For Pride 2026, we ‘DESIRE’, a magazine dedicated to exploiting what drives us. Through essays, interviews and photographs from across Amsterdam’s queer community, it celebrates desire in all its forms. 

Desire is the force that runs through each and every one of our veins. It is what drives us forward, the engine of our dreams, the spark that ignites our imagination, feeding us the sweet taste of our most indulgent fantasies.

The beauty of the dance floor lies in its mystic potential: the fleeting chance to become lost within your wildest dreams, to count your blessings, nurture a vision, shed a tear, revisit old wounds with compassion, forgive, learn, heal, and release. 

Desire can transcend the self. It can be an electric flash in the eyes of a future lover. It can make your cheeks flush when you feel someone's hand trace against your skin, their lips meeting yours. For queer people, desire is inherently political. It is the desire to be seen as one's true self; the desire to be accepted, valued, and understood. The desire to exist with dignity, to live freely within one's basic human rights, without pain or persecution.

The purpose of this magazine is to give a platform to the wonderful minds that grace this club. You are its beating heart: the creators, artists, organisers, writers, performers, activists and dreamers who bring our space to life.

‍

‍

DESIRE ESSAYS

DESIRE: BACK TO THE STARS

by Raúl Fournier

When I was six or seven years old, I wanted to become a priest. A few years later, I decided I wanted to become a dentist instead. I used to laugh at the gap between the two, but I think they were never far apart. In both, there was the same impulse: to heal, to witness, to be close to whatever makes a person feel whole. Even then, without the language for it, I was already following something. A light just ahead, always slightly out of reach.

That is desire, as I have come to understand it. Not a craving, not a gap you fill with the next purchase or version of yourself the algorithm approves. Desire is a motor, a light. It lives in a deeper layer of reality — something already yours, already true, that only asks you to be brave enough to reach for it.

Desire comes from the Latin de sidera: away from the stars. As if longing were born from separation from a light you once knew. But what if we are the stars? What if desire points not outward but inward — back toward the light we have always been, and simply drifted from?

Modern life presents desire as something external: a career that defines you, a body that you earn, a status that makes you belong. And belonging is offered as the reward, because the system knows that it is a basic need humans seek to cover. So it hijacks that need and redirects it outward, toward consumption, comparison, and the endless performance of becoming someone recognizable. I cannot pretend I stand outside of it. I have shaped myself for recognition more times than I would like to admit.

Plato saw this clearly. In the Symposium, Aristophanes tells a myth of humans being whole — radiant, complete — before the Gods split them apart and condemned them to search for their missing half. But what if there is no missing half? What if we are already whole, and the myth is a trap, keeping us hungry, outward looking, never enough? Jung, yin and yang, Shiva and Shakti, all point somewhere different: we are not half beings awaiting for completion. We carry two energies that long to be balanced, and we fracture; not because we are incomplete, but because we were taught to feed only one half of ourselves.

Queer people know something particular about this fracture. To grow up queer is to discover that the script does not fit, and to decide, often alone, often young, what you are going to do about that. There are dark seasons in that process. But those moments are not failures. They are the soul asking to grow. Those who move through them carry something extraordinary: the knowledge that authenticity is not given. It is chosen, again and again.

That is what I believe desire is, at its deepest. Not the ache of lacking something outside yourself, but the call of something inside you that has not yet been lived. The light that grows when you are kind. When you follow your curiosity. When you let yourself be moved by something without immediately asking whether it is useful. When you choose, even in small ways, to be more fully who you actually are.

To desire from within is the bravest thing a person can do in a world built to redirect that desire outward. It means turning off the noise long enough to hear your own voice. Sitting with darkness and trusting it is part of the cycle. Questioning, what do I actually want, beneath what I have been told to want? Romanticising your emotions, not as problems to solve, but as guides pointing toward something real.

