Like many queer teenagers from a small Ontario town, Vince, the founder of Kingston Raves Community, always dreamt of leaving Kingston to experience the rave scenes in Toronto and Montreal.
After attending his first rave as an 18-year-old in Toronto, Vince knew Kingston needed its own rave community to serve as a safe haven for 2SLGBTQIA+ youth. Up until the 90s, Kingston had a underground rave scene pioneered by its local queer community. In the 2000s and early 2010s, the underground scene was replaced by the adoption of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) by club culture, with clubs like Stages featuring Skrillex, Avicii, and Steve Aoki. Today, however, this vibrant history is just that—a memory of what the rave scene used to be.
Through the Kingston Raves Community (KRC), Vince is committed to changing this reality. Known as rareasfck in the DJ sphere, 21-year-old Vince was born and raised in Kingston. Growing up, Vince never had the opportunity to attend raves. It was only when he moved to Toronto after graduating high school that he gained access to the scene.
“I originally got into the rave scene for the music, and to party of course,” Vince said in a statement to The Journal. “Although [I was] excited to have access, I realized the Church St. scene has pushed young queer people away with its prices and music.”
Vince sought out an alternative environment where he could truly “fit in” and be himself.
“After experiencing D.Dan, UFO95, AADJA and Measure Divide, and the warehouse techno environment, I finally felt I found my community,” Vince said. “But I still knew there had to be cheaper, more consistently attendable events.”
Eventually, Vince found the underground rave scene which provides accessible and often free spaces for queer individuals. In 2023, Vince returned to Kingston from Toronto, hoping to find a local rave scene that had developed while he was gone, but unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.
The absence of a rave scene in Kingston is what motivated Vince to start the KRC, a renegade-style rave collective for anybody interested in helping to revitalize Kingston’s underground rave scene.
“I started the page in hopes of promoting raves with the values and experience I gained from Toronto’s scene, but I quickly realized there are no actual ‘raves’ being organized here that I would want to promote or ,” Vince said. “It very quickly turned into me realizing if I’m not going to do it, nobody else is either.”
KRC organized several secret do-it-yourself (DIY) renegades over the summer and hosted their first open decks event on Sept. 26. KRC’s open decks event provided a space for novice and experienced DJs to perform for an audience and meet others in the community. For many event attendees, the open decks event was one of the first queer-centred spaces they had found in Kingston.
Ren Chalykoff, ArtSci ’27, attended the open decks event and was refreshed to meet a community of other queer ravers like herself.
“I loved attending a rave in Kingston, and I’m extremely happy we have KRC to prepare raves for the Kingston
community,” Chalykoff said in a statement to The Journal. “The people at the KRC rave I attended were top notch.”
In addition to being a safe space for queer people, Vince hopes to prioritize the needs of all marginalized community through KRC.
“The intersection between the rave scene and marginalized communities has very deep roots—cultural, social, and political,” Vince said.
He added raves have always been spaces of resistance, inclusivity, and liberation for marginalized groups, specifically people of colour (POC), 2SLGBTQ+, and working-class youth.
By hosting free renegades for the local community, KRC hopes to provide accessible forms of entertainment for economically marginalized people who can’t afford clubs or other mainstream nightlife options. Historically, this need for accessibility was one of the reasons that raves emerged as an alternative nightlife form.
“DIY and renegade rave culture enables people to create spaces on their own , free from commercial exploitation,” Vince said.
Vince explained the financial accessibility aspect of rave culture has diminished as larger, commercialized raves and festivals have overshadowed smaller, DIY raves and renegades. For this reason, he thinks it’s so important to revitalize Kingston’s underground rave scene.
“Community-led raves are vital to maintaining authenticity, inclusivity, and the true spirit of rave culture,” Vince said.
At the heart of rave culture is respect.
“[There’s] a ‘social contract’ within rave communities, where differences are embraced, and everyone is encouraged to connect through mutual respect and comion,” Vince said. “It’s about you as an attendee contributing to creating a space where people can feel safe, accepted, and free to express themselves without judgment.”
