Beginning with a theatre piece about a man in love with a silicone sex doll, Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Against Ageism: A Queer Manifesto (SPBH, 2025), explores attachment without reciprocity and the material conditions of care and projection. Turning to animegao kigurumi, and through a dialogue with Oshiruko Chan, a forever seventeen-year-old fictional character with large blue eyes and blonde hair, Simon(e) explores how masks and garments shape behaviour rather than express identity, positioning age as a structuring fiction and the self as an architectural phenomenon.

From the sweat-drenched chill-out rooms of early-90s Brixton to the algorithmic sprawl of contemporary ambient rave: how a music born to hold bodies through altered states became a survival grammar for the dissociative drift of digital capitalism in a world that never quite comes down.

In Chengdu, queer communities navigate tightening control and fading digital openness, reshaping where and how connection can exist in China. Public celebration recedes, nightlife moderates itself, and intimacy slips into coded networks and overlooked daytime spaces. Through Xinke Lee’s returning gaze, nightlife, public encounters, and cruising grounds reveal a fundamental reckoning: an ongoing meditation on adaptation and loss, and a community that survives through floating identities.