And it means loving. Loving so fully and so freely that love stops being a transaction and becomes a way of moving through the world. Love your people. Love your own strangeness. Love the questions you cannot yet answer. When you love that way, you experience love from every angle: given, received and reflected, and you understand it was never something you were missing. It was always what you were made of.

De sidera — away from the stars. The stars, I think, were always us. And desire is simply the long, beautiful journey back.

‍

DESIRE: BIKE RIDE TO THE DANCE FLOOR

What keeps pulling me back. 

By Thomas Macht

I should go to bed, take a break and get some rest. Instead, I dress up and get on my bike. It moves almost by itself — is that the wind? I cycle through the deserted park, climb the hill, and coast down towards the former gas holder. Allotment gardens give way to a potato shop in an old village. Soulless new developments around the station, then anonymous warehouses along an elevated highway. Suddenly packed bike racks, a hard beat banging through tinted windows, a lively queue around the corner. 

How am I, how do I feel? Good to see you, I’m great. Being refused and sent away? No, stop the nonsense! Please, come in. A sticker here, one there — oh, you already have a few! I recognize the people, know my way. I find my usual locker in the corner. I land and chill. Then undress and grab my things. Gum, lighter, debit card — I never bring my phone. All into my socks — outfit’s tight and short, no pockets. A pile of jackets on the lockers — my hoodie on top for when I go smoke. 

Walking up the stairs, head up, shoulders wide. As if I were making a big entrance on the runway — but fully safe. The family is gathering on the right, ready to pursue any hot guy into the dark corners — me, perhaps? But first, let’s dance! 

There in front I see a spot. Quick! Someone else may want it too. I claim my space and start swaying to the happy upbeat sounds. Red lights pulse behind the dancing crowd. The late afternoon sun above the ocean during golden hour. I take a deep breath of saltiness, then let it go. Dolphins are singing — or is it a whale? Birds calling? Not quite. In fact, a telephone is ringing. Distant at first, but quickly coming closer by. Ring. Ring. Then a sudden drop, a brief silence. Someone there? A woman is shouting in the distance. Beliz! I need him. Beliz! Him I need. 

The sunglasses on my fishnet, I put them on my head. A thin curtain of black appears. I want to look, observe. Sexy bodies from here to there. Two men — one short, one tall — dancing for a third. Look at us — join in and taste! That lands, he can’t resist and kisses them. They rub their bodies, feel each other. 

The new guy clearly likes the short one best. Pulls him closer, hands around his hips. Tall guy watches every move. Not amused, he makes a claim. My man. My name. My house. Mine and mine alone. Someone shouts that this is right. Be faithful, resist. Hold on to what is yours, procreate and build. But not everyone agrees. Nobody’s property. No need for commitment, nor rules. Let’s enjoy and dance and play. Because who knows how long it’ll last? 

Enough thinking, I need a break. I bend down, fish in my socks. There it is! Break my thoughts, leave just the beat. One of many, part of the whole.

A body in front of me catches my eye — tall and toned, bending sharply with the beat. I lift my glasses so I can see. The guy next door, but so much better! I step closer, we dance in sync. Cautiously he peeks at me, turns away as soon as I look. I smile at him. He feels it in the corner of his eye, he smiles. We look at each other, enjoy the view. I touch his hips, as if by mistake. He does the same with mine. Surely a coincidence? Oh no. It’s not. He grabs my neck, pulls me close. I shut my eyes and let him in. He tastes even better than he looks. I feel the warmth, the world dissolves. 

The floor applauds — oh look at them! He pulls away, it’s been enough. I stare up — into the void. Catch nobody’s gaze, nothing to be seen. Whisper, chatter, fingers pointing. Do you see him? Oh yes, I have. Quite a show that he pulls off!

