QT+ Gala 2026

QARC’S QT+ Gala is a formal fundraising event in solidarity with historical & contemporary liberation movements. Funds will be donated to three organizations: Oasis Legal Services, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, and a mutual aid fundraiser supporting Palestinian families. Through visual, literary, and performance arts, we aim to highlight how the resistance struggles & histories of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as those of other local & international marginalized groups, generate a collective future. The gala will host an artists' showcase and a dance floor, with food, drag performances, crafting, and a DJ. The event is open to all UC Berkeley students, faculty, and alumni, as well as 18+ attendees.

Attendance is $5 per person, & open to UC Berkeley affiliates and an optional +1 from outside of the affiliate community. Plus ones from outside UC Berkeley must be 18+. There is no dress code; come dressed in whatever is affirming for you.

Please Venmo QT-GALA-2026 $5 for payment. We understand that not everyone is able to pay this amount, so if you have financial barriers, please email cWFyYyB8IGJlcmtlbGV5ICEgZWR1 to get the cost waived. We will be verifying payment at the door. The entirety of this money will go to the three organizations listed above.

Limited at-the-door tickets will be available. Check-in at the event will close at 5:00 PM, so please plan accordingly and do not arrive late!

The gala is created & designed by the Queer Alliance Resource Center (QARC), UC Berkeley's oldest student organization for and by queer & trans students.

The "archive," as both a lineage of documentation and organizing force of events into a history, has long been the source of how we as queer communities conceive ourselves in relation to the past. Yet the archive has also long been an asymmetrical force, which excludes non-normative practices and knowledges — worlds and bodies outside of the imperial, cisheteronormative West. To rethink the archive, then, we might instead turn to our ability to imagine the future.

Jose Muñoz writes in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity of the idea that "Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer." This QT+ Gala, we encourage participants to consider how this conception of queerness — as something towards which we reach towards & believe in — shapes communal possibility. How does imagining a future open up potential to organize for and against past history and present conditions of exploitation? In the end, we hope that we might come to feel queerness as, in Jose Muñoz's words, "the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality."

Also check out other Arts events in Berkeley, Literary Art events in Berkeley, Nonprofit events in Berkeley.