We built this city! And again! And again!

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2025 was a tough year for city and art builders. The first huge windstorm, with gusts of 50mph, came right at the end of build week and destroyed the hard work of many build teams. In the queerborhood and the city at large, big shade structures and tents were particularly prone to being blown away. The Camp Beaverton dome has, sadly, seen its last burn. The strap-on-a-thon was held in a series of smaller yurts and delayed by a couple of days. Comfort and Joy kept trying to rebuild the Afterglow tent and did finally get something beautiful up in time for the Wednesday Naked Pub Crawl, which took place amongst scattered showers. The straights have their Orgy Dome which, according to national news media, just blew away on the first day and never opened. Almost every camp had to rebuild something at least once or twice. It was a mess, but mostly, we persevered.

With rain and wind persisting through Wednesday, it felt like a shorter burn than usual — and some planned art, camps, and events just did not happen. The city streets were torn into cobblestones by the mud making it hard to bike around the city, although the inner- and deep-playa were delightfully flat and easy to navigate.

It was a great year for queer art, with two giant pieces this year: Afterlife (by Blitzy aka Ade, Chickpea, Steve Dudek, Scott Pando, Noah Schnaubelt, and a large crew) and Event Horizon (by Ben Bartlett and his large crew) and some smaller ones like the beautiful driftwood strollers by Klajdi Tsano. As usual BAAAHS was out and about, the Naked Pub Crawl survived some light rain, and every Future Turtles party was actually just a mud party.

There were new and old camps in the Queerborhood, but one big change was that BAAAHS Station and their HUB camps have moved from the 4:30 sector to the 7:30 sector, effectively closing down the “emergency backup” East Village.

As Starlink and social media become more prevalent it’s easy to see a change to the culture of immediacy. I have to admit that occasionally I peeked at the Reddit burning man group during the event, where I found an odd and motley assortment of bitter people complaining about things that had absolutely nothing to do with the reality on the ground, and couldn’t help but think that if those idjits just got the heck off of Reddit and out into Burning Man, right outside their tent flap, they could enjoy the greatest thing on earth instead of writing salty screeds about how it was better last year and tech bros were ruining it and nobody is weird any more. Baloney. The real Burning Man is still there, in the same quantities it was always there. Don’t believe social media. I deleted my Reddit account.

The 2025 Event Guide Is Here!

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It’s here! The Queerburners 2025 Event Guide is ready just in time for you to print (or download to your phone) and bring to playa! There will also be limited edition printed copies available on playa (see that link for locations).

For the first three years I produced this myself, but this year I’m happy to have the help of Robin from Mission Country Club who really did all the heavy lifting of graphic design, page layout, and a ton of data collection.

Queerborhood 2025

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Every year we try to pull together a map of where the LGBTQIA+ and ally camps are placed in Black Rock City. Here it is, for 2025!

Although there are still a few camps out in the 4:30 “East Village,” this year BAAAHS and their hub of friends have moved into the 7:30 sector with the rest of the queerborhood. We now have almost fifty camps in the Queerburners directory.

Even more fun: production of the Queerburners event guide is well under way and we expect to have that for you to download on August 12th. We have well over 400 events on playa this year! You can also come pick up a printed copy of the event guide (first-come, first-served!) at either the Future Turtles welcome party (opening night, Saturday night, at 11:59:59 pm), or at the Down Low Club LGBTQ+ Meet & Greet, which is Monday night at 9pm.

What happened with Toaster?

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Happy burning man everyone, this is Toaster writing. A question came to me through social media the other day about who is managing Queerburners these days. There are some amazing people who have stepped up in a vacuum I created by taking some steps back. I am grateful those persons who kept this legacy alive with a great deal of respect and honor.

Starting in 2018 I began a slow process of making changes. My last visit to the burn was in 2022 and it was a rough year for me. I began looking into what my priorities are and where they are going. 2022 was so rough, I ended up leaving the burn the Friday before Labor Day weekend for my own mental and physical health. Would I go back? There is a part of me that craves it.

I go to my regional burn called www.snrg.com outside of Las Vegas and am open to others. This year there has been a lot of temptation to return to the burn but I am still questioning if the logistics will work and why I would go. I have never gone to Burning Man as just an attendee before. I have always, always been super committed to projects. In 2022 I didn’t have that structure around me of a theme camp and really crash landed because of my own mistakes. I never learned to Burn on my own.

2018 my parents became seriously ill and I had to make some choices. It was the beginning of change for me as life started asking for more commitment from me. Marriage, moving, job, trying to get a book published, and more.

I still help out on Facebook and check in with @spolsky routinely. He is an amazing human being. Also Paul Carey and others who keep the faith on what Queerburners was always meant to be. I’m in the background, helping where I can, leaving the major decisions to the team who is left. My status as creator and founder is acknowledged, but I am glad to take a back seat as needed. I am no longer involved in a lot of things regionally and nationally that I used to be.