‍‍

DESIRE: A WORLD POST HIV AND AIDS

Working Through Hegemonic Transcultural AIDS Memory 

By Kuntenserven

A post-AIDS world. The desire is strong. It has been proclaimed! We live post-AIDS. In Western academia, the term is thrown around to indicate a time following the “end” of the AIDS epidemic in the US. Yet, there is no end. Yet, my body is a space that exists at heightened risk of a virus that, while no longer a death sentence, can feel like a sword of Damocles. Over 40 years after the emergence of AIDS, its sticky narratives prevail, rendering homosexuality outside of AIDS nearly unthinkable (Kagan 2018, n.p.). Initially, research on HIV and AIDS was funded by affected and allied communities since the US government was more invested in the destruction of queer life¹ than its preservation – what Mbembe (2003, 39) describes in necropolitics as life subjugated to the power of death. However, once (white) affluent male gays gained more liberal inclusion through their status as consumers, the dynamics shifted. With an emerging depoliticized homonormative constituency, not resisting heteronormativity but rather buying in (Duggan 2002, 179), and HIV/AIDS increasingly affecting white, heterosexual, and middle/upper-class populations, the USA funneled public funding into research and supported private pharma companies in their efforts. The pharma industry only took on this endeavour when it became profitable for them to do so. PrEP is a result of a shift from gay men being targeted by the government to becoming profitable consumers. Additionally, PrEP is an indication of the type of “post” that demarcates a “post-AIDS,” since it is situated between the enactment of the desire for a world without AIDS (post as in after²) and haunted by the deadly circumstances of its development (post as in continuing past), both entangled with sexual desires deemed (too) risky. To make sense of the “post” and the desires it entails requires an examination of hegemonic transcultural AIDS memory.

Culture is a crucial link mediating between the individual and the collective. For memory to become part of the latter, it cannot only be an event remembered by several witnesses but requires the creation of shared narratives through communication and representation, which then influence how a person might make sense of their own experiences. These stories become references that are accessed by the collective across space, time, and beyond the community of origin. Due to their circulating nature, memories have the potential to cross imagined boundaries like nations or cultures, connecting people across vast distances – time and space (Rigney 2015, 65–68, 70, 72). This becomes pertinent for marginalised people where group identification can be fostered and sustained through affective ties to past common memories (Assmann 2025, 165). Memories should not be conceived as static (sites of memory) but need to be understood through their movements (travels of memory) (Erll 2011, 11). Hence, memory is not contained within a nation-state or a singular culture. Rather, memory exists transculturally: it spans across and beyond cultures (Erll 2011, 8).

However, transcultural memory of AIDS is not just given. Rather, the American AIDS narrative has become hegemonic, overshadowing other memories and stories. Transcultural memory is defined by its borderless travels across time, space, and people. Similarly, a virus like HIV does not stop at man-made constructs such as borders. A global crisis would generate transcultural memory. However, there is no equal exchange between local memories across different places. The memory of the US overshadows all others to the extent that since the introduction of Antiretroviral Therapies (ART) the crisis has become a background issue in the Global North, at the detriment of people in the Global South who do not have access to these lifesaving treatments and are not considered worthy of (media) attention (Kagan 2018, n.p.; Castillo Villanueva and Bollas 2024, 8). AIDS is imagined to be happening elsewhere, no longer in the West. The transcultural narrative of AIDS memory constructs the victim of AIDS as gay, white, and male, and since the racialised Other is constructed as non-white and straight, their stories and (cultural) memory are overpowered by this specific US memory (Schulze 2023, 146; Kagan 2018, n.p.; Puar 2007, 44). Furthermore, American-based NGOs like Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) gained significant influence in the West, which contributed to an Americanization of AIDS memory and further linking it to male homosexuality (Castillo Villanueva and Bollas 2024, 3). ³However, this dominance and the resulting idea of a post-AIDS time are not uncontested. Stories from the Global South intervene in these narratives, making space for local memories (Ansari 2025, 1073) such as Suquet (2024) writing about Cuban literature responding to homophobic HIV/AIDS policies in Cuba, Mills (2024) creating space for the AIDS memories of women in South Africa, or Proudfoot and Marley (2024) highlighting the importance of including women in AIDS discourses and the experiences of motherhood with HIV. Further, even the hegemonic AIDS memory is not monolithic: it is internally contested, consisting of (re)mediated individual memories, ranging from debates, commemorations, biographies, identity politics, oral histories, to a culture of witnessing and witnesses of the crisis, which all emerge from various actors, collectives, and (sub)cultures (Castillo Villanueva and Bollas 2024, 5).

