I still laugh at being called the “bad circuit party guy.” It was a moment three years ago when I had just become editor of The Bold Italic, and it must have come from someone who knew me—or knew of me—around 2015 to 2019.

Back then, I was in my early 30s and only recently active in the San Francisco LGBTQ+ community. I’m not sure I ever went to that specific kind of party, but I did drink; I kept an aggressive social calendar, and I organized events. A series of them at small bars—Q Bar, the Lone Star Saloon, SF Eagle, and others—I meant as a love letter to Comfort & Joy’s Pride party, Afterglow. (Maybe that’s what my critic meant.) And equally as a love letter to the drag queen, Juanita More.

At the time, I loved Ms. More’s Booty Call Wednesdays series, specifically for the amazing photography captured by one Cabure Bonugli. When my peer group debuted Glow at SF Eagle, Cabure was the first photographer we hired. I invested considerably on photo booths at every subsequent event. Glow also wasn’t my main fare; I mostly hosted weekly game nights where I took the photos.

I belonged to a group of misfit nerds who commonly shared stories of loneliness in the San Francisco LGBTQ+ community. This is a topic I distinctly remember a pair of bar owners discussing with me—that our group was a rare one within this age bracket to coalesce on the queer scene at that point. Other popular choices included a set of sex parties, gay kickball leagues, and a series of wine nights that featured the sort of Grindr eye candy with white-collar jobs and Fitness SF memberships.

Lately I’ve been expanding my horizons and going to more events. In reviewing this story, my partner asked what my argument was. I don’t have one. I might have just wanted to reset the narrative on my nonexistent circuit party habits.

But in writing this feature, I think the most honest thing I concluded about the San Francisco dance party scene in 2026 is that it resists a thesis. So do I.

A born-again circuit queen

I only started going to dance parties a bit more in the 2020s. I shimmied in tulle at Trixie Mattel’s Solid Pink Disco in 2024. In the last two weeks I went to a Cave Rave at the old Sutro bathhouse, and then Tinzo + Jojo made an appearance at 1015 Folsom. I found the latter two parties lacking something I can’t put my tongue on. Probably molly.

The cave rave felt particularly young and not well managed; and in a way, that was almost charming. I just had nothing in common with a group of Gen Z that, as I wrote, clutched NÜTRL and Bud Light while lots of weed wafted around. Both this party and the one at 1015 felt, ahem, quite heterosexual. I think of San Francisco as the queer heart of the planet, so I get a strong vibe mismatch attending parties like these.

“We’re seeing a common thread,” my lesbian friend told me. “The problem is straight guys.”

She and I had just come from the Tinzo + Jojo party, where a man almost punched me after he had been hogging a small space in front of the DJs. Behind us, another man was drunk to the point of falling over on everyone, happily, until my partner turned around and said, “Do you mind?”

“Yes we do mind!” one of the women with him said before carting him off. Later when we passed the group upstairs, the man was dry humping the same women against a railing. “He’s going to fuck them right off the balcony,” my friend said.

The gay/straight dichotomy

My friend’s read was specific to that night, but the dynamic she described isn’t new.

A few years ago, Vice published a piece about queerbaiting nightlife, describing venues and promoters who borrow the aesthetics of queerness to draw crowds that end up being overwhelmingly straight. A DJ named Meduusa put it plainly: in the past, straight people didn’t really want to party with queer people. Now they do, or at least they want the vibe.

“Our visibility has brought us to a place where people see we’re cool and influencing the culture,” she said, “and they want to be cool and in the know, too.”

Katherine Conrad, a local DJ in San Francisco, offered a more hopeful read.

“There’s definitely a movement toward events that are really queer, sapphic, that everyone can go to,” she told me. “You can tell that they are spaces that invite people to express themselves freely.”

Conrad is co-president of FLUX SF, which hosts events for the trans and nonbinary community, and she goes to a lot of music festivals. On raving, she noted that if the performer is too mainstream, you get a crowd that’s not even that into the music, and they don’t know how to behave.

