by Alexander Cheves
A kind, handsome Irishman called The Ginger Lash runs some of the best queer parties in Switzerland. But when I meet him, he says he has no idea what he’s doing. But it’s working.
The Ginger Lash’s first name is Brian. He doesn’t share his last name because he works in a corporate office job.
“I feel like straight people don’t have our back right now,” he says. “So I still need to keep walls between my personas online.”
The Ginger Lash is from Ferbane, a small town in Ireland, and has spent thirteen years building a life in Zurich. By day, he logs hours at one of the largest human resources companies in the world.
And by night, he runs kweer.io, an events platform that’s part of his nightlife company, So Relevant, with his partner. Through it, he organizes five queer party series in Zurich: Kweer Ball, TEA, Drag Brunch, EXPLICIT, and the newest (and sleaziest) addition, PIT.
Thirteen years ago, his husband got a job offer in the city. They “scoped it out” for a weekend, swam in the lake, and decided it could be home, first for work and, later, a queer nightlife empire.
How did you start EXPLICIT?
For transparency, I met The Ginger Lash years ago, first as a reader and fan of my x-rated book.
He came to a reading I did in Montreal, then invited me to Zurich to do a reading before a special edition of EXPLICIT, a slutty techno party in a subterranean club that felt, at least on that night, like the center of gravity of gay Zurich. I think every gay man in town was there.
The story of the party, now in its 7th year, begins with censorship.
“It started with my other party series, Kweer Ball. I noticed Facebook, Instagram, whatever, kept taking down my ads. They said I was soliciting sex and flagged a post as ‘stripping.'”
Did you strip on Facebook?
The Ginger Lash laughs: no. The footage in question was a video of his best friend, a non-binary person of color, performing a burlesque number, fully clothed.
He removed that specific clip. The ad was still flagged. He tried different things and came to a conclusion:
“This was before AI. Even so, the robots were flagging her as a stripper. It felt like because she’s POC, they had deemed it an issue. It would not let me put any footage of this person through. And that’s my best friend. That’s the face of the party. We made it together.”
That experience pushed him to start EXPLICIT, a party that declares, in its name, a stand against online censorship. He created it as a sex-positive protest, complete with a dark playroom, with community events, like my reading, intended to remind attendees about the worsening censorship faced by queer communities and creators, something I’ve reported in LGBTQ magazines like Out Magazine and The Advocate.
Distributors flagged my first book as “sexual violence” due to its graphic depictions of queer sex, making delivery to certain countries difficult, even impossible. The Ginger Lash asked me to read those explicit passages to an audience before the party started.
“Just coming to the party is a protest. I want to make a space where people feel like their queer body is at its most free.”
EXPLICIT happens every second month at KAUZ, a venue in Zurich, and often sells out.
Over the years, The Ginger Lash has made fighting censorship a core mission, even outside of nightlife. In a 2018 essay, he argues why queer people should leave Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The essay first appeared on the Kweer.io blog and then on LinkedIn, where it drew strong responses. It details his experiences with algorithmic censorship and how these platforms have no incentive to protect queer people.
Tell me about Kweer Ball.
Before EXPLICIT, there was Kweer Ball, and before Kweer Ball, a WhatsApp group.
Some years ago, The Ginger Lash and his friend Dominik hosted weekly watch parties of RuPaul’s Drag Race in his apartment.
These events were home to a small, rotating cast of local gay friends. They made drinks, brought snacks, and placed bets on the winner of the drag competition show. Season after season, it grew.
Eventually, The Ginger Lash noticed a problem: Dominik was adding his weekly hookups to the WhatsApp thread. One day, he realized Dominik had invited too many fuck buddies.
“I said to Dominik, if all these guys show, I’m fucked. That’s a thirty-person group in my tiny apartment.”
The solution, of course, was to leave the apartment and find a bar. They settled on Les Garçons, a Zurich bar sadly now gone, and screened Drag Race there every Friday through the season ten finale, when friends turned to them and said: Hey, just throw a party!
What was the first Kweer Ball like?
“We put two grand into it,” he tells me. “No ticket cover. We were just hoping that, at the next one, we could make the money back.”
Two hundred and fifty people showed up. The venue was tiny, but “the energy was wild.”
