THE VORTEX brings together new writing, conversations and visual works from the family and allies of Mothers and Daughters – a lesbian & trans bar*. Who after eight years of operating as a community project for trans and lesbian people in Brussels and around, is wrapping up. This issue serves as a celebration of Mothers & Daughters, an honouring of those who came before and those who joined us, a vessel for some of our thoughts, an outline of our wild vortex and a gathering place for resources for future trans and lesbian organising in Brussels and beyond.

Dear reader,

here, for you: a gift of 33 letters, bound together through their flavours of disappointment.
The feeling of disappointment is not only close to regret, sadness, and dissatisfaction – a feeling of loss, an uncomfortable space (or a painful gap) between expectations and reality – we also understand it as a rattling in the rusty machinery of a society whose fuel is extraction and oppression.

Go clubbing with us, the group MYCKET. MYCKET means ‘much’ in Swedish and that is how we like it; much is more. Together we will put on our best boots, follow our desire and curiosity, as we invite you to follow us on a personal, political, queer, lesbian, feminist, erotic journey through The Club Scene.

Welcome to your queer life.

A life along a line, or several.

A life through writing, images and objects.

Life as a sticky, messy pile of narratives and emotions.

Life not as singular and individual, but entangled and connected.

Framed as inescapable, indescribable, uncontrollable and essential, economies are everywhere. Oppressive and enabling, lucrative and undervalued, there are economies that trade our emotional labour, desires, love, fertility, time, minds, queerness, politics and clicks. There are economies that we can control and that control us, and those that we can subvert to serve our collectives. A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound, in a conversation with a cat, an app-enabled journey through a rainy Shanghai night, in the margins between intimacy and power, in the kitchen, with your record collection, under the tip of the iceberg, at the foot of a tower she built, dancing at the lesbian bar.

We want a future outside of straight time. A future in which all our friends and lovers and their lovers are coming over for dinner around a table we built together. We want a future that is fair, fun, furry, fabulous, fierce, free and not fucked up. We want futures.

It has been a longstanding wish to expand Girls Like Us beyond the editorial team, to use this platform for different voices and disciplines and to experiment with pushing the publication to another plateau. Horizontally — not vertically. When New York-based artist and writer Emma Hedditch approached us in fall of 2016 to work together on a special issue themed around DANCE & DANCING, the opportunity for this expansion arose. DANCE AND DANCING explores the New York dance scene – past, present and future.

Dear Lovers, Sisters, Brothers, Mothers, Adopted Aunts, Long Lost Fathers, Half-cousins, Wives, Black Sheep and Partners In Crime

As you know, we have a soft spot for collectives, collaborations, friendships and support structures. People doing things with other people: loving, working, organizing, living. These strategies for surviving together form an underlying thread throughout all our issues. This time we wanted to look more closely at one way of naming these friendly constellations: FAMILY.

120 pages exploring the body and bodies, inside out and outside in. Bodies that dance and move. Bodies making waves. Body double. Bodies at work and working with the body. Using the body as an instrument. The body as medium and massage of touch and being touched. The single, singular body as the very basis for a ‘we’.

Interviews with image ingenue K8 Hardy, filmmaker Babette Mangolte, writer Jina Khayyer and documentarist Mariah Garnett. Essays by Derica Shields and Crystal Campell. Plus 7 Q&A's with healers, herbalist and modern witches. Beautiful bodily artists series and last but not least – horoscopic aphrodisiacs.

A secret can be a private space for self-creation – or a shared site of pleasure.

We explore secrets in a plethora of forms and contexts. From layered accounts of mediaeval ecstasy to the unexplored sensory experience of smell. From camouflaged play to queer readings of astrological charts and the hidden history of house music. From a very analog point of view to the outskirts of the internet.

In a world with too many choices and too little time to explore, play is an excellent strategy. Objects, roles, bodies, settings – anything can be transformed in play. Playing across time, space, architecture, beds, houses, lives, papers. Suddenly a chair is a plane is a stroy is an animal is an avatar is a new reality. Making up worlds, filming them. Surfing warm and cold waves. Playing with identities. Playing en masse. Playing to be free.

These days, if you call someone to go for a drink or a walk in the park, the obvious answer is: 'Sorry, I'm too busy'. Too busy with what? What do you do all day in your studio or office, bar or dancefloor, spending precious time on 'work'? And what makes it different from labouring? Do we slave for money – or no money – building on a system that is doomed to collapse? Or do we build on a new future where work and play are equal? When we work on our own initiatives and with a self-generated goal, would that still be called work? In this issue: other voices, other routes.

Featuring Alice Carey, Anna Franceschini, Lizzie Fitch, Devin Blair, Kim Gordon, Annika Henderson, Melanie Bonajo, Marie Branellec, Elizabeth Orr, Holli Smith, Joke Robaard Litia Perta and Marie Karlberg.

Doubles: Vava Dudu and Theo Mercier, Tavi Gevinson and Diane Pernet, Keren Cytter and Dafna Maimon, Lauren Flax and Lauren Dillard. Singles: Kaisa Lassinaro, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Leilah Weinraub, Benjamin A. Huseby, Eline McGeorge, Janis Pönisch, Anie Stanley, Andrea Ferrer and Devrim Bayar.

The Photo: Melanie Bonajo, The Class: Pascale Gatzen, The Musical: Melissa Lidauvais, The Story: Melissa Plaut, The Composition: Anne de Vries, The Editors: Lisa Gunning, Jeannette Petri and Devrim Bayar, The Movie: Jennie Livingston, The Gallery: Jessica Silverman, The Ode: Mylou Oord, The Jewel: Yaz Bukey, The Essay: David Lynch, The Composition – Qiu Yang.