Burning man gay

Welcome to the Queerburners unofficial guide to going to Burning Man... and surviving!

By this point you’ve heard of Burning Man. You’ve seen the videos of glowing people dancing in front of big art in the desert. Your friends have been, or at least, maybe you met someone at a party who wouldn’t shut up about how it transformed their life. Maybe you’ve resisted going in the past; maybe that’s because you have a mistaken impression of what’s going on there or what it’s all about.

In any case, Burning Man is so different from everything else that it’s probably safe to say it’s not what you expect.

It’s a temporary municipality, in the desert, created entirely by those that display up. The first rule is No Spectators and everyone there is expected to participate by building something, creating something, or participating in something.

There is music there, but it’s done by people who decided they want song at Burning Human. There is art there, but it’s created by people who decided they wanted to create something cool for Burning Man. There is cinema and restaurants and bars and roller skate

Culture

We’re pretty nerdy.

We are, to a large extent, nerds, engineers, programmers, gaymers, creators and artists, scientists and philosophers. A lot of us recognize our way around Python, LED circuits, computer science, and Monty Python. Debates about tabs vs. spaces turn us on.

We are a male queer camp.

Everyone is welcome, but we serve actively to construct a safe homosexual haven in a heteronormative world.

We're burners.

We try very firm not to be one of those camps that hosts parties at Burning Man that are indistinguishable from parties in San Francisco. Time on playa is too short to waste it by sipping vodka sodas, bopping gradually to some pop diva disco tune, and getting judgy looks from lofty men with flawless abs.

We are at Burning Gentleman to get clueless in dust storms, to jury-rig elaborate outdoor social showers, to fall asleep in a geodesic dome while somebody explains how to manifest aligned thought, to watch frat boys swinging from trapezes while re

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The annual Black Rock City Census data is out for 2022, and it paints a picture of the desert festival getting marginally more diverse than it was a decade ago, and a fair bit less traditionally heterosexual.

Burning Man has long been criticized for being an event for a privileged and primarily white crowd, and the latest census data shows that is largely still the case. The sheer size of Burning Dude has grown to over 70,000 attendees, up from 52,000 in 2010 — and up from around 25,000 a decade earlier. But the festival was slightly smaller in 2022 than it was in 2019 — around 75,000 people went last year, down from 79,000 pre-pandemic, and we had anecdotal evidence to suggest that this year's numbers will remain lower.

The census, which has been taken annually since 2002, isn't a precise accounting, but since 2013, organizers hold used a similar methodology which involves both a random sampling on the playa and an online survey that's taken after the event. The result is an informed estimate of the demographics at each year's Burning Man, managed by Black Rock City Census General Manager Andi “Sonder”