Hey, it's Maggie Sivit, Curious City's digital and engagement producer.

This is Quench, a queer party hosted by a group called Small World Collective.

And tonight they brought this traveling party to a bar in Chicago's Fulton Market District.

There's a DJ booth at the front.

There's performances, dancing, and a lot of really well-dressed people, most of them black and brown.

And the reason I'm here, well, part of the reason I'm here, is that a while back we got a question from a listener named Marina,

who wanted to know more about parties like this one.

My question was, where do queer women hang out in the city?

Are we just like hanging out at Hollywood Beach?

Like, what are we doing?

And Marina is specifically interested in queer spaces that put people of color at the center.

I am a Latinx person and

they're like visibly brown. My partner is a Latinx person visibly brown. And so I think also having

those spaces is important to us and for us. And so like not having to be in like all, like, all white spaces, like, it would be ideal.

If you're not part of that community yourself, you might be thinking, like, there have got to be

places for queer women to go in this city. But there really aren't. There's basically one bar

called Nobody's Darling, which opened last year to a lot of fanfare.

But over the years, queer folks, especially queer women of color, have created what they

call traveling parties or pop-up parties.

The need came out of not enough consistent and accessible spaces for black queer folks in Chicago.

The traveling party is something that is rooted in a need that mostly black queer folks have.

Coming up, we revisit a story from last year about the history of queer traveling parties

...