01Gay life · Society · Technology
Before Grindr, Your Profile Was the Way You Turned Your Head.
Before photos, filters and “how close?”, the body sent the message. Grindr did not invent proximity. It put it on a server.
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Politics · Culture · Technology · Life
Ideas inmotion.
A personal journal about the world we live in and the one we can still build. Written by Nick Dragoi.
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Essays, observations and practical guides from a life lived across industries, cities and communities.
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02Ten Men, One Newspaper, and a Democracy Still Outing People.
In 1973, ten men left Los Tarantos in costume. The police took their freedom for a night. The newspaper tried to take the life awaiting them the next morning.
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03Music · Politics · Society · Party
Communism Washed Folklore Clean. Weddings Got It Dirty Again.
Between Song to Romania, Electrecord, the “de-pollution” campaign and the tape recorded at a wedding, the state tried to manufacture folklore without sweat. The audience asked for an encore.
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04Gay life · Politics · Technology · Society
Two maps of the same toilet: one for desire, one for the police.
In 1937, a satirical guide and a secret state map described the same London toilets. One helped men find each other. The other helped the police catch them.
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05Sitges, gay paradise. Now who is looking after those who stayed?
They came for the beach, freedom and nights requiring no explanation. They stayed and grew older. Now paradise must learn something harder than seduction: care.
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06Gay life · Politics · Party · Music
The party that paid for the revolution: when gay activism settled its bills on the dance floor.
In 1971, at 99 Wooster Street, a former firehouse became a club, political headquarters and cashier’s desk for gay liberation. Admission was about two dollars. The profits funded the revolution.
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07Romanian folklore has a credit problem: the lăutari built it, the state signed it.
Five centuries of enslavement, four instruments with foreign passports, a state orchestra and one indecently simple question: who gets credit for the national sound?
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08Disco did not die in 1979. The industry just pretended it no longer knew it.
They blew up records at Comiskey Park and declared the genre dead. The beat, not officially notified, carried on under the name house.
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09The Balkans Are Not in 7/8. The West Is Simply Obsessed with Counting Them.
Uneven rhythms are real. The myth that they alone explain Balkan music is just exotic arithmetic, beautifully packaged for export.
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10Gay life · Party · Politics · Travel
Save the sin! How Sitges’ Sin Street became cultural heritage
It is just over 70 metres long. Named after noise, ideologically misunderstood by Franco and filled with generations who came here to be a little freer.
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11The disco story everyone knows began with a lie
A fabricated article, Tony Manero, the Bee Gees, and how Hollywood compressed disco’s Black, Latino and queer history into a single white suit.
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12Who stole whose music? Probably everyone from everyone.
From Banat’s lăutari to Azur cassettes and ethno techno: how Balkan music crossed borders, regimes and labels without asking permission.
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