Bathhouse Collective
How does our collective work?
2026
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2026
One Park
6 March 2026
How does our collective work?
Sign up and stay up to date
One Park
At Bathhouse, we move to remember our bodies are ours. We sweat to wash away the weight of a world that demands we shrink, perform, or hide. We connect in ways only possible when space is built by us, for us.
This is joy as resistance. This is pleasure as power. This is ours.
Why We Exist
Bathhouse started with complaining at an afters; the exhausted kind that happens when you and your friends leave another party feeling underrepresented, bored, unsafe.
We were tired of watching queer and femme DJs get relegated to warm-up slots, playing the most electric sets of the night to empty rooms. Tired of expensive tickets, unsafe venues, no consent policies, no awareness teams, no sense of community. Tired of scenes that demand we be grateful just to be let in.
We were tired of begging for scraps in spaces that were never designed to hold us. So we stopped complaining and started building.
What We Are
Bathhouse is a queer nightlife collective based in Cape Town. We are busy evolving into a cooperative structure. We throw parties where queer and femme DJs headline because they are the main event; where you can sweat freely, connect safely, and move through space designed by and for our bodies and our pleasure from the very beginning.
We honour the lineage of bathhouses as queer sanctuaries and rave culture as an incubator for Black and queer resistance. We're standing on the shoulders of pioneers who knew safety wasn't found in the police but in each other, who turned the dance floor into a place to build the world they needed–hand-in-hand, in community.
As a cooperative moving toward not-for-profit, we're building infrastructure that uplifts, creates, supports, and lasts.
Owned by us. Run by us. For us. Legally, financially, spiritually.
Our Ethos:
Move x Sweat x Connect
These three acts are the foundation of everything Bathhouse does. They define why we exist.
Move = Liberation. When we move, we transform. Dance allows us to express ourselves in ways words fall short. For us, pleasure is political and dance is liberation, rooted in defying norms, letting go, and freely expressing whatever emotion comes up. It's a physical and emotional release that leaves us feeling grounded, renewed, powerful, proud, sexy, seen.
Sweat = Power. Sweat is release. It's what your body does when it works hard and lets go. When the sweat pours, it's a physical manifestation of shedding your inhibition, insecurity, doubt. It’s a release of the masks you wear to get by. We are cleansed in sweat; a baptism in rhythm and heat.
Connect = Resistance. There is power in unity. At Bathhouse, you are free to connect to your own sexiness, sluttiness, and playfulness in a space designed to nurture those parts of your identity. You also connect to something bigger: to friends, strangers, and chosen family, to the history of rave culture and queer nightlife, continuing the fight towards liberation of queer minds and bodies through community.
Our Vision
We're building the world we want to dance in. One that is founded in genuine care and shared power. A world where queer nightlife is collectively owned, culturally influential, inclusive, and punk.
In five years, Bathhouse is a thriving underground institution: a fully-realised cooperative where queer people share power, learn together, and build sustainable nightlife infrastructure. We've proven that parties can be transformative without being extractive, joyful without compromising safety, and financially viable without prioritising profit over people.
Our impact ripples beyond our own dancefloors, shifting Cape Town's underground rave scene toward genuine collectivism, collaboration, and care.
Our Mission
We throw the party we want to go to: where queer people are centered, queer and femme artists are celebrated, and through collective care and shared power, we make space to move, sweat, and connect at a party that is uncompromisingly ours.
In practice this means:
- Queer and femme artists headline and are compensated fairly
- Not-for-profit operations prioritise community benefit over profit
- Trained awareness teams and comprehensive harm reduction infrastructure
- Accessible pricing and dedicated community tickets for QTPOC, trans folks, and marginalised communities
- Pathways for community members to volunteer, learn, and grow into organisers
- Collaboration with other queer collectives to strengthen the scene
- Cooperative governance with shared decision-making power
Our Sound
We book queer and femme DJs because they're constantly sidelined and because they're making the most exciting music—experimental, fast, forward-thinking, genre-bending sounds.
If straight men play Bathhouse, they're proven allies who understand this is an honor, not just another booking.
We don't lock into one genre. Genre-focused nights come with codes about how to dress, dance, who belongs. We reject that gatekeeping.
The dancefloor has always been a site of resistance and community-building for Black and queer people. The music we play honors that lineage.
Who We're For
Bathhouse is for people pushed to the margins of the margins.
We don't "welcome diversity;” we exist because of it. This space centers Black and brown queers, trans and nonbinary people, femmes, freaks, sluts, weirdos, and anyone sidelined by scenes that claim inclusivity but operate on straight, white, cis logic.
We're disrupting nightlife's inherited patterns—tokenism, hierarchies, rules about whose bodies belong.
If you're here to gawk or collect cool points, you're in the wrong place. This is for people who know the dancefloor is political and joy is survival work.
Join Us
Bathhouse is a cooperative. Membership is earned through contribution—start as a volunteer, show up, learn our values, do the work. When you're ready, the collective votes you in.
We're building the world we want to dance in. Come build it with us.