There are parties that entertain, and there are parties that become cultural infrastructure. Somewhere between nightlife, performance, activism, and radical hospitality, ICONIQA has quietly become one of Barcelona’s most influential queer platforms, not because it tries to define queer culture, but because it refuses to limit who gets to belong within it.
Behind the project is Barry Brandon, a creative director and community builder whose career has spanned more than fifteen years of producing events across North America and Europe. But ICONIQA is less interested in spectacle than in what spectacle can make possible: visibility without performance, glamour without hierarchy, and community without gatekeeping.
At a time when queer rights continue to expand in some countries while facing political backlash in others, nightlife has become more than entertainment. It has become a site where culture is negotiated, protected, and imagined. During our conversation in Barcelona, Brandon spoke candidly about responsibility, the limits of allyship, why inclusivity requires intention rather than branding, and how creating a dance floor can become an act of cultural architecture.
What makes the conversation worth reading isn’t just Brandon’s biography; it’s the consistency of his thinking across very different questions. Ask him about politics, branding, history, or a friend stumbling on a runway, and the answer circles back to the same idea: that belonging has to be built on purpose, because it doesn’t happen by default, even in a city as outwardly open as Barcelona.
Queer rights continue to advance in parts of the world while being aggressively challenged elsewhere. In that climate, what responsibility do cultural leaders carry beyond simply organizing events?
I can only answer that from my own perspective, because activism isn’t a single language. For some people it’s policy. For others it’s education, journalism, art, or community work. Creativity itself can be a form of activism.
If you’re fortunate enough to occupy a position where you’re visible, safe, and able to express yourself freely, I think there’s a responsibility to acknowledge that privilege. Whether everyone should carry the same responsibility is a more complicated conversation; I don’t feel comfortable imposing that expectation on others.
Personally, though, I feel it very deeply. Building community doesn’t exhaust me. It energizes me. It doesn’t feel like activism in the traditional sense, because it has become inseparable from how I live. Somewhere along the way, my personal life, my creative practice, and my professional work collapsed into one thing. My existence became my art.
Everything I produce begins with intention. Whether it’s an event, a publication, or a collaboration, I’m always asking the same questions: Does this expand access? Does it create community? Does it educate? Does it allow people to see themselves?
I’m not looking for recognition. The goal has never been applause. The hope is simply that the work quietly shifts perspectives, maybe even changes a few hearts along the way. Ultimately, I’m just another queer person trying to leave the world slightly better than I found it.
ICONIQA feels remarkably intentional. It doesn’t read as something that emerged from nightlife trends; it feels like it answered a question Barcelona wasn’t asking loudly enough. How did it begin?
I’d already spent more than fifteen years producing events before moving to Barcelona. After COVID, I honestly thought I’d retired from nightlife. I still had my creative agency, and I was producing commercial activations, but those projects are fundamentally different from building culture. They’re commissioned. Community isn’t.
Barcelona fascinated me because, on the surface, it was already incredibly queer. You could walk through the city and see queer, trans, and non-binary people expressing themselves openly, without the constant friction that exists elsewhere. I always joke that I judge a city by my trans friends. If they’re comfortable walking home alone at three or four in the morning without fear, that’s probably somewhere I’d want to live. Barcelona passed that test.
But I also noticed a contradiction. There were countless gay venues, yet relatively few spaces that genuinely centered the wider queer community, the dolls, the girls, trans people, non-binary people, people who didn’t necessarily fit neatly into existing scenes. That absence stayed with me.
So I combined everything I’d learned over years of producing events with what Barcelona already offered: openness, expression, incredible venues, and an audience that was ready for something broader. That’s where ICONIQA came from.
Even the name feels considered.
Originally it was called Iconique. I was designing the logo and the branding when I suddenly realized it sounded impossibly French, which made very little sense for Spain.
I sent everything to my best friend, who’s Puerto Rican, and he replied almost immediately: “ICONIQA.” It’s not technically a real word, but that’s exactly why it worked. It carried a little Latin rhythm while still pointing toward the idea of becoming iconic. More importantly, it didn’t belong to anyone yet. It gave us room to define it ourselves.
The ambition was never to create another demographic-specific event. The ambition was to create a place where queer excellence could exist in full view, and where as many people as possible could genuinely feel that they belonged.