“They don’t maintain space or know how to be polite,” she said. “They barge through people.”

The substance use question

I struggle in other ways. I quit drinking seven years ago, and now I notice when the DJ is fine but not transcendent. I notice that the room is too hot and that someone near me smells like a distillery. I notice that nobody is having the same experience, because the chemical that would synchronize them is doing different things to different nervous systems, and without it, we’re just a bunch of strangers standing in the dark.

I don’t miss drinking at parties; what I miss is the permission that drinking gave me to not care whether a party was good. And for those around me, it isn’t alcohol that motivates them anyway; the chemistry of the room is literally changing.

Cocaine use nearly doubled and ketamine nearly tripled in the U.S. from 2016 to 2019, while MDMA held flat. The pattern continued through 2023: ketamine kept climbing, molly didn’t. The rave drugs of the moment aren’t the ones that make you love everyone; they’re the ones that numb you out or wire you up.

“And how the fuck are you partying until 5 a.m. and just drinking?” one friend told me. They noted that most people appear to do some kind of drug at parties, but in SF it’s never one specific thing.

“It’s just common. It enhances the experience,” they said. “Would I go to a rave completely sober? Probably not.”

Sober sisters

Not true for Connie Chen, a new influencer I found in San Francisco through her Instagram, Curious Connie. She’s amassed nearly 11,000 followers in just three months from promoting day raves and other sober-leaning events.

“In the past, I think a fun night for people meant getting really drunk and going to a show,” she told me. “So I thought I should like it too, but then I didn’t.”

Chen stopped drinking about two years ago after noticing that every drink cost her roughly an hour of sleep. But quitting didn’t mean staying home. Through San Francisco’s Burning Man scene, she discovered a network of house parties, day raves, and creative gatherings that run on Partiful invites rather than bottle service.

The day events, she told me, share a quality that my friend and I noticed was missing:

“There’s no aggression. People are sober, it’s during the day, everyone is really friendly,” Chen said.

And the big venues? “Nobody knows me. It feels kind of hetero. Kind of aggro. It’s already late and I don’t like that.”

The bigger picture, and the rise of the third space

Conrad described a queer scene that’s thriving in its own rooms. Chen found a sober world that was invisible to her for eight years. My anonymous friend can’t imagine raving without drugs. All of this is true at the same time, on the same weekends, in the same seven-by-seven miles.

San Francisco has always run on parallel tracks. The tourist San Francisco and the local San Francisco. The tech San Francisco and the artist San Francisco. The sober San Francisco and the one where someone you just met is offering you a bump in a bathroom at midnight. These aren’t contradictions. They’re just the city.

Dance parties here are the same way. The experience you have depends entirely on which door you walk through. What stays with me, though, is something Chen said about her first eight years in the city. She was here the whole time along with the house parties, day raves and creative gatherings. She just didn’t know.

Partiful added 2 million new users in the first quarter of 2025 alone, with monthly active users up 400 percent year over year. The majority of users are under 30, and its pitch is literally helping people plan “intimate dinner parties, weekend house parties, or warehouse raves” to cultivate real-world relationships.

For San Francisco, this is a puzzle piece wedged between ambition and economics. A report from the National Independent Venue Association released this year found that the city’s independent stages generate $152 million annually in off-site economic impact, but only 36 percent of them were profitable in 2024. The rooms are producing enormous value for the city while struggling to survive inside it.

Meanwhile, the parties that people actually want to go to are increasingly the ones that don’t need a room at all.

“As you get older, it’s not as easy to make friends,” said Stuart Schuffman, the San Francisco writer known as Broke-Ass Stuart, who this month is launching an algorithmically-matched dinner club. “This takes the pressure off of having to walk into a club or join a class to meet people.”

Dinner clubs are having a moment, much the same we’ve seen a proliferation of outdoor dance parties. Daybreaker, for example, is a sober morning dance series that began in Brooklyn in 2013. It now operates in San Francisco out of venues like the Ferry Building and Thrive City at Chase Center—on the premise of no booze, no VIP or bottle service.

