Why safe spaces must extend beyond the club door
An uprising in New York in 1969, a disco ball on the floor and a badge reading “vibe control”…
Think about the walk from your favourite bar to your car. In Cyprus, those of us who have cars rarely walk all the way home. But we do walk to the car park, down a dark alley or across an empty parking lot at three in the morning. How long does it take? Two minutes? Five? Now think about how you make that walk. With your keys already in your hand? With someone on the phone, “until I get into the car”? And once you’re inside, do you immediately lock the doors?
For some people, the question sounds strange. For others, it’s every Saturday night. Ask your female friends. Ask any queer or trans person you know. Ask anyone who stands out on the street because of their skin colour, accent or body. The details change. The journey stays the same.
We see the term “safe space” everywhere now: in clubs, at festivals, on posters, at universities. So often that it risks becoming just another sticker on the door. But safe for whom? And how far does that safety extend?
That’s why, one evening in May, we sat in a circle at S//IP and asked the question openly.
A refuge with a history
The idea of a safe space didn’t begin as a hashtag. Its roots lie in the feminist and queer movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, for women, gay people and trans people, a bar, a bookshop or someone’s living room could be one of the few places where they could speak freely without paying a heavy price.
In the early hours of 28 June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York. It wasn’t the first raid. This time, however, the people there didn’t leave quietly. The Pride movement as we know it today grew out of that night. In the ballrooms of the same city, predominantly Black and Latino queer and trans people created their own “families”, known as houses, with their own rules and trophies. The 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning brought them to international attention.
From the beginning, the history of safe spaces has run through dancefloors. And from the beginning, the threat has come from the door. Sometimes, though, it’s already inside.
In Cyprus, that history is closer than we might think. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1998, five years after the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the Republic of Cyprus in the case of Modinos v. Cyprus. The first Pride parade in Nicosia took place in 2014. And, as we heard during our discussion, conversations about legislation recognising gender identity have been going on since 2008. For many people on this island, a safe space isn’t a trend. It’s something that was won only recently, and it still cannot be taken for granted.
At the door of S//IP
On 28 May 2025, S//IP filled with sofas, cushions and red light, arranged around a disco ball on the floor. The discussion brought together people from Accept – LGBTI Cyprus, which also moderated the event, S//IP’s safer spaces team, United by Pride, Music Element and academia. And us, from ABR. The music would come later. First, we would talk.
At S//IP, creating a safe space begins before you reach the dancefloor. There’s a large poster displaying the rules at the entrance. Someone at the door welcomes you and explains that racist, sexist and homophobic behaviour has no place here. And inside, there’s someone wearing a badge that reads “vibe control”.
At first, people at the door took it personally: “Why? Do you think I’m going to harass someone?” Over time, the conversation became routine. Then something even better happened: people began approaching the team themselves to report something they had seen or experienced.
After all, a safe space isn’t just about rules. It’s also about offering a glass of water to someone who’s had a little too much to drink, or asking “Are you OK?” at the right moment. As someone put it during the discussion: “It’s about taking care of one another in here.”
Three seconds
But not everyone experiences safety in the same way. A representative of United by Pride described it with the precision of a stopwatch: “As a queer person in Cyprus, I don’t need more than three seconds to tell from the way someone looks at me in a space.”
Three seconds. That’s how long a glance lasts. If you’ve never had to count them, you’re one of the lucky ones.
And it isn’t only the queer community that knows those seconds. The woman assessing a look across the bar knows them too. So does anyone who’s heard a comment about their skin colour, accent or body. The reasons differ. The calculation is the same: a few seconds to decide whether to stay or leave.
Then came the evening’s most uncomfortable question, from the academic side of the discussion: how do we know that, in trying to protect people, we aren’t ending up policing them?
The response from the S//IP team was simple. You ask first. “Personally, I’ve never intervened without consent.” Because something that looks like a problem from a distance might, up close, simply be two friends fooling around.
And who does the explaining? The door team might spend as long as 15 minutes explaining to someone why they’re being asked to leave, in the hope that they won’t repeat the same behaviour elsewhere. But another participant drew a line: “A safe space means that you shouldn’t have to explain yourself.”
The venue explains its rules. People don’t owe anyone an explanation for their existence.
The new closet
This was where the discussion began to heat up. From academia came perhaps the evening’s most provocative idea: “I understand and support the practices that help keep us all safe. My problem is with the concept of a safe space itself.”
The problem? If we create three, four or five “safe” clubs, bars and cafés, then “all of you who came out of the closet will end up in a new closet”.
Another voice put it even more bluntly: “I don’t believe safe spaces exist in Cyprus.”
That’s why many people now prefer the term “safer”. One extra letter that acknowledges the work is never finished.
Gradually? No!
So how do things change? On this question, the discussion split in two.
Some argued that culture is built gradually, within spaces: from clubs to events, and from there into society, because “it can’t change overnight”. Others responded that “the state and institutions have a responsibility”, and that people have been waiting long enough since 2008.
When someone returned to that idea of doing things “gradually” a little later, the response was a single word: “No!”
There are reasons for that impatience.
We didn’t agree on everything, and we didn’t need to. The closest we came to common ground was a comment from United by Pride: “There are many fronts.”
Laws, venues, groups, culture. All together, not one at a time.
Five minutes
Remember the walk to the car? For some people, there isn’t a car waiting.
Later in the discussion, a trans person from S//IP’s safer spaces team said something very simple:
“As a trans person, I feel like I need, let’s say, a friend to leave the club with tonight. There have been many times when I haven’t had anyone to go home with after the club, and because I live in old Nicosia, that five-minute walk has been a nightmare, literally.”
Five minutes. About the length of a song. That’s the distance between a space that’s trying to be safe and a street that isn’t trying at all.
Anyone who’s ever sent an “I’m home” message to the group chat at three in the morning knows exactly what that means.
A safe space that ends at the door isn’t enough.
Ideas also emerged during the discussion. Ideas, not decisions.
The first was to introduce “vibe control” at other events, not just at S//IP. The second was greater awareness of class and financial barriers, such as offering free tickets to people who cannot afford them, because, as someone pointed out, “inclusion is largely defined by someone’s class”.
And the third was to learn from groups already doing this work instead of reinventing the wheel.
The dancefloor is only the beginning
From Stonewall to S//IP, dancefloors have always been more than dancefloors. They’ve been rehearsals for a world where you can exist without looking over your shoulder.
And that world isn’t just for one community. It’s for anyone who has ever walked a little faster in the dark.
The task now is to take that rehearsal out onto the street.
Safety shouldn’t be the responsibility of those who are at risk. A street becomes safe when harassment stops, not when we learn to walk faster.
Until then, let’s look out for one another.
When you’re leaving the club, ask who’s going where. Wait until your friend gets into their car or reaches home. Ask “Are you OK?” and wait for the answer. If you see someone being harassed, don’t pretend you didn’t notice. And if you organise events, borrow the idea of vibe control.
Watch the film Questioning Safe Space and tell us: what would make your journey home after a night out safer? Write to us on Instagram at @alternativebrainsrule, or email [email protected].
A safe space isn’t a place. It’s something we create for one another. And it doesn’t stop at the door.
The ABR team
Watch the film: Questioning Safe Space
Instagram: @alternativebrainsrule
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TY-CO is a European project funded by the Creative Europe programme under the CREA-CULT-2024-COOP-1 call.
Funded by the European Union. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for the views expressed.
Source: ABR
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