While hegemonic AIDS memory might allow the comfort of a post-AIDS, the situation outside of the Global Minority paints a different picture: global supply chains, neocolonial dependencies, and colonial histories result in people not considered part of transcultural AIDS memory actively being prevented access to (prophylactic) medication. Post cannot mean a strict sequential after in this context. It needs to be “commitment to ‘work through’” (Jackson 2013, 682). To work through the hegemonic memory, the injustice, and the continuous disregard of (bare) life. This means that medication like PrEP or ART cannot be restricted to affluent consumers who can afford to pay for it, it needs to be accessible globally. Only by working through these issues can the desire for a post AIDS and HIV come to fruition. 

¹This is not to say that HIV and AIDS only affected gay men or the queer community at large. Black and Latin urban populations, sex workers, haemophiliacs, and drug users were equally affected by the negligence and deadly dismissal of government officials and the public at large.

²After refers here to the idea of the end of one period and the beginning of another. It demarcates a sequential passing of time with a clear cut between different events.

³ This is not meant as a criticism of these organisations, rather it is descriptive of a (side) effect of their crucial work. Many of my siblings living with HIV have found solace, support, and new energy through these networks.

‍

DESIRE: HOW MY MOUTH GOT SO LONELY

Confessions of my hunger 

By Hanna Reijgwart

(TW: disordered eating, murder) 

To my queerplatonic lovers (you know who you are), 

‍

Someone once asked, not particularly to me but still out loud: is eating your friends the ultimate act of friendship? The answer is yes.

‍

The urge. It always starts with relaxation. A release and then a contraction. Your hug came too late, sorry. Now I am growing smaller. I am growing a long snout and sharp front teeth and a tail to wag. I put my paws in your lap and start growling to warn you that my teeth are coming dangerously close to your soft neck. The importance of consent becomes my mantra, as I hold the collar around my own neck as tight as I can.

‍

The rationalization. In cis-straight life there are two sexes: one to fuck and one to get to know. When liberalism married capitalism, three types of relationships sprung from there: the ones you should be grateful for (‘family’/ ‘conglomerate’), the ONE that possesses you (‘husband’) and the ones you forget about (‘friends’). Queer people fail this and language fails us in turn.

‍

Language fails me when I don’t want to estrange you with strange phrasings. Sounds from my mouth could never stab you with my desire for your presence, as deeply as my teeth could. Language fails me when communicating who you are to me.

‍

The longing. As my jaws sink into my plush dog Flappie, I cannot forgive you for giving me a taste of how things could be. Flappie tastes bitter. The purple-coloured hickey you left in my neck mirrors the hole you left in my chest simply by being not here. You are not dead yet, but you just as well could’ve been. If you are not here, what are you even doing. 

‍

The coping. Someone once launched the thesis onto me that people eat the flesh of mammals because it reminds them of eating pussy and dick. Maybe straight people cope by eating the meat of an anonymous entity. You don’t have to ask a cow for her consent. You can just put her upside down in a machine and let the sharp steel machinery do the work that could have been existentially interesting. The line of civilization then, is arbitrarily drawn at cannibalism.

‍

Together again. Seriously, please, let me feel how the joy of your humour could bury even deeper into my ribcage and down. Let me take a bite out of that beautifully bared shoulder where the joint and muscle barely hide under your skin and I promise you, the pain will be worth it. Inside of me, I will build you a nice nest to live. You could even get a goldfish, if you want.

The coping. To hide the feelings, I playfully dig into your side. Maybe I can trick my fingers with the soft access to the side of your belly, where the temperature conceals the difference between inside and outside.