KRC has faced numerous barriers to planning raves, particularly sanctioned raves at event venues in Kingston.
Budget issues, noise bylaws, and unethical venue owners are among the many obstacles KRC has had to overcome. While Vince hopes that KRC will grow, he’s committed to maintaining the “punk,” anti-capitalist essence of community raves.
“Marginalized people came together to create their own freedom and sound which is what the rave community is,” Vince said. “Why commercialize and capitalize on that and ruin the DIY beauty in it?”
***
Estella Maise Kent-Pym, also known as DJ Lala Gothicfish, is the founder of Estella Originals (EO) and Pure Campy, two alternative event organizations based in Toronto. Through these organizations, Kent-Pym has organized over 30 raves and has played at many others.
EO was Kent-Pym’s first ion project, and strangely enough, it started off as a high school business project. Kent-Pym was already ionate about throwing underground parties, and this project sparked their decision to create an official collective for all-ages, queer-friendly events.
Kent-Pym was inspired by the rave scene with which she was familiar from a very young age, as their mom was a raver in the 90s.
“It was very much a community where I felt safe for the most part, and it was also a community that I wanted to contribute to, to make it feel even safer and more welcoming,” Kent-Pym said in an interview with The Journal.
As a rave baby, Kent-Pym was raised with the concept of PLURR, which stands for peace, love, unity, respect, and responsibility. This term was coined in the 90s by DJ Frankie Bones to create a sense of community in the blossoming rave culture at the time. The values embodied by PLURR have been a staple of the rave world ever since.
To Kent-Pym, embedding PLURR into EO policy is an essential part of keeping the community safe, particularly as an all-ages event organizer.
“Not to toot my own horn, but I’m probably one of the strictest policy organizers in the city, specifically when it comes to predatory behaviour,” Kent-Pym said. “It’s completely zero-tolerance.”
Kent-Pym explained individuals who have crossed others’ boundaries at events, have a history of crossing boundaries in the scene, engage in discriminatory behaviour, or have serial allegations against them aren’t welcome at any of her events. As a teenager in the punk and rave scene, Kent-Pym witnessed this kind of behaviour frequently go unchecked. Now, organizing their own punk shows, goth shows, raves, and other events, safety is Kent-Pym’s top priority.
“It quite literally comes down to the question of, do I want to make an extra twenty dollars from a ticket sale and possibly have people get hurt at my events, or would I rather just not get that twenty dollars and potentially save people from trauma? It’s really as simple as that,” Kent-Pym said.
Kent-Pym recognizes the importance of acknowledging marginalized communities’ historical contributions to the rave scene. Techno and jungle, two of the main genres of rave music today, derive from queer culture as well as reggae music respectively. Sound system culture and dance culture were also pioneered by racialized communities in North America and the U.K., Kent-Pym added.
“It’s really important to acknowledge [this history] because I feel like there are some folks who have led an erasure of that,” Kent-Pym said. “When [raving] became more mainstream, that’s when you started seeing lineups that were all white or made up of only cishet males.”
Harm reduction is another critical aspect of being a rave organizer. Kent-Pym believes it’s important to have open conversations about substance use at raves.
“Although there’s a lot of stigma around substance use, no one can deny the fact that whether you talk about it or not, people are going to use, and it really comes down to whether they would feel comfortable coming to you in an emergency or not,” Kent-Pym said.
EO works with harm reduction organizations like Rave Angels to address substance use emergencies among other issues that may arise at events.
***
Tommy Akinnawonu, a 19-year-old student at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), decided to Rave Angels as a volunteer several months ago. Like other rave angels, he is trained in conflict de-escalation and istering Naloxone, a medicine that can prevent opioid overdoses.
Since ing Toronto’s rave scene, Akinnawonu has observed a substantial shift in overall safety for event attendees. He believes the pandemic sparked increased awareness of harm reduction in the scene, making raves safer for everyone, especially minors.