The name of their holding company, So Relevant GmbH, comes from that night. A man walked up to them, very drunk, and said they were “so relevant to the scene right now.”
Though Dominik has since left the business, The Ginger Lash tells me that, on that first night, they realized they could fill a gap in Zurich’s queer culture. The city’s nightlife at the time ran on large, commercial parties, with “nothing for the weirdos, the alts, or the club kids.”
“Some friends used to organize a party I loved, called Kunt. It was a great club kid party.” He tells me it stopped because “they were a couple, and one day they broke up. I was like, fuck, there’s nothing now, so let’s build it.”
1980s ball culture, a trans and POC heritage, inspired Kweer Ball. Why is that history important to what you do?
Kweer Ball drew from drag and ballroom culture. The Ginger Lash, a self-described “little ginger white boy from Ireland,” knew the history well enough to build a party around it and also well enough to know he had no personal claim to it.
Before the first event, someone called him out about that online.
“She said, ‘You don’t come from this world, why do you think you can take space in it?’ I told her, ‘You’re absolutely right. Would you like to work on it with me?'”
That was Ivy Monteiro, drag mother of the House of St Laurent, Swiss Chapter, now his best friend and longtime collaborator. After that, The Ginger Lash set a rule: If he’s building something he doesn’t have lived experience in, he finds someone who does and asks them to shape it with him.
Kweer Ball has since evolved away from its direct ballroom reference, partly, he says, because ballroom culture has now established its footing in Switzerland and no longer needs a proxy.
The Ginger Lash feels that running Kweer Ball trained him for everything that came next.
Tell me about TEA.
The legendary tea dances of Fire Island inspired TEA, his afternoon dance party in Zurich. A regular visitor to Fire Island, The Ginger Lash knows the history.
Tea dances predate Fire Island, he explains: They started as heterosexual socials where couples would waltz and salsa.
When gay men and lesbians started throwing their own tea dances in NYC, they built a warning system for police raids. Someone would sound an alarm, a lesbian and a gay man would pair off, and suddenly there was nothing to see, just a normal, hetero dance.
“That’s where the concept of not being allowed to dance with your partner evolved into being able to dance around your partner, which is basically what everyone does now,’ The Ginger Lash tells me. “Queer people invented dancing, at least how everybody dances now. I believe it started with tea dances.”
TEA is great, he says, because “you can still make a ten-thirty bedtime.” It’s “the place for face-to-face, for conversation.” Put phones away.
This partner-swapping history of tea dances proves, he says, “how vital gay and queer women have always been to the freedoms and spaces gay and queer men found refuge in.”
“Typical lesbians,” The Ginger Lash says. “Saving our lives.”
Tell me about PIT.
PIT is the newest party, launched just last November. The brief: “You’re climbing into the pit with hot, sweaty men. Fetish wear required.”
It came about partly from a placement problem: he had good DJs who didn’t fit EXPLICIT’s harder techno sound. At PIT, the sound is more house, but still a slutty, sweaty event.
“I want PIT to feel like a sexy house party at the Eagle in New York City, where you can get railed and still hear a good house remix of Beyoncé.”
He also wanted to create space for Zurich’s fetish scene. He recognized this need when a friend who attended told him about the Mr Rubber Ireland voting ceremony—it happened in the basement of an Indian restaurant.
“Even in major cities, kinky people don’t have spaces to gather. Few people are giving weirdos in full rubber the space. So I try to help.”
At the time of our talk, there had been two PIT events. After the first, Meta flagged and deleted the party’s Instagram account. This briefly sent The Ginger Lash into an “existential crisis” about whether or not to continue it.
He decided to set up a new one and keep going. Edition three happens this November.
This is a lot of work outside a full-time job. What’s the drive?
“At the end of the day,” The Ginger Lash says, “the people I surround myself with, my family, my friends, are good people. I do it for them.”
“On a global level, there’s not much I can do. I can stay informed, I can challenge, I can shout. But then I go back to the little world I can control. I’m making queer spaces for us to feel joy, and that drives me. Sometimes I just have to take that and be happy.”
He stresses that, in keeping with his manifesto, he’s never competitive with other promoters. If someone wants to throw a new party and asks for his help, he helps if he can.