For its part, the city itself has been loosening the screws. In 2024, Mayor Breed waived entertainment permit fees for outdoor music. San Francisco also became the first city in California to create “entertainment zones”, allowing bars to sell drinks for outdoor consumption during events. And that gave us ongoing moments like Castro Night Market (and a spate of others), and Downtown First Thursdays.

I’m not making friends at these parties, but I’m not sure I was supposed to. The dance party scene in San Francisco in 2026 is fractured and alive, and probably happening somewhere you haven’t been invited yet.

Under all the bass, and in between the ketamine and the Partiful links and the faux fur, is the same question the SF dance scene has always asked: Do you want to be in this room with these people? If the answer is no, that’s okay—there’s always another room to dance in.

Saul Sugarman is editor-in-chief and owner of The Bold Italic.

The Bold Italic is a not-for-profit media organization, and we publish first-person perspectives about San Francisco and the Bay Area. We operate under a fiscal sponsorship of a 501(c)(3).

You can become a paid subscriber. Or donate. Or learn more about us.

Many of these photos in this story were proudly commissioned and paid for in prior stories for The Bold Italic. The cover photo of The Stud reopening was taken by Gooch.

This month we are sponsoring LGBT Center Soirée 2026. This isn’t a paid gig; but they promised to sing The Bold Italic‘s praises on their party brochures and messaging, so long as we did the same. I have gone to this party twice before. It’s not as fancy as, say, Art Bash or SF Ballet’s opening gala, but—much like Hunky Jesus earlier this month—it is a great time to see many notable faces in the LGBTQ+ community. And a good time to reuse yester-year’s Pride dress. Sister Roma and Honey Mahogany aggressively went for those fundraising dollars at the 2024 dinner. And I loved the drag performances that year.

LGBT Center Soiree party details:
📅 Saturday, April 18, 2026
🕑 5:30 PM
📍City View at Metreon
🏠 135 4th St, San Francisco, CA 94103

Soirée 2026 – SF LGBT Center

As we celebrate the SF LGBT Center’s 24 incredible years of service to our community, please join us for an evening filled with reunion and community brilliance.

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Want even more events?

I’ve got a new events page at events.thebolditalic.com – and I’ve set aside all my picks for April at the top of the list.

What’s Happening in SF — The Bold Italic

The Bold Italic’s guide to the greatest events in San Francisco and the Bay Area.

And in full disclosure

Not to totally dismiss an untrue narrative, lol: I did go to an occasional dance party in the 2010s. At small venues. For example, I loved Lindsay Slowhands’ Hell’a Tight.

Nightlife party ‘Hell’a Tight’ enters new era at SF Oasis

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The long-running LGBTQ+ drag show and dance party by Lindsay Slowhands begins a new chapter after officially winding down at Underground SF.

I also made an occasional appearance at Bootie. (And its organizer, Adriana Roberts, is a freelance writer for The Bold Italic.)

20 years in, ‘Bootie’ is still mixing tracks for ‘girls, gays, and theys’

But straight men are welcome, too. Their April 6th party at Cat Club will celebrate “the best mashups in the world ever.”

Photos from Bootie’s 20th Anniversary

I loved that people came for good music and laughs, not to stand and pose, cruise, or get blackout drunk. The vibe was pure happiness.

I never wrote about D’Arcy Drollinger’s Sexitude, but I should do so eventually. In this dance group, I’ve performed onstage with her at Pride. We’ve shared moments at galas. SF Oasis was, in many ways, my introduction to San Francisco LGBTQ+ nightlife.

High noon at the Oasis

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D’Arcy Drollinger’s busy at the helm of the SoMa drag club and other ventures, too

The legacy of SF Oasis will live on, following its successful gala

More than $200,000 flooded in support of the SoMa drag club and its quest to pay artists fair wages.