The dance floor always felt comfortable to me, whether at a wedding or in a club. It was like an invitation to lose myself in the beat and move my body the way it was meant to be. Little did I know that the revival of this passion after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic would be crucial to better understanding my identity and building my now large LGBTQ+ community in the City of Angels.

My COVID-19 experience also included a 1,000-mile move from Denver to Los Angeles in September 2020, where I essentially hit the reset button for my community by spending my first full year as an Angelino largely at my own company during shutdowns and lockdowns.

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In January 2021, I came out as nonbinary. At the same time, I was redefining what the “queer” label I had held onto for years meant to me—namely, that my sexuality was more consistent with bi/pansexuality.

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Because of my solitary life, it was challenging to explore these personal elements and how they affected my reality and life overall. At this point, I was still mostly alone in my apartment and although I had community support online, it didn’t feel like enough to fully navigate this new world of exploration.

In late 2021 and early 2022, I jumped at the opportunity to share space with other LGBTQ+ folks as vaccines rolled out and some parties began to reopen their doors, mostly recurring queer events in clubs across LA that featured alternative electronic musicians. I had made a few local friends online through Instagram and TikTok who served as a lifeboat of sorts to explore these queer-organized parties and lineups.

These spaces were electric. They drew crowds of people who felt completely uninhibited in the world of expression. Every part of the community was represented, and no one seemed afraid to be fully themselves.

While I was initially only brave enough to cross them with friends, after breaking the seal, dancing with other LGBTQ+ people felt like a necessity in my life. In 2023, I decided to go out alone more often to satisfy that need, rather than relying on friends to help me feel braver. Gradually, I remembered my personable, extroverted nature around strangers, perhaps due to a pandemic regression that made me more hesitant to socialize than I had been before.

During my first solo dance event in the first week of January, I made it a goal to simply start a conversation with the people there. When I first started wandering dance clubs alone, my number one priority was to overcome the discomfort and start making connections – I trusted my gut and approached people whose style or demeanor I was comfortable with. I latched on to “who do you want to see?” or a compliment on an outfit. And sure enough, that was enough to get people talking, even finding friends for the night and connecting on Instagram to get back together.

It became clear that many around me were similarly hungry for contact and hesitant to take the step. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to build community or fully explore my newfound identity with my fellow queers unless I made an effort to practice being a human in the world again. Almost every time I spoke to someone I’d never met, they were immediately friendly and open. Whether we stayed together for the entire evening after chatting or just left the conversation at that, I was regularly greeted with a warmth that soothed my previous insecurities.

I can hardly express in words how much my community has blossomed with this goal in mind since the beginning of 2023. The confidence to overcome the initial discomfort and traverse new spaces alone, together with an ever-growing circle of friends, has given me a new sense of self-confidence.

Little by little, I found and regularly attended parties where a wide range of people from the community met—myriad identities and backgrounds, yet sharing the warmth of being an LGBTQ+ person. This felt like the expansive community I’d always longed for when imagining life in LA, all-encompassing and not just a subset: gays and lesbians alike, all races, ages, and a wide range of gender expressions, which felt really safe as a newly out nonbinary person.

These were some of the first places I introduced myself as a nonbinary person, and these larger LGBTQ+ crowds have always given me a greater sense of safety and validation than some other queer (and of course non-queer) spaces I’ve traversed since.

This immediate validation within my community, especially in those early days, certainly gave me more confidence to embrace my identity and expression without regret, alongside the simple act of dancing itself.

The dance floor gave me a lot of space for self-exploration during this phase of transformation: I could move with people of all genders in friendly or more intimate ways, experiment with my fashion and gender expression, and fully engage with previously latent elements of myself while the music moved me on the dance floor.

Although I was out and proud throughout my teens and 20s, I clung to my masculinity as a lifeboat, perhaps, with feelings of safety or acceptance overshadowing my true self. Since childhood, I have not fully identified with either gender binary, although I have always felt more connected to femininity, even if I rarely expressed it.

Dancing has allowed me to truly enjoy softness, sensuality and femininity as I shake my hips, move my hands and arms expressively and walk my own stationary catwalk to the beat. At the same time, dancing has provided me with opportunities to create space, to feel dominant and assertive, and to embrace those elements of myself that might be coded as more masculine, right alongside everything else that I am.

It’s hard to explain how therapeutic or cathartic it can be to lose yourself in a good DJ set or live electronic performance. I’ve left many of these places with more compassion and a better understanding of my true self. Trusting my body and its expression in movement has given me a greater capacity for self-love and the gentleness to continue to explore and realize my identity and place in the world.

Understanding that I can take up space on the dance floor and embrace the collective energy of the people around me – and not worry about what I look like or how I’m perceived – has given me more freedom to adopt the same mentality for the rest of my life and has afforded me an immense amount of freedom in expressing and exploring my true self.

During a Pride techno rave party last June, where I was under the roof of a warehouse with a dozen or so of these new friends, one of them openly praised my genuine energy on the dance floor, with no regard for anyone else’s perception, while simultaneously giving the people around me permission to do the same. A few weeks later, a stranger told me I had a “giving” energy on the dance floor as we looked at each other on Instagram on the smoking terrace. Moments like this always remind me that, despite my ongoing insecurities, I’m doing something right.

Trusting that I can build community by simply being myself and, in fact, recognizing that I will find my people—without putting on a mask or trying to make myself smaller to be what I think others want me to be—has allowed me to better incorporate these same principles into my everyday life.

This ultimately led to a wide range of expression in my everyday life: I wore more skirts, shorts, softer color palettes, and certain hairstyles as my hair grew back—though it also left room for the more “masculine,” coded parts of my expression that I might have been quicker to push aside when I first came out for fear of misunderstanding. Over time, I simply became less afraid of being understood or of everyone “seeing” me as nonbinary, given the truth I knew for myself and the validation I found from the people I genuinely cared about.

Dancing makes me feel much more grounded in my gender, queer identity and self-worth. It’s a fundamental human experience that has brought LGBTQ+ people together in the past and gives me permission to focus solely, if only for a few hours, on the warmth around me and the beat in my ears, quieting the often overwhelming noise that life may be throwing at us.

As a result, my demeanor has changed and I have a little more confidence in managing my self-esteem and the way I explore change and growth as my old and new experiences continue to shape my life and personality.

I’m in the midst of a tumultuous career transition, and like many Americans, I’m unhappy with the current economic climate, inflation, and the myriad forces working against the LGBTQ+ community. Knowing that I have family in these spaces to return to, and that I can always take time to let those worries fade, offers a certain comfort and renewal.

I am eternally grateful for the music that carried me through my confused teenage and young adult years, and the freedom to move my body to it that was the catalyst that shaped my new life and community, now teeming with chosen family and warmth both on and off the dance floor. I can’t wait to see where it takes me next.

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