If you want to know more about me and what I am doing in life find me www.scottkay.me and www.iamscottkay.com.

To all those keeping the faith, to all those building community and not getting caught up in the negative, to the creators and the influencers, to those raising up people instead of bringing them down – all the love and respect in the world.

Happy New Year!

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Oh boy! Oh boy oh boy oh boy. It’s the new year which means that all of us die-hard burners can officially start preparing for Burning Man without feeling insane. It’s less than nine months away! Time to start organizing your camp, figuring out what kind of art you’re going to bring, and recruiting new burners. If you want to attend Burning Man for the first time, we have a guide. Remember that most theme camps do a lot of work during the year leading up to Burning Man, so if you are interested in joining one, now! is the time to start getting involved.

It’s also going to be a great year on playa. I can feel it. Last year was a little bit quiet thanks to some big camps taking the year off but they are all comfortably rested by now and should be ready to bring renewed energy.

(My math nerd husband would like to remind everyone that 2025 is the only year we will be alive for that is a perfect square (45²); this won’t happen again until 2116.)

The second largest US regional burn, Love Burn, is coming soon! February 13-16th, in Miami, Florida, it is one of the easiest regional burns to attend. Our correspondents tell us to expect a sizable Rainbow Village located right on esplanade, with quite a few camps including anchor Banana Hammocks, RUPL, Wilde Muse, Freaky Tiki, Sasquatch Society, Darude/Sandstorm, Bad Bitch Skate Club, Locochon, In Vino Veritas, and Time Travelers.

And it’s time to start getting ready for the largest regional burn, located just outside of Gerlach, NV, to be held August 24 – September 1, 2025. Last year we had about 50 queer or queer-adjacent camps in our directory and we published an awesome 36 page event directory listing tons of great events on playa. The 2025 directory is now open for submissions. It is a great way to find your tribe on playa.

If your camp is coming back to playa in 2025 and was already in the 2024 directory, you can resubmit your information with a click (just log on with the same account you used last year). If you are a new camp in 2025 that would like to be listed, it’s easy – just click the Submit link, fill out your camp’s information, and Hey Presto! If you need any help, email me at directory@queerburners.org.

If you didn’t like Burning Man 2024, you can stop going now

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(A trip report by Jetpack)

Burning Man 2024 was, technically, one of the best years to be at Burning Man in recent memory. There was a bit of wind and rain during build week, that was all gone by gate opening at Midnight Saturday. And with the weather behind us, we had one of the most spectacular weeks in years: a perfect week with virtually no dust or wind and reasonable temperatures. In fact the first time this year’s Burning Man Virgins even knew what a whiteout was happened late Sunday night, during the temple burn, which, by the way, was so surreal and cool.

This year’s predicted apocalypse, the world-shattering, paradigm-breaking catastrophe of the event not selling every last ticket, resulted in a city with probably 67,000 peak residents instead of the usual 75,000. The easy availability of tickets was healthy for the city in a number of ways, bringing more last-minute and lower income participants, and reducing the Placement department’s ability to use their monopoly on Steward’s Sale tickets to cajole theme camps into working themselves to death just to get a ticket or two.

The theme this year, if I remember correctly, was Curiouser and Curiouser, which doesn’t really mean much in terms of Burning Man art, since we’re all doing Alice in Wonderland every year anyway. The man base was spectacularly beautiful and its spiral ramps gave a sensation of movement bursting out of a static object. The way those ramps brought you near, but not with, the people who had chosen to ascend a different ramp resulted in a moment of spontaneous interactivity as you waved and called your friends across a little chasm. This year’s Temple of Together, by Caroline Ghosn, recalled some of the delicateness of last year’s Temple of the Heart, but at night, it was better lit than any temple has ever been, which made for what was probably the most ornate and gothic temple we’ve ever had; it felt like it would not have been out of place as one of the great cathedrals of the world (without ever feeling sectarian).

Mutant vehicles? They just keep getting better. Mayan Warrior 2.0 made its surprise debut, and, as much as I wanted to be skeptical, found it to be absolutely stunning, four stories high, and with the best sound we’ve ever heard on playa. There were many other new mutant vehicles, large and small, including a simply massive one with a gigantic multi-tiered stage area behind the DJ so that there is virtually unlimited room to participate, even if you’re not a supermodel or friend of the DJ.

