Cloaca: the single shared opening through which everything passes. In vertebrate biology, it is the cavity where the reproductive, urinary, and intestinal tracts converge — one hole for all of it. In paediatric medicine, it names an intersex condition where the rectum, vagina, and urinary tract are fused into a common channel, a body that medical institutions have historically treated as a problem to be surgically corrected. Naming a queer rave series after it is not subtle. That seems to be exactly the point.

Cloaca is billed as launching on 18 April 2026 as a new queer rave series. The tagline: "One Hole One Whole Rave." DJs Smoko and Formosa are listed alongside others yet to be announced. Doors at 10PM. The venue is given as Ask a punk — a name that functions less as an address and more as a dare. It places the night in the tradition of word-of-mouth events where the location is disclosed only to those who seek it out. You are not invited. You have to want it.

Here is the complication: some listings place the debut in Pittsburgh rather than Berlin, which introduces genuine ambiguity about whether this is a single series with multiple launch cities or simply a data inconsistency. The promotional copy references Berlin's nightlife scene. The $30 door price — dollars, not euros — suggests an American origin, or at least an American-facing listing. This matters because everything that follows about Cloaca depends on where it actually happens. A queer rave called Cloaca in Berlin is one proposition. In Pittsburgh, it is a different one, operating in a different economy of risk and possibility. I am going to take the Berlin framing at face value while noting that the ground may shift under this reading.

The name deserves sitting with. In zoology, the cloaca is where functions that polite convention insists on separating are merged: waste and reproduction sharing a single channel, the abject and the generative occupying the same site. In medicine, a cloacal anomaly is a body that refuses the anatomical separation that textbooks expect — and that surgeons have spent decades trying to enforce. For a queer party to claim this word is