This article is part of a series originally published in French during and just after Whole 2025. Since they're so good, we decided the world should enjoy them too, so we translated them.
Last summer, Leslie discovered the Whole Festival and gave you an account of her three days at the world’s biggest queer festival. This year, she has decided to share her impressions and all the details of her endless nights with you. On this first day, she takes advantage of her arrival to look back on her year, her expectations and the impact of the previous Whole Festival on her life.
First times are always funny. Last year was my first Whole Festival. I said it would be a “life-changing experience”. I wasn’t lying. Three days were enough to shake up who I thought I was, who I wanted to be, who I was going to be. Last year, I rediscovered my body, I told myself that I loved it, and I drew on those three days of festival to find the strength to be again the bad bitch I’ve always been.
Sitting on the same bleachers, in much the same state, I can look back.
I arrived at Whole in 2024 like a disco ball that had exploded on the floor, and three short days allowed me to pick up the pieces. Whole and – I insist – the Whole’s faggots reconciled me with myself, while opening a breach in some of the convictions I had most tightly ingrained in me. Ferropolis 2024: less certainty and more self-confidence.
So it wasn’t easy not to feel a little apprehensive about coming back. While carefully putting together the outfits I’m going to wear this year, I tried not to expect too much from this second time around. After all, you can’t turn your life upside down every summer. If I felt beautiful for the first time in many years at Ferropolis last summer, I arrived there this morning with a strength I had forgotten I had deep down inside me.
A lot has happened in a year, and while I have cherished, cultivated and nurtured all the seeds that sprouted by this lake, I have also often felt like a circus performer, constantly juggling desires, wishes and identities that I embrace, but not necessarily all at the same time.
Been there, done that, then? I don’t know if I was expecting anything from this new edition. Maybe I was even a little apprehensive. You can’t change your life around indefinitely, can you?
There was the journey, the arrival at the site, the waiting, the preparation. And then…
And then there’s that moment when you step onto the dance floor with this body you’ve got to know again, with this new way of holding your head. And the billions of fragments finally come back together and you’re once again the disco ball spinning in the pit of your stomach.
Maybe my life will be turned upside down tomorrow or the day after. For now, all I know is that I’m exactly where I need to be, in the state I need to be in, surrounded by the people I want to be with.
I can breathe, no longer needing to do the splits, no longer needing to carry the weight of the debris of who I am: there is no more debris. This feeling of being exactly where I need to be at the right time is already a big change. No part of me is missing. I gather them together and make them dance to a four-beat rhythm.
This brings me to two observations. The first is less an observation than a feeling: I am extremely grateful to life for finally allowing me to surround myself with people with whom I can be completely and entirely myself, with all my contradictions and paradoxes. The second isn’t entirely an observation either. It’s more of a question that arises from all the daily balancing acts. Everyone should have the freedom to be themselves, that epiphanic moment when all the pieces fall into place. There is a force that arises from the depths of the margins that can sweep everything away. For me, it was leaving heteropatriarchy and gender norms – thanks in large part to queer people – that allowed me to reclaim my identities and enter my bad bitch era, without ever fearing contradiction or making mistakes. Because I contradict myself and make mistakes every day, but nothing is off limits. I can be both a superficial bitch and an unstoppable independent intellectual. I owe this infinity of possibilities to queer communities and experiences like Whole, where I am perhaps moving away from the idea of the queer girl I am supposed to be. This idea that life could be an infinity of possibilities and open doors that we can choose to push or not, that is true emancipation. The kind that all those who are not rich, middle-aged, cisgender men deserve. In short, the minorities who are the majority. I wish this raw joy of being for everyone. But can we experience this step aside beyond questions of identity or sexual orientation?
Sometimes I think of Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment: AUFKLÄRUNG ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit. The Enlightenment as a way out of the state of minority. A few thinkers in the 18th century had the luxury of calling for this revolution of the mind. There are beautiful things to be said about the fact that the German language expresses the process, the movement, the dynamics a thousand times better than any of our translations. I know that in the night and the neon lights, in the swirls of smoke, amid the lasers, ich wurde aufgeklärt. Perhaps that should be the real magic of this kind of space: that what we find there never really stays within the walls, between bodies, between beats. That we manage to make everything overflow, spread, catch fire slowly and leave with us.
Because my freedom only makes sense if it sets fire to everything that holds us back. To emancipate oneself is to light fires in the margins that can melt the foundations of an old world that is slow to die.
WHOLE 2025
DAY 1 Like A Disco Ball
DAY 2 Let's Talk About Sex, Baby
DAY 3 Sex, Drugs & A Whole New World
BONUS Shit And Giggles
