beers, the organizers of Up Yours 2016, a queer New Year’s Eve party, will sound familiar. Up Yours 2016 is a one-time collaboration between Queers and Beers, Denim Vest, and Man Up, three rad groups doing late night queer party organizing with tons of experience. If you’ve been to events held by any of these three collectives, you know that their coming together for this NYE event is going to be epic.
Man Up, which I haven’t written about at length on the blog yet, is a multi-gender drag performance and dance party held at the Cobalt the last Friday of every month. If you’re into drag artists doing new and exciting things, and playing around with gender in all the funnest ways possible, you’re definitely missing out if you haven’t checked out the show. Man Up has a history in Vancouver that goes back to 2008, a story of queers dedicated to drag king culture and women’s and trans folks’ spaces in Vancouver despite the uphill battles of shifting landscapes in Vancouver’s queer nightlife and the historical and contemporary dearth of any exclusively lesbian venue in Vancouver.
Up Yours 2016 will combine the best of all three events: DJ dance party (courtesy of Denim Vest), Man Up favourite performers doing go-go dancing, and a craft beer bar thanks to Queers and Beers. You can look forward to music by DJs Body Party, DJ T, and Ponyboy, of genres all over the map: soul funk, hip hop, Top 40, R&B, 80s pop, new wave, and more! Performers—the Man Up Go Go (S)Team—will include Rose Butch, Syren Deputy, and Ruby Slicker. There are also going to be visual projections of drag performances throughout the night. The craft beer bar will include a final cask of Queers and Beers’ “fabulously fruity Pride beer” and a NYE exclusive brew pouring, as well as the usual suspects of BC breweries tall cans.
The venue this year will be the Red Gate Arts Society on East Hastings, which you’ll be familiar with if you’ve attended past Denim Vest in the past. Check out the Facebook event for more details (especially re: safety and accessibility) and to RSVP! As the organizers say in their event description: “We’re ready to turn the page and close this godforsaken chapter in a glittery storm of furious cathartic exuberance. We’re bringing in a New Year’s Eve primal scream dance party for the people!” Sounds like what I wanna be doing to ring in 2017.
When: December 31st, 9pm – 3am
Where: Red Gate Arts Society, 855 E Hastings
Tickets: No advance tickets; ONLY at the door at a sliding scale of $15-20; no one turned away for lack of funds
Casey Stepaniuk is a writer and librarian-in-training who runs the website Casey the Canadian Lesbrarian, where you can find LGBTQ+ Canadian book reviews and a queer book advice column. She also writes for Book Riot. Find her on Twitter: @canlesbrarian
Sign up for the Out In Vancouver newsletter if you are interested in hearing about more non-heteronormative news, events, and culture that are part of Vancouver’s colourful mosaic, and to get notified on the latest contests.
Pingback: Things to Do in Vancouver this Weekend: December 29, 2017 | Canada