In photos: The people of Glastonbury’s queer heart The NYC…

It’s approach­ing 3am on Sat­ur­day night at Glas­ton­bury Fes­ti­val, and Gideön steps up to the decks, nes­tled away in the right cor­ner of The NYC Down­low. Onstage, drag and cabaret leg­end Jon­ny Woo, and the host of the club leads his troupe of dancers, tak­ing to the micro­phone and asks the DJ and Block9 co-founder to ​“take it away Gid”. He indeed does so, spin­ning infec­tious, sub­lime, house grooves in with the home­com­ing con­fi­dence of a DJ in their ele­ment, in a par­ty and club cre­at­ed by him and Stephen Gal­lagher for the queer com­mu­ni­ty that he is a pil­lar of.

Tak­ing place for just five nights a year, The NYC Down­low is unques­tion­ably one of the world’s best clubs, let alone LGBTQ+ venues. For the long week­end, the mood is high, the ener­gy dom­i­nant­ly queer, and the sound­track is house music of the high­est order. Peo­ple queue around the block, often for hours, to catch a dance inside the Down­low and its con­joined back room The Meat Rack.

Since its first iter­a­tion at the fes­ti­val in 2007, when the club was housed in Low­er East Side ten­e­ment build­ings, the club has since been redesigned and refit as an ​’80s Man­hat­tan meat­pack­ing ware­house, while adding The Meat Rack in 2016. And around it, the two fields that Block9 occu­py have con­tin­ued to be increas­ing­ly pop­u­lat­ed, with the Down­low joined by the dystopi­an acid house cathe­dral Genosys and the expan­sive, dystopi­an IICON stage marked by a giant anony­mous audio­vi­su­al head.