Jetpack

2026 Burning Man Trip Report: Axis Mundi

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What are people going to remember about Burning Man 2026?

To me, it felt like a pretty easy year. There was a lot of wind and dust and some pretty cold weather, but everybody just plowed through it and kept having fun. The concert featuring the Black Rock Philharmonic together with the Playa Choir, with percussive fire bursts provided by El Pulpo Magnifico, located at the Titanic, took place during a thickening whiteout that really made it hard for the choir, but everyone pushed through anyway and it was awe-inspiring. There was some light rain one night, and a lot of people left their bikes behind and walked home, but it wasn’t a mudpocalpyse and the playa was back to normal by the next day. There was a sense of things just working fine. The spectacularly high man base burned quickly and when it collapsed in flames, it all collapsed at once, boom, absolutely gorgeous.

The population was smaller than usual (60,000, I heard). There’s so much going on, between art, the city, and the playa, that you would never notice, but it was easier to get tickets and exodus only took an hour. I have to say that this was the best year for art, large and small, in a long time. There was just a ton of the big spectacular stuff and a lot of cute little things, too. A new trend I’m noticing is adorable little art out in the deep playa where you can sit down. Benches, chairs, sofas, little living rooms: I’m here for it.

Let’s focus on our stomping grounds: the queerborhood. Comfort and Joy has new leadership who have done a great job of reinvigorating the camp, focusing on the important things like the super-popular naked wrestling, the afterglow tent, Chickpea’s dayglo garden, and the Pink Gym. The leadership of BAAAHS has announced that the art car itself will be taking a year off in 2027 so that the people who have spent more than a decade maintaining it and running it can actually go to Burning Man one year. There is a crop of new camps, too: I noticed Bikini Bottom(less), PLUR pups, and Through the Looking gl.Ass. VICE had a truck crash – fortunately, nobody was hurt, but they still managed to get to playa and serve iced coffee. My camp Future Turtles switched to a café format – I hope you enjoyed the Coffee and Blow Jobs.

The Naked Pub Crawl was a bit of a drunken mess (what!?), with more stops than ever and really, really cold weather, but people pushed through anyway and fun was had by all. This is the second year in a row where it was low key too cold to be naked, so Bar Bunny renamed it the “Flasher Pub Crawl.” Fair.

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The Queerburners Event Guide is Here

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Your humble web nerd Jetpack is just two days away from leaving for playa. Burning Man 2026 is turning out to be really, really cool and I could not be more excited.

We’ve got a new edition of the Queerburners Event Guide ready to go! This year it includes not only complete listings and the Queerborhood map, but a bunch of new editorial content! We have an article about the Queer Scene at Love Burn by Karloz Torres (who reminds you that “Burning Man is not a Love Burn-sanctioned Event”), Jason Olsen’s story about the giant piano bench he is bringing to Burning Man, Trixie’s history of 20 years of burning with the story of Gender Blender, art and an essay by Victor Tang, Stupid vs. Sexxy, and profiles of some of the well known LGBTQIA+ artists on playa.

You can download the PDF right now.

Want a printed copy? You can pick it up:

  • At the Future Turtles Opening Party, Saturday night midnight (right when the gate opens!), 7:00 & E
  • At the LGBTQ+ Meet & Greet Monday at 9:00pm, at the Down Low Club, D & 7:25
  • While supplies last at the Future Turtles cafe (7:00 & E) or Mission Country Club (7:00 & D).

2026 CREDITS: Rob!n and Jetpack, Editors. Layout by Rob!n. Print production by David Ceccarelli. Special Thanks to Jen Brown, Dusty Rose, Kyana Van Houten, Wink Maltman, Micahel Yamashita, Scott W. Wazlowski, and The Bay Area Reporter. Extra special thanks to Adriana Roberts and the veterans of Piss Clear; Gran Fury, HomoCore, Keith Haring, David McDiarmid, and the BRC Gazette for inspiration.

Help us Make the 2026 Event Guide!

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We’ve got a draft of the 2026 Queerburners guide ready for your review! If you are organizing any queer events, camps, art, or otherwise at Burning Man Axis Mundi, we need your help to make this year’s Queerburners event guide as great as possible.

Help us by using the link below to –

  • Check the accuracy of your camp’s event listings
  • Upload graphics (flyers, logos, photos, etc) to include in the final version
  • Verify your camp’s placement and other details!

The deadline to respond is Saturday, August 15, at 5:00 PM PDT.

This is best reviewed on a laptop or desktop.

To start reviewing, click here.

Thanks!

Rob!n and Jetpack
Editors

Queerborhood 2026

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The queerborhood is shaping up to be a super exciting neighborhood, mostly centered on 7:00 this year, with camps old and new. Here are the camps that have reported their locations to us (final update, August 21):

Did we make any mistakes or leave out your camp? Please let us know by updating the detailed Queerburners Directory.

As we have done for the past four years, we’re publishing a Queerburners Guide to the playa this year. We’ll have event listings, a camp index, artist profiles, and content from you! Submit your ideas here.

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.

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.