‍

The medicalisation. When I was six years old, the dentist and later some scary adult in the hospital told my parents I was resting my mouth wrong. Later it was confirmed that because of this, I would be ugly and regretful for the rest of my life. The feeling of my failure never left the inside of my cheeks that I should hold closer and the surface of my lips where they should be touching. Would you please substitute for the shortcomings in my anatomy?

The coping. I put another fruit and metaphysics-flavoured chewing gum in my mouth. It’s all I have since it turned out to be no solution to fill my mouth until I got sick. As a solution to the fullness of my mouth, I developed an eating disorder, because the wish to be skinny ergo loveable also needed to have its manifestation. That’s not my sad story, that is society’s sad story. And still, I am one of the lucky ones.

‍

It won’t go away. Don’t be surprised when you wake up with one finger less. I am keeping it, as a souvenir of your calming presence, like a baby’s pacifier while the tears dry on their cheeks.

‍

DESIRE: COLLECTIVE DESIRE AS A REHEARSAL

On crowds, looks and the practice of attuning to one another 

By Edward Lloyd

Strutting out of the club. Sunday morning. 9 AM. The heavy bass dissipates through the whistling of the birds perched in the tree above my bike. I search for my sunglasses and a mint as I psych myself up for the forty-minute ride home. I usually take a taxi, but the sun is out and I need to keep my body moving a little while longer. The post-rave afterglow is still humming in my chest. Cycling through the city, glimpses of the night surface through my darkened lenses. 

My friend and I arrived later than planned. 1 AM is normally our sweet spot, but we got caught up drinking Skinny Bitches and choosing our looks… I decided on my black platform boots, blue denim micro shorts, leather collar and black cropped tank top that I bleached on a whim last summer because I ran out of things to wear. Checking the line-up, we’re expecting something cunty. 

We find our usual spot by the DJ. Front left. Just in time to catch the beginning of Clarisa Kimskii. Bags on the DJ booth. Earplugs in. My organs vibrate as she unleashes her beat on the decks. We get lost in the intricacies of her set, eventually turning to one another: “She’s giving, but the vibe is off,” I say. Looking around, we see bodies standing, bopping, chatting, on their phones. They seem unaffected by the wrath of Kimskii’s sound. We turn toward the crowd and try to initiate something with the people around us. Smiles. Eye contact. Nothing lands. 

I stop at a traffic light. 

 My mind wanders back to São Paulo. I was there with my partner visiting his family, which happened to coincide with Carnival. After a day of street parades, we ended up in a gay bar close to his brother’s apartment. One of the guys in the group mentioned a new club night in the outskirts of the city. Novo Affair. He didn’t seem overly enthusiastic, but the two of us got tickets and jumped in a taxi. 

We pull up to an old brick building. No windows. Muffled beats vibrating through small air vents, and a queue of well-dressed queers waiting at a thick iron entrance. Meandering our way through a darkened corridor, we arrive outside again, at a huge yard. Thick summer air blankets the crowd. Drinks. Earplugs. We slide through sweat-sheened bodies in search of front left. Only, there is no front. We gather around a long catwalk. DJ in the middle. Trans women from different houses appearing one by one, iridescent under the hazy glow of the rigged lights. Their presence pulling the focus inward rather than forward.

There’s something about seeing and being seen by the crowd that dissolves the edges of myself. The intensity of it soaks through my skin and I become absorbed by the fleshy landscape of bodies, sweat, and desire. 

We’re used to thinking of desire as a yearning for something or someone, but what if we approach it more as a way of orienting ourselves? Perhaps away from a fixed front and toward a constellation of bodies. Each one attuning to the collective, producing a kind of desire that requires everyone’s presence to become possible. Queer dance floors were built for this. Places for accessing modes of joy, intimacy, and aliveness that had nowhere else to go.

