The Toronto photographer saving queer nightlife one body at a time

Albert Hoang carries his 35 mm digital camera onto the dancefloor and his eyes scan for drama, intimacy, somebody shedding themselves within the music. He avoids photographing throngs of nameless faces. Instead, he dances by means of the gang specializing in one or two topics in motion. These grow to be the protagonists of his pictures. 

“My style is very much about capturing connection between people,” says Hoang. “And at parties, it’s so pure how fleeting those connections are. I get to see something that not everybody’s seeing.”

Hoang is a Toronto-based photographer who paperwork town’s queer nightlife, taking pictures theatrical events like Beam Me Up Disco and New Ho Queen. More lately, he’s used Gay Rights, a month-to-month get together collection launched in February 2025 that takes place within the Village, as a visible playground to experiment with new ideas.  

“The word I would use to describe the visual culture of Gay Rights — and I use it very reverently and seriously — is ‘stupid,’” Hoang says. The first promotional photos he shot featured the get together’s founder and resident DJ, Rae Abunahla (a.okay.a. Booty Cornfed), hanging posters across the Village whereas carrying see-through underwear, shiny black boots, a leather-based jacket and sun shades within the useless of winter. For another shoot constructed across the get together’s “bob” theme, Hoang photographed a mannequin with a lavender mop of hair mendacity in mattress beside two mannequins carrying nothing however flouncy wigs. 

Now, pictures from the get together’s first 12 months have made their method right into a bodily zine — additionally known as Gay Rights — in an try, Hoang says, “to extend the life of the party.” Designed by Hoang, and with phrases by author Divine Angubua, the zine is a component visible archive and half manifesto on partying as a way of queer self-expression. 

Its pages flip Hoang’s intentionally imperfect — or in his phrases “crunchy” — pictures into dense collages of blurred our bodies, harsh flash and grain. In one full-page picture, a partygoer wears a costume made solely from newspapers whereas others maintain up Gay Rights flyers resembling the newspapers, as if they’re concurrently making the information and being confronted by it.

Elsewhere, orange-tinted spreads layer scenes and portraits from the get together. The textual content over these photographs proclaims a “right to the dancefloor as stage,” imagining the get together as a spot the place the music itself “loosens the scripts” of gender efficiency.

Hoang displays on the rituals that happen when the lights come on: You get meals to sober up, you cozy up at a good friend’s place and debrief. You speak in regards to the music, about folks you flirted with, “maybe even who smelled bad,” he says. But even what’s relived by means of dialog is passed by the morning. It is that this ephemerality that drives his need to {photograph} nightlife.

For Phil Villeneuve, documenting the dancefloor may also protect a historic second. Villeneuve is the co-founder of Yohomo, an internet platform masking Toronto’s queer arts, tradition and nightlife. He can be a celebration organizer, DJ and was beforehand editor of the now-defunct Fab Magazine. 

Having began his profession as an arts and music journalist within the early 2000s, Villeneuve remembers a interval when nightlife pictures was extra tangible. Photographs appeared in magazines; they had been printed as Polaroids and caught to fridges. “That period is burned into my mind because we were [all] still using actual cameras,” he says. “It was in print media all around us…. You could touch it. While at Fab, he curated a “scene” part impressed by Page Six that featured group photographs of queer folks out about city.

But the connection between cameras and queer nightlife has by no means been simple. Villeneuve factors to an ancient times, by means of the Nineteen Seventies, ’80s and even into the ’90s, when cameras might be unwelcome inside homosexual bars. “Being out and being queer, wasn’t as accepted,” he says. So the easy act of showing in {a photograph} at a queer institution might result in detrimental penalties for some patrons. Even as queer counterculture roared throughout this era, the ensuing photographs got here from inside trusted networks and communities.

Today, “there’s more photographs than ever,” Villeneuve says. As party-goers pull out their telephones, photographs seem to have infinite digital lives. But he questions whether or not this quantities to an archive folks will really return to. “It just kind of exists and goes by on Instagram,” he says. “Then it’s gone.”

That impermanence is partly what Hoang needed to withstand with the Gay Rights zine. The get together had grown shortly over its first 12 months, he says, and the succession of nights and pictures had begun to really feel like a blur. The zine allowed him to decelerate, sift by means of his archive and take into account what, precisely, he needed to protect.

At one Gay Rights get together, he photographed a dancer named Jade as she tore aside an enormous papier mâché alien penis that had been hanging above the stage. In one body, she’s turned away from Hoang’s digital camera, her hair flying as the gang erupts in entrance of her. He remembers her gaze as virtually heroic. Every time he returns to that photograph, he’s reminded of the vitality within the room. 

When Villeneuve considers what Hoang’s photographs would possibly evoke 20 or 30 years from now, he hopes they’ll reveal the reprieve dance flooring supplied. “The world is pretty dark, but at least with these photos, you could see there was still beauty, escapism and freeness.”

Hoang additionally believes pictures can seize the folks, relationships and artistic scenes that converge at a celebration, turning into a reference level sooner or later. He imagines audiences trying again at previous nightlife photographs and recognizing individuals who went on to grow to be well-liked DJs or artists, all partying collectively of their youth. 

“We don’t know anybody’s significance right now,” Hoang says. But he acknowledges that a part of creating an archive within the current is about pointing his digital camera at what feels essential.

The Gay Rights zine can be accessible on the subsequent Gay Rights get together on Oct. 9.