Regional Community Connections
The future blood of Burning Man is in it’s regions, it is said, as the life of an event in the middle of nowhere for almost a hundred thousand people is really 8+ days long but in the default world it can be eternal. Check out your Official Burning Man Regional page to connect what is often amazing people.
Regional = Means in other regions of the world / country
- Regional Communities: social centers for links to gatherings, events, resources and a means of people to connect with each other. The life and blood of community is tegetherness. To revel and celebrate life and joy in communion with all the amazing souls of our culture.
- Regional Events: places where those souls can revel and play. These events happen all over the world and this page offers places where you can find out more.
There are too many official and non-official resources in the world to list here. The official ones are listed on the Burning Man site (linked above) as well as our own LGBTQIA+ allies focused events (link). While the Regional List on the Burning Man [dot] Org web site should be your primary list for seeking out locals here is a list of resources related to our web site and those of our friends:
Queerburner Regional Communities
Joining your Regional Community
There is no way to stress this enough… if you have it within your ability, seek out your Regional Community. There is a directory on the Burning Man web site with all the official regions listed. Who knows, maybe you can volunteer to be a leader yourself and start your own region.
With the link above, you will be put in touch with a Regional Contact who might assist you in getting in touch with others in your area. You can easily do a search using Google too! There is a high probability that your community has a page on Facebook at least.
Do not confuse this with Regional Events, though the two are related, events are pockets of micro-burns all over the world that bring the Burning Man spirit home. One example is “Element-11” which is produced by members of the Salt Lake City Burning Man Community. “All Of Us” is an unofficial regional event of which there are also many.
Burning Man and the 10 Principles from Larry Harvey are the foundation of this community ideology that by fully embracing the things many of us hold dear. The LGBTQ community may have been there in some way since the beginning, but we have our first records of radical participating began about 1993 in our history section.
There are safe places popping up more and more for LGBTQ people at Burning Man and the events in regional locations all over the world. Not all burners are altruistic in the matters of those marginalized in the world historically. Even today the main event in Nevada and many regional events are very hetero-normative and can my misogynist and unwelcoming for LGBTQ participants. So we created one with a stated focus for LGBTQ and our allies call All Of Us that attempts to flip the paradigm.
To be clear, the Burning Man community did not create these events to exclude LGBTQ but invited anyone who wanted to play along. The model of the 10 Principles is literally everything queer people could want and are attracted to this community because of those stated standards. But where some fail is assuming that our differences can be collapsed into one people one cause thinking. People of Color, Queers and others still want to be seen for what they bring and feel safe in their identities instead of flattened into a single thread.
It takes a lot from some marginalized people to trust going out into an environment deigned to kill them and feel safe. Without Queer Safe places there are many LGBTQ people who would never have been willing to try Burning Man at all. Even inside our community there are aggressions that use an old argument accusing queer spaces of being a bubble that keeps some people out and some people in. While not 100% wrong or right these kinds of attacks on ideology and identity offer nothing but unsolicited and unhelpful fodder for people who do not understand what it is like to feel fear in daily living.