One of the things I love about clubbing is that each night is different. The crowd. The music. The look. You need to work harder for some nights than others, and maybe that’s the point. Like any rehearsal, failure is part of the process. We don’t always get it right, but we keep showing up. Waiting to see what the night will bring.

I pull up in front of my apartment. Birds still whistling. My platform boots cling to my swollen feet as I drag myself upstairs. I smile, crashing into bed, chest still humming. The vibe was off, but the music was giving. We’ll try again next weekend. 

‍

DESIRE: SUSPENSION

By Fadi Houmani Fidalgo 

There’s something bouncing off the walls.

As I walk into the dimly lit room, the atoms of my body begin to boil.

Effervescent and running microscopic kilometres underneath my skin — my biggest organ, my exposed organ ·— they emerge, gushing out in raptures through my pores. My body is all sweaty and I am in love.

 I am in love with the guy on the corner wearing brown Levi’s.

 Am I in love or do I want to be like him?

 A homosexual conundrum, I suppose.

I had agreed to drop by the bar after my shift at the restaurant. Normally, I would come up with any cheap excuse to use as a reason why I can’t come tonight. But I also know that a good way to extend time is to say ‘yes’ to everything. If you don’t want to, you’ll go through an excruciating process that will surely slow down time. Hence, you can live more. There I was, living, at the bar. It was packed; not one more soul could enter, and I hate crowded indoor spaces because I’m half deaf. I had brushed my teeth and put on one of my favourite perfumes, scanning the room in search of him. He was sitting by the bar, my new favourite spot, so I went over and sat beside him. He looked at me and put on a goblin-like smile that made me melt instantly onto the floor, having the girls behind the bar come out with a mop to put me together in one piece. When I was back up on the stool, he had already ordered two drinks. My drink of choice is a Negroni, but he ordered two glasses of white wine, which I despise because I got too drunk on it far too many times as a teen. Now I had to pretend that I liked it, because I had fallen in love. To show that this was the first of many more similarities to come, and that he should fall in love with me too.

While he ranted about a myriad of mundane and very grounded yet complex aspects of life, I was contemplating the nature of my instant infatuation: I immediately started to want him. Normally, I would let that desire fill me up from the inside out. I would chase its consummation. Rebecca Solnit mentions that “we treat desire as something to be solved.” We adopt a mathematical attitude towards desire as though it were an inconvenience, something to shake off as soon as possible. We define its boundaries and its reason for being by focusing on how to terminate its life. Navigating through this year’s unfathomable pain, I acknowledge the possibility of desire existing. Which is to say that I have defined myself by means of hope, but desire is located at the intersection of hope and despair: desire happens in the disjunction; I exist in the craving. I will not kiss him. I will let the flames exist in my loins, and I will remove my organs, in case they catch fire. I once dated a guy who told me he enjoyed not masturbating; he enjoyed the yearning that comes with waiting.

My date has noticed I’m zoned out, not saying a word. I get nervous. I try to circle back to what he said, but I was not listening. I tap into the desire, as my only device and I try to flirt with him with the intention of leaving it there. I juggle between climax and drifting, chasing his touch. I stare at him; he gives his gaze back to me. I pull my notebook out of my bag, about to show him doodles and games I draw in it. We open the space a bit before entering together: his hands and mine dance without touching but invade each other’s areas, as when two planes fly one above the other. What if we crashed? The suggestion makes me excited. The desire in suspension; ecstatic. After four hours we had covered family, work, and hobbies; and during that interval our hands and legs had polished the surface with their restless motions, indicating what we truly wanted from each other. 

I get the feeling I could drop it. Right here, right now. It wouldn’t collapse; making justice to its own nature, it would bounce and stretch, warp and twist, elastic. How exciting, how pristine this feels. 

Without aiming for its total consummation, desire can be a leading force. Let desire accumulate like tree sap. Desire turns you oblivious and unaware, desire turns you into a child stuck on a lollipop they saw in a window, only now you’re not a kid anymore.