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.