On a Tuesday afternoon in September, Hinsdale Street is quiet. From the Atlantic Avenue L train station, I walk past a school, a masonry supply, and a parking lot filled with school buses before arriving at a black door sprinkled with white graffiti tags. It opens, and Michael Falco, executive director of the new Queer Nightlife Community Center (QNCC), greets me with a hug.
Housed in a 15,000-square-foot warehouse, QNCC will hold some parties, yes, but don’t mistake it for a club. The goal for the space, Falco tells me, is to serve as a site for community health care, conversation, career development, and a host of experiences across the queer nightlife spectrum, from performances and lectures to history presentations and screenings. “Everything we’re doing in this world is trying to build the infrastructure, the capacity, the skill set of people who work at night,” Falco says. “We will produce things at night, we will produce things during the day, we will produce theater. Our primary focus is to be a community center.”
The space is the result of nearly a decade of advocacy and planning by a coterie of nightlife workers. Creative director Seva Granik—a maestro of queer warehouse parties like Shade and Unter, as well as fashion fêtes for the likes of Alexander Wang and Givenchy—spent part of his career developing underground events that would occasionally be interrupted by the police. Seeking both more space and greater safety—for his staff as well as for attendees—Granik had conversations with New York’s Office of Nightlife about his vision for a venue before meeting Falco in 2021.
Falco—a former director of Columbia University’s Incite Institute, a department blending social change, the arts, and community engagement—wondered what it would look like to curate a university’s offerings for nightlife. “When you get there, you get food, you get housing, you get mentorship, you get all of these support services wrapped around you,” he says. “You can learn, you can move forward. Why are we not doing that for these alternate sites of knowledge?”
After receiving their first donation in March 2025, QNCC established its board of directors, among them journalist Ronan Farrow; scholar madison moore; NYU Langone-Brooklyn chief of neurology Aaron Lord; Alyssa Nitchun of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art; and Kareem Nemley, the founder and artistic director of Rooted Theater Company and a longtime East New York resident. In an area like East New York, Nemley tells me, “there’s always a concern about gentrification.” But he’s been encouraged by Falco and Granik’s presence at community board meetings, where they’ve shared their vision for QNCC. “They showed that they are about giving life to the space, to the area, and also partnering up with organizations that are within the community to help us all out,” Nemley says.
QNCC also has a creative board, responsible for shaping its programming. That group includes figures like Telfar Clemens; Hari Nef; Julio Torres; artist, writer, and musician Juliana Huxtable; writer J Wortham; and artist Desi Santiago. “Especially now, when everyone’s becoming more and more marginalized by this [presidential] administration, people need a sanctuary,” Santiago says. “This is the time when we can’t be separated, when we have to be together.”
QNCC’s first event was Slambient, imagined as a reset from a long weekend of partying or working at the clubs. On October 5 it welcomed approximately 800 people, who could variously be seen napping, talking, snacking, reading, making out, getting massages, dancing, and stretching in the space. The daylong activation also included ambient DJ sets and well-attended talks about addiction and self-care.
Max Vale, 25, attended hoping to learn more about nightlife from people in the community. “I want to be the good nightlife citizen who can enjoy spaces and add things to those spaces,” he tells me. “I want to be able to contribute to that because it’s done a lot for me.”
Bartender Summer Surgent, 26, was, as they put it, “skeptically confident” about QNCC. “I’m curious to see what [QNCC] becomes, because there’s not really a framework for something like this.”
Young Sun Han, 42, who sees themselves as a rising nightlife elder, is compelled by the idea of a community space that feels at once fun, safe, and sustainable. “By creating something [with a] 501(c)(3) structure, a longer lease, and working with the city, it means that the magic energy and all of the labor that’s put into this can be employed longer,” they say. “It’s bringing people together in a way that can be both even more exciting, more joyful, and make sure that we’re protecting each other.”