And I Dance with Somebody: Queer History in a Japanese Nightclub

Extract

Halfway up the exit stairs of a Kyoto subway station lies the entrance to a small nightclub called, appropriately enough, Metro. It’s been there for several decades, serving a cosmopolitan mix of people drawn from the art schools and universities in the immediate neighbourhood and non-mainstream music scenes from across the wider Kansai region of western Japan. Once a month it also hosts the region’s longest-running queer event – a drag-based club night called Diamonds are Forever, which was launched in 1989.

I first went to Diamonds in the autumn of 1998 while studying at a nearby university. I had been learning Japanese for about eight years at that point, starting in my suburban Queensland high school at the high point of Australia’s early 1990s turn to Asia, before spending a year as an exchange student at a high school in Kyoto’s outer suburbs in 1995. My official reason for being back in Japan was to improve my language skills, but, about to turn twenty-one and with a growing realization of my sexuality, I also knew that it was past time to make real the slow break from the conservative family, church and community I had grown up with.