“We need to continue to find ways as a marginalized group to be happy, to be joyful. Because our joy is just so fucking wonderful.”
What is an upcoming event you’re excited for?
The next big one has him visibly amped. It’s a collab in Zurich between EXPLICIT and Berlin-based Pornceptual, happening at a new, larger venue, Zinkbad, on 13 June, the weekend before Zurich Pride. Tickets are on sale now.
The lineup brings artists The Lady Machine, CRYME (co-founder of SEVEN, which Hinterhaus is part of), Anna Logic, and others. It’s pointed timing: the city’s Pride funding collapsed this year, leaving Zurich without a festival. “The city’s queer crowd will need somewhere to go,” he says.
“At its regular space, EXPLICIT sells out and maxes out capacity. With Pornceptual, we needed a bigger venue.” Zinkbad is the solution for a night. Whether it becomes a recurring spot depends on how the party lands.”
Gay men tend to divide each other into types, which causes strife in our community, more than we like to admit. Any thoughts on that?
“I think I look and present like a butch, masculine guy. But I can be a big sissy faggot. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world when you can experience that level of silliness. If we can find more ways to do it, that’s healing. I wish more queer men could have access to that side of themselves.”
This dips into a tangent on the “manosphere,” the loose online movement of influencers who promote a rigid, punishing vision of heterosexual masculinity, which The Ginger Lash has been watching with growing worry.
“Those people don’t have that level of joy because they’re so focused on masculinity and a certain way of being. They’re miserable. I just think, wow, gays have it so good.”
Now, I want to get personal, so I start with the most universal of queer experiences:
Tell me about coming out.
The Ginger Lash’s hometown had a population of 700. On day-of specifics, he’s purposefully vague: “I told my mom. After that, I didn’t have energy to tell Dad.”
His father came to him the next morning: “He said to me, ‘Your mother told me, and I want you to know that no matter what, I love you.'”
His father passed some years ago. I hear the emotion in his voice as he recounts a beautiful memory, the time his father helped him and his partner move into their first apartment. The three of them were in a furniture store shopping for bedding.
“My dad was very matter-of-fact. I’d suggest something, and he’d say, ‘No, that’s not warm enough, the fiber count is not high, you’re going to be cold.’ And I was just like, wow, my dad does not care that I’m moving into an apartment with a man. He’s literally here helping me buy bedding for this bed where I’ll be having gay sex, and all he cares about is that we’re going to be warm.”
When his father passed, “I remember thinking only of how good and kind he had been, how he didn’t say much, but when he said something it was always, somehow, the right thing.”
Do you have a favorite dancefloor memory?
If he had to pick, it’s a moment “like many moments I’ve had” at Lab Dance in Berlin, which happens once a month at Lab.Oratory, a gay club in the same building as Berghain.
He’s been to many of these parties, but a moment from last year stands out. It had all the elements he tries to create in his own: a good DJ, best friends, free and shameless sex, and dancing.
“I remember coming back from the sex area and finding all my friends. Everything was hitting, and it felt like the walls were melting, and we were all cuddling and melting into each other. It was that pure feeling that nothing else matters other than this moment, us being here together.”
His husband was there, along with some longtime best friends. The world and its problems—its violence, its censorship, and what feels like a darkening landscape for queer people, especially trans folks—were all, briefly, elsewhere.
“That’s the beauty of these spaces. You become one on the dance floor. And the outside world, just for a bit, doesn’t matter anymore.”
He pauses, then summarises the feeling:
“It’s gay magic.”
For The Ginger Lash, it’s both the product and the point. He builds the space, does the briefs, manages the spreadsheets. He fights the algorithm. The result: “If you’ve done it right, someone walks out of the sex area and finds their friends, and for a few hours, nothing is broken.”
“And that,” he says, “is a protest.”
Follow The Ginger Lash along with all his parties on Instagram and don’t miss PRNCPTL x EXPLICIT on Saturday, 13 June 2026.
Alexander Cheves is an author and essayist exploring sex, culture, art, and music. Winner of the Geoff Mains Prize and an NLGJA journalism award, he can usually be found dancing shirtless in Berlin or working on his next book.
Words: Alexander Cheves
Images: Mara Menzel + images courtesy of The Ginger Lash