This year placement offered theme camps the option to take the year off and still get guaranteed placement for 2025, and a surprising number took them up on it, including some very major camps like Playalchemist, Distrikt, and queerborhood anchor Comfort & Joy. The result was interesting. Placed camps only went as far as approximately F or G this year, so there was tons of room for open camping. A lot of new, creative, smaller camps got some attention this year. My camp, the Future Turtles, had only 43 members but we managed to put on four big parties that were all mobbed. Many of the other newer queerborhood camps established in the last couple of years are starting to become institutions, from Pink Ponies to Fruitpop. This year saw Banana Hammocks, long established at Love Burn in Miami, establish their playa presence, along with a bunch of all new camps including Queertirement, Sandy Taco, Olympus (the first Queer camp on Esplanade in years!), BRC Municipal Pool (out of NYC! represent!), and Womxn Sex-positive & Pleasure Sluts, the first new all-women camp in the Queerborhood since Beaverton. The main drag of the Queerborhood was really F from 7:00 to 7:30 and the frontage of the camps there, many of them refurbished after last year’s mud, was absolutely perfection, making for one of the most on fleek blocks of Burning Man, with bars, clubs, sex clubs, a movie theater, cafes, Dusty Frogz’ Eiffel-fricking-tower, a candy shop, all done beautifully and without a single U-Haul truck or RV on the frontage. Gymnasium brought back their perennial favorite, naked oil wrestling and naked yoga, and also made room for the Pink Gym for lifting weights. Paradise Motel was back, after a year interruption, with sno-cones: show your junk to skip the line. 8-bit Bunny brought back the hot sauna and added a cold misting fan. Some of y’all ran San Francisco-clone parties with the usual pop music, tall men with perfect abs sipping vodka sodas and judging everyone, you know who you are, stop it, we don’t need to hear brat summer and feel bad about ourselves for not pulling some twink, when we could be biking into the playa exploring an infinite array of transcendent monumental art.

Time to go!

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We’re packing up and ready to go to playa in time for Build Week which starts next week!

This year there has been a lot of speculation about the weather (will it be hot and dusty? Oh no!), the city population (tickets did not sell out for the first time since 2011!), even where everyone is going to go after the Naked Pub Crawl now that Comfort & Joy is taking the year off (a new camp, BRC Municipal Pool, is the official afterparty). The one thing I’ve learned in five burns is that the thing that ends up being hardest in any given year is never the thing people are whinging about on social media beforehand. Just go, it’ll be fun!

I had a blast putting together this year’s Queerburners Event Directory which is chock-full of great events in the ‘hood and around the playa. You can download a PDF at that link and print it out, or just stop by the Future Turtles at 7 & F when you hit playa and pick up a copy, while supplies last.

The 2024 Event Guide is Here!

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With so many things to do on playa, queer and straight, it’s hard to know where to go at any given time!

Queerburners has your back. Every year since 2022, we publish a directory of as many awesome LGBTQIA+ events as we can find. To make it easy to use without Internet access, we provide it in PDF format which you can print out and bring with you. Download it now!

The 2024 Black Rock City Queerborhood(s)

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Every summer, it’s pretty glorious to see all the queer camps announcing their on-playa placement. The 7:30 sector continues to be a stronghold of the Queerborhood. In particular, F (Fascinate) and G (Gobsmack) are chock-filled with our friends, between 6:30 and 7:30, with other camps representing all over the sector. There is also a significant East Village in the 4:30 sector, clustered near BAAAHS village. This year we even have a Queer camp right on Esplanade called Olympus.

For a list of queer and ally camps that we know about, check the Queerburners Directory. And here they are in map form:

This is the final version of the Queerburners Map for 2024. There may be mistakes for which we apologize in advance, but please don’t send corrections — we’re busy packing our sparkly fairy lights! See you on playa!

Queerburners today

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Hey everyone this is Toaster. It’s been a hot minute since I reached out to the community because I have been taking a break over the last couple years and working on figuring out what my future is going to be with Burning Man. As much as I have changed and evolved, so have a lot of people who participate in this amazing community. As the founder of Queerburners, as the president of the board running this as a 501.c3, we have went through a period of reflection and adjusted to the needs and wants from all of you.

The board decided to disband, but keep certain services working along with these web pages. This is largely thanks to Joel’s work who is deeply passionate about this project. Some of us from the board are still participating only to manage resources and assets that have been designated to go to another non-profit as soon as we are able to close the non-profit part of this down.

Who knows what is next. I personally have not let go 100%, because I think a lot of who I am is still tied to Queerburners and this community as a whole. I chose to be a part of this, to work on helping build and create, over the last fifteen years and this is something that is hard to give up. My personal ups and downs with this have been meteoric, but I am hold on to the best moments. I am focused on my local regional event, SNRG.org, and am looking around to new ways I can do more. My time as a BRC Ranger has been very rewarding, too. So, who knows?

I updated the front of Queerburners.org and am checking in with Joel with some frequency while he has been managing a lot of the online stuff and has taken over the BRC Queer camps map and his events guide is opening for submissions on August 15th.

Thank you again!