Welcome to a Swing Dance Festival for Queers and Allies!
We are happy to announce the fifth edition of Gothenburg Queer Lindy Festival 19th-21st September 2025! Welcome to a festival where we acknowledge, and celebrate the queer expressions of swing dancing.
Practical:
When: September 19th to September 21st 2025.
Where: Gothenburg, Sweden
Location: Forum, at Doktor Fries Torg 7. This is our main venue and the home of West Coast Jitterbugs. All parties and most classes will be at Forum.
Price: Solidarity pricing.
Registration opens TBA.
This webpage is currently under construction. For more info and updates, check out our Instagram or Facebook page.
A Massive Thank You!
To everyone who joined Gothenburg Queer Lindy Festival 2024.
To all the volunteers and others who have been helping out, the Tea Dance Group, The Sound Tech Crew.
To Pansy Craze Jazz Band Mildreds kompani, Cats and Dinosaurs and to the wonderful performers who took the stage during the parties.
To the DJ’s filling the rooms with danceable tunes when there was no live band, DJ Isac, DJ Spoon, DJ Spreadsheet, DJ Rikard.
To the amazing teachers this year who brought their own perspectives of how to queer the lindy and swing jazz scene. Jamica Zion & Sonnie Spoon, Grey Armstrong & Pomona Lake, Hung-Jie “Jason” Hsu, Kate Bramley-Moore & Linnea Damber, Mina Warringer & Anne Normann as well as Malin Gustavsson and Ida Malkomsson for the Nordic Folk Dance Theme Class.
To Erik Nordblad, our photographer this year, who dedicated lots of hours documenting the festival.
To the panellists who shared their stories, ups and downs of being queer in the lindy hop and blues scene. To everyone who was brave enough to take part in the contests and forum talks.
A big thank you to Regnbågshuset and West Pride in Gothenburg for letting us have a taster in queer lindy hop during Pride Week and lending out pride flags for us to put up at the square next to Forum.
Especially an extensive thank you to Adam Brozowski who guided us throughout this year during long zoom calls despite our time differences, and also emceeing as well as bringing us the fabulous Guest Emcee Free’da Follow on her first time visiting a European Country.
Thank you to the board of West Coast Jitterbugs, to our collaborators, exchanging full course and party passes with Swingin’ Spring and Edinburgh Queer Lindy Festival.
We organisers all have had a fantastic weekend! Evaluation forms will be sent out soon!
Hope to see you next year! Love from Ludvig, Isac, Malin and Leslie!
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Is this Festival for Me?
This swing dance festival is a space for queer dancers and allies on all levels of dancing skill.
If you are a queer dancer, or a queer person wanting to learn lindyhop in a queer space, this festival is for you. If you are an ally who support the vision of the festival, this event is also for you.
The creators of early swing music were black. The dancers of early lindy hop, the people we look at for inspiration were black. A lot of them were also gay, lesbian and/or trans people. As contemporary dancers in the lindy hop culture we should not disregard or minimise the fact that many of us are guests in a culture created by these people 100 years ago. Most dancers then were black, most dancers nowadays are white. They did not care about the norms we have today on leading and following.
With this event we are celebrating these black and queer people who in today’s society still are underprivileged in one or more ways. If you’re not African-American, remember who created the dance. If you are cis and hetero, and want to learn more about how to better accommodate for queer dancers in your community, be very welcome, but remember that you are a guest in the queer space we are creating together.
An Inclusive Dance Floor
Make sure to read through the Code of conduct before signing up for the festival.
Our goal is for the Gothenburg Queer Lindy Festival to be a fun, welcoming and inclusive festival for all participants, both during class time as well as on the social dance floor. We want queers and people of color to feel welcome, wanted and comfortable.
In order to create a friendly and welcoming atmosphere, we have established a code of conduct that applies to all the participants at the festival.
We want you as a participant to take responsibility for your actions and to be respectful when you meet other participants at the festival. We all have different knowledge and experiences and we hope that you will be considerate of this. Sometimes you make mistakes, despite good intentions. When this happens, please apologize.
You can always talk with the organizers if you feel unsafe or uncomfortable.