“When I go as a rave angel, I’m finding that although there are still some issues that arise, they’re all solved very easily,” Akinnawonu said. “I’ve noticed that people are a lot safer on the dance floor.”
Rave angels like Akinnawonu wear glow-in-the-dark armbands so they can be easily identified for help.
“[Having rave angels easily accessible at events] just makes people not feel alone,” Akinnawonu said. “They know where to go if there’s an issue going on, and they know they’ll be kept a lot safer than if they were left by themselves.”
***
Angel Nayyar, known as Angelphroot in the rave community, is a raver-turned-DJ who entered the scene as a high school student. At the time, she was struggling with mental health issues and searching for a judgment-free environment for self-expression.
“[The rave scene] helped me get through high school, when I had depression, anxiety, and was struggling a lot,” Nayyar said in a statement to The Journal. “Having something to look forward to every month where you’d go and see people who were weirdos like you was really comforting.”
As a queer, disabled woman of colour attending a predominantly white high school, Nayyar found a safe space in the rave world.
“It was really accepting,” Nayyar said. “There were queer people, people of colour, people who were like you—people who seemed like outcasts, artists, creative people. I’ve met some lifelong friends from being a teenager at raves.”
Nayyar made the shift from raver to DJ two years ago at the age of 19. Having been heavily involved in Toronto’s rave scene and being ionate about electronic dance music (EDM) for years, becoming a DJ was, in many ways, a natural progression for Nayyar.
Nayyar’s career progression has been on display for the world to see—more specifically, for her audience of 226K on TikTok and 90K on Instagram. She started her social media platform to showcase her alternative fashion style, but her content has evolved to include posts about her life as a DJ with a disability.
Within months of starting her DJ journey on TikTok livestreams, Nayyar was getting booked to perform at local raves.
“Because people had known me as the girl who was always at the rave until 5 a.m., first, they were like, ‘she’s at our party, so she knows the vibe,’ and then they were like, ‘we’ve known her for years because she’s been at every rave,’ so they started booking me pretty quickly,” Nayyar said.
Nayyar particularly found from other queer women of colour in the rave scene.
“All of the opportunities I’ve gotten and all the things I’ve accomplished have been because of incredible women in my community, and racialized women specifically,” Nayyar said.
When she was first starting to play gigs, Nayyar grew on the backs of other marginalized DJs, including Bambii, Chippy Nonstop, Nino Brown, and Young Teesh. Nayyar recalls a time when Nino Brown and Young Teesh lent her their XDJ controller, which retails for several thousand dollars, to prepare for her very first booking.
“It’s stuff like that, it’s stuff like people in your community who are trusting you and taking chances on you and who are booking you that make a difference,” Nayyar said. “They want to give people a chance.”
Nayyar believes this community is particularly important at a time when white men like Martin Garrix and Alan Walker dominate lineups at large festivals like Veld.
“Once you start going up where the actual money’s at, that’s where you start to find that it’s a lot of white-dominated and male-dominated scenes,” Nayyar said.
Female DJs like Nayyar are frequently overlooked by rave organizers despite having years of experience under their belts. Often viewed as Instagram models rather than “real DJs,” Nayyar has found herself and other female DJs being treated very differently than their male counterparts, being objectified and undervalued by organizers and other DJs.
“Unfortunately, a lot of the city is behind, and a lot of the electronic music space is behind and still holding onto old notions of what a DJ looks like, what a DJ is, and who’s a real DJ,” Nayyar said.
Even when Nayyar is booked by large rave organizers or clubs, she finds that these organizers will, practically by default, spotlight their male DJs and leave their female DJs to do their own promotion. Nayyar once played at a club where the main stage was composed entirely of male DJs, while she and the other female DJs were forced to play in the basement. Despite this inherent disadvantage, however, the basement ended up being the busiest and liveliest section of the club.
“We will make our space. We cannot be stopped,” Nayyar said. “The skill is there, and I think we are the future of electronic music as queer people and women of colour. There’s no denying that, no stopping that train.”
Tags
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be ed, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to [email protected].