It’s an elusive state to be chasing. The situations that produce it seem simple, but for it all to come together just right—that’s rare. Sometimes, a night out is just a night out. Which is fine, as far as it goes. One expression for it is to “blow off steam.” As if we were steam engines with too much pressure in the boiler.

A night out to blow off steam can return us to the state where we can go back to our jobs on Monday—the accumulated frustrations and disappointments dissipated, at least for a little while. Until the next weekend. Then it starts all over again. Nightlife as a safety valve to get us through each work week. To reconcile us with the inevitability of returning to selling ourselves to make rent.

Sometimes, I want more than that. Especially when Pride Weekend rolls around again, at the end of Pride Month, in June. I don’t just want to return to the state in which I can endure this world as it is. I want to get free. I want to be outside the cyclical time of work and leisure. I want to be off in a different time altogether. I want those rare and special places, which I write about with a certain hesitation. Some things don’t need to be exposed to the light of day.

Those spaces are not exactly utopia. It’s not as if people leave all the contradictions and antagonisms of everyday life at the door when they enter the party. Both Michel Foucault and Samuel Delany have used the term “heterotopia”—and that I think describes the situation best. There are spaces and times in the city where gay habits of life are the common ones, and everyone else is supposed to adapt to them, rather than the other way around.

It says something about the straight imagination—that the idea of dispensing with compulsory cis-heterosexual norms becomes a fantasy of utopia. Cis-het straightness is more like a straitjacket. Less a sexuality than a social compact, where everyone is looking at everyone else to see how to appear normal. When people tell me they are “straight,” I wonder what their private browser history would say about that.

“I don’t just want to return to the state in which I can endure this world as it is. I want to get free. I want to be outside the cyclical time of work and leisure. I want to be off in a different time altogether.”

Because the public conduct of straightness can be so confining, straight people interpret gay space as a space in which they can be free to express themselves sexually—despite the side-eye from gay, queer, and trans people, thinking to themselves: “You fuckers have eleven months and the rest of the world in which to publicly express cis-het sexuality. Why do you have to bring that here?”

As someone who cosplayed the cis-het game for a long time—I get it. That’s a way of life that subordinates a lot of things about pleasure, the body, the enjoyment of life, to the hard work of making and raising more humans. As if the experience of life meant nothing other than passing on that meaninglessness to yet another generation.

I have no regrets at all about becoming a parent. And I know plenty of gay and trans people who are parents, or who want to become them. The whole idea of “family” is complicated. We want the part of it that is a haven from the pressures of capitalism—where we can love and be loved. Where we can feel safe and appreciated for who we are, or want to become.

It just isn’t like that for so many people, particularly queer and trans people who discovered that their family loved the cis-het order of gender and sexuality more than it loved them. The family can also mean violence and expulsion. Even at its best, it’s fragile, and more than a little boring. My friends Sophie Lewis and M. E. O’Brien, who work on “family abolition,” have elaborated on these contradictions.

Some cis-het people look longingly at gay life and see freely-expressed sexuality as utopia. On the other hand, Jamie Hood has written beautifully about the longing for the sort of suburban, heterosexual, nuclear family that Don and Betty Draper had in the TV series Mad Men—something very hard to achieve for a trans woman. The “utopian” can be a kind of impossible desire, continually out of reach in whichever everyday life one is constrained to.

“Capitalism, or whatever this nightmare state of affairs is, doesn’t allow us to live lives that have both public and private joy on a consistent basis… The possibilities of life are subordinated to working for The Man, or working on making more little laborers to grow up and work for The Man.”

I got to do the family thing by putting off coming out—an option unavailable to most trans people. I get to do the nightlife thing now, but not as a young person. This middle-aged body is only up for so much. Capitalism, or whatever this nightmare state of affairs is, doesn’t allow us to live lives that have both public and private joy on a consistent basis. Even if you can afford it. The possibilities of life are subordinated to working for The Man, or working on making more little laborers to grow up and work for The Man. All we seem to have are moments of heterotopia, where a better life is possible, but only in isolated spaces and times.

The word “utopia” gets tossed about freely, but it’s a shame nobody much reads the greatest of the utopian writers, Charles Fourier. His utopia was actually very practical. He worried away at all the little details of how the good life could be organized, from delighting the senses to taking out the trash. That his utopia seems impossible is an indictment of how impossible life became, in giving up so much to that other utopia—the one where the market decides everything. To the point where it will crash the climate and destroy this world.

These are the sorts of thoughts that spool through my brain when I’m dancing, at the rave, on Pride Weekend. Or, at least, this is as near as I can reconstruct them on the rainy Monday morning after. When I get free, get into “ravespace,” the relentless monologue in my head doesn’t stop, but somehow, I’m just not there for it. Thoughts float by like clouds on a blue-sky day, and leave me be. What’s going on is elsewhere, in the flesh.

It can be hard, as a transsexual, to be in one’s body. But I think it’s something cis people have trouble with, too, sometimes. I was dancing near who I took to be a cis-het woman, who had her back to the big sub-bass bin, house left of the DJ. For hours, she just stood there, barely moving, on her phone. Who I took to be her boyfriend stood nearby, in dark shades, looking self-conscious, making half-hearted attempts to move his body. They looked at me like I’m some sort of freak. Whatever. I looked back with pity, and, quite frankly, condescension. I’m not proud of feeling that—but whatever. The music is calling to your body to move it and get free, hun. Why resist it?

For there I am, dancing with my girlfriend at a big gay party on Pride Weekend. I’m slicked in sweat, making my silly, poorly-coordinated moves. Tits out, getting free. Not caring what anyone thinks. Flesh and sound merged in the dark, the heat, the terrarium of the rave. It’s what I have to keep me going until Pride comes around again next year.