Going to Church with Mother Kylie
Eight months ago, I found myself dancing to Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” alongside maybe 30 Gen Z Central Asian queer activists in Almaty’s fabulous Amirovka gay bar and community space. It was a sublime moment of my life, profoundly unexpected yet the perfect way to wrap up several days where I had the incredible fortune to share in these activists’ creativity & resilience, forging communities, making art, exploring various political strategies to survive and even thrive despite the region’s authoritarian regimes.
That moment — which included a whole bunch of young queers who only used one English word: “SLAY” — will be seared into my memory for the duration.
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
Last night, Kylie made her first visit to DC since 2011, and it was an epic evening. Being someone left cold by traditional religious institutions, last night was for me going to church, finding communion with 15,000 or so other concert goers. With Mother Kylie leading us all.
I recognize that Kylie has decades of performing under her belt, both as a pop superstar and as an actress, and she probably loves all her audiences. But she seemed genuinely taken with and moved by the energy of the audience, and that fed her through the two-hour set full of her greatest hits.
I’ll go out on a limb and suggest that for those of us in DC, at Ground Zero for the chaotic global cataclysm now unfolding, we especially needed this night of respite, this night of sheer, unadulterated joy, and in turn, our energy fed Kylie’s.
(Also, it hadn’t registered for me until we walked onto the arena floor that we were going to be 25 feet or so from Kylie during the four or five songs she performed on the pop-up stage. So that added to the frenzied magic of the night.)
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
I probably knew 40% of the songs; my knowledge of her catalog drops off dramatically after her biggest hits, and I have a bunch more now to absorb, starting with “Confide in Me,” “Say Something,” and “Lights Camera Action.”
And the hits were all spectacular, from “Come Into My World” and “Get Outta My Way” early on, through “The Loco-motion,” which brought her & her entourage out to the pop-up stage, to “All the Lovers,” “Padam Padam,” and “Love at First Sight” later on.
But of course, “Can’t Get You Out of My Mind” has taken on an even richer meaning for me since last summer, and singing and dancing along to that was sheer bliss, even as my mind drifted to everyone I met in Kazakhstan — to everyone now confronting regimes further emboldened to crack down on dissent, freed from pressure from Washington to dial back human rights violations, and to all the U.S. government colleagues I met working in the region who have since been shafted in the extreme.
I don’t have to go too far down that road, that line of thinking. Instead, as my mind drifts back to the Amirovka and then to Capital One Arena just last night, I am reminded how utterly central joy is to resistance, as well as the communion shared with those we are connected with. And I am reminded of our own resilience and creativity that will sustain us and light the way through these dark times.
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
La-la-la, la-la-la-la-la
