Afterglow Pride
Come join fellow radical robots, sickening cyborgs and forever-glowing glam-droids at San Francisco's premier Pink Saturday gathering. We can't wait to welcome you once again into a future-forward liminal space where queer family can convene without worry of persecution, and we can together plug into the love + light that connects us all.
We’ll be honoring this year’s SF Pride theme "looking back and moving forward" by first holding space to affirm and uplift the struggle of the queers whose shoulders we stand on whenever we attend a nightlife event like Afterglow. From the first Liberation March down Polk St. and “gay-in” at Golden Gate Park in 1970, down the runways overtaken by Billy Bower’s queer self-expression in the late 1970s, through the radically grounded happenings manifested in the ACT-UP protest / rallies of the late ‘80’s–early ‘90’s, to the assertion that Black Trans Lives Matter a short 3 years ago, LGBTQ2+ history is written with the sweat, passion and tears of the pioneers who came before us.
We will be screening video of queer cultural watershed moments throughout the night, allowing each and every human present to pause for a moment and send sweet love and warm thanks into the forever-changed spaces our predecessors left behind. Plug back in soon for more details on the ways in which we’ll be honoring herstory…as well as announcements about which allied organization(s) will receive a portion of the profit from Afterglow Pride 2023.
Next, we invite you to join our joyful celebration of technology’s innate ability to facilitate gender expression and sexual identity as a continuum, rather than an antiquated binary. We open our arms and embrace the gender bending cyber aesthetic, and invite all of the queer diaspora to join us on a community transmission from a technologically differentiated, hyper-diversified future!
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Our DJs will be powering up the dance floor all night with their pulsing beats so you can gyrate your gizmos in euphoric bliss until your gears are fully greased - stay tuned for DJ announcements. Make sure you plug into the main stage around 1 AM to download a live performance from artists to be announced in upcoming weeks…it's sure to fry your circuits.
Comfort & Joy’s very own Creative Director Chickpea will beep-boop-bump us into a funky-fabulous future in the Main Room: she’s assembled a crew of neon robots and their fluorescent friends to illuminate the dancefloor as we celebrate at the center of the queer roboverse.
The Cuddle Space will be elevated for this evolution of Afterglow, occurring in the mezzanine space above the main dance floor: it will remain a mellow space plushly appointed to facilitate emotional intimacy and caring touch. If you’re going for something more anima-tronic, find your way to the Upstairs Back Room to access a world of visceral delight.
Plan your retro future glam game for Afterglow! Robo-inspiration Lewk Book available here:
>>SPECIAL NOTE ABOUT CONSENT & COMMUNICATION<<
Comfort & Joy is here for you! If you ever need support, see someone who may or have other concerns at our parties, please find one of our 'vibe-raters' (purple glow collars) or a house manager (pink glow collars).
We want everyone to always feel respected, adventurous and safe at our events. Consent makes that possible. Please communicate and check in before touching. If you aren’t feeling it, a polite ‘no thank you’ is kind. ‘No’ is also a complete sentence. If you receive ‘no’ in any form, please be gracious and respect it. Ultimately, we request that we ask each other for permission rather than forgiveness, when it comes to consent.
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Perks available to all attendees include face + body painting, tea service, miso station, waves of fresh late-night fruit and professional photography in action or at the photobooth.
Full coat & clothing check is available to help you shed your street-hardened shell and free your inner glam-bot. *Sadly, items in coat check are not under constant supervision, and we cannot assume liability for items lost, stolen or damaged.* Help us foster unbridled immediacy by thinking twice before bringing your new smart accessory, designer jewelry or other high-value items to the club, beautiful!
125x Door Tickets will go on sale at 10pm on 6/24/2023 for $125 each. Please note Space 550 is a 21+ with ID venue.
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Afterglow is a luxurious, one-of-a-kind San Francisco party thrown by Comfort & Joy, a 501(c)3 volunteer-run non-profit. Proceeds enable us to host more splendid parties, create our legendary village in the queerborhood at Burning Man, provide funding for community arts projects, and offer free or discounted events supporting queer community, creativity, and expression here in the bay area. We thank you for your support!
Volunteering
Afterglow volunteers will receive a complimentary ticket to the event and a chance to meet the Committees that dream it up (most will also receive a free hearty meal). As we are a 501(c)3 not-for-profit public benefit organization, we depend on over two hundred pairs of helping hands to make Afterglow happen each Pride season...Volunteering will open Friday, April 28th @ Noon (Pacific time).
Comfort & Joy also offers free or discounted Affinity tickets to radically include all queer, creative and expressive community members inclusive of all gender expressions, ethnicities and sexualities in an effort to counteract the systemic racism/discrimination faced by BIPOC, Latinx, API, Trans and Nonbinary community members...and so many other category we haven’t learned to describe yet! If you can’t afford a ticket but believe you should be in attendance, tell us about it — afterglow@playajoy.org.