That doesn’t diminish the importance of lesbian nights, gay parties, FLINTA spaces, or community-specific gatherings. I love those spaces, and they’re necessary. But the world I imagined looked different. I wanted a room where people stopped asking themselves whether they fit in before they even walked through the door.
ICONIQA has become synonymous with radical self-expression. People don’t seem to edit themselves once they’re inside. Was that always political?
Always. Because I think the hardest thing any human being can do is simply be themselves.
I’ve had multiple open-heart surgeries. Health changes your relationship with life. It strips away the need for external validation much faster than you’d expect. Eventually I reached a point where I realized confidence isn’t about convincing other people. It’s about no longer asking permission.
That’s the atmosphere I wanted ICONIQA to create. Yes, we have themes. Yes, people arrive dressed spectacularly. Fashion becomes theatre, glamour becomes performance. But underneath all of that, the invitation is incredibly simple: come exactly as you are.
One moment from the very first event still stays with me. A close friend walked the runway in towering heels and fell. Instead of laughing, the room applauded. People immediately reached out to help her back onto her feet. That was the moment I knew the culture inside the room was working.
The runway wasn’t about perfection. It had become a place where vulnerability was celebrated instead of punished. To me, that’s community. Not flawless performance. Collective care.
Visibility has become one of the defining ambitions of contemporary queer culture. Brands celebrate it, institutions measure it, politics often reduces liberation to it. But visibility alone rarely changes the conditions people live under. What does meaningful solidarity look like today?
This is probably where people stop agreeing with me. I don’t know that I believe in allyship, at least not in the way we’ve come to use the word.
If we’re talking about allyship from a heterosexual perspective, I’m skeptical. The real test of solidarity isn’t showing up when queer culture is fashionable or profitable. It’s showing up when there’s something to lose, when standing beside queer communities carries social, political, or economic consequences. That’s when a lot of people disappear.
I don’t mean everyone. There are certainly exceptions. But the language of allyship has become so comfortable that sometimes it asks almost nothing of the people using it. Support is easy when it’s celebrated. Support becomes meaningful when it’s costly. That’s why I’m cautious about the word.
So perhaps collaboration is a more honest framework than allyship?
Exactly. Collaboration implies participation. It implies mutual investment. It requires people to actually build something together, with something at stake for everyone involved, rather than one side simply extending support downward to the other. That’s much more tangible to me than simply adopting an identity as an ally.
Even within queer communities, solidarity isn’t automatic. People often assume we’re one unified movement simply because we’re grouped under the same acronym. We’re not. We still have to educate one another. We still have to confront our own blind spots. We still have to choose one another. Community is work.
You also speak frequently about history. There seems to be a growing generation that inherited visibility without necessarily inheriting memory.
That’s something I think about constantly. There’s something beautiful about younger queer people growing up believing that certain freedoms have always existed. In one sense, that’s exactly what previous generations fought for. But there’s also a danger. Rights can create the illusion that the struggle has ended. It hasn’t.
History disappears surprisingly quickly. I still meet people who don’t fully understand how much trans activists have contributed, not just to trans liberation, but to queer liberation as a whole. So many pivotal moments across different countries were driven by trans people, by gender non-conforming people, by people whose names rarely appear in mainstream histories.
If we forget that, we don’t just erase individuals. We erase the architecture that allowed the rest of us to arrive here.
That explains why ICONIQA exists beyond nightlife. The publication, the storytelling, the archive, they all seem to function as cultural memory.
Exactly. The magazine wasn’t about producing beautiful photographs for the sake of aesthetics. It was about documenting people.
I wanted readers to encounter someone from another country, another culture, another identity, and simply listen. No explanation. No debate. No performance. Just someone’s life. Sometimes that’s enough.
People underestimate what happens when you genuinely listen to another person’s story. You stop reducing them to an identity. You begin seeing them as a human being. That’s where empathy actually begins.
Perhaps the most radical thing ICONIQA offers isn’t visibility. It’s permission, permission to exist without having to explain yourself first.
I think that’s beautifully put. Because explanation is exhausting. Queer people spend so much of their lives translating themselves. Explaining pronouns. Explaining identities. Explaining relationships. Explaining existence.
Sometimes people just deserve a room where none of that is necessary. A room where they arrive already understood. That’s what I’m interested in creating. Not another event. A feeling. A temporary world where people experience what life looks like when acceptance isn’t something they have to negotiate.
And hopefully they carry that feeling with them once they leave. Because if it only exists for one night, then we haven’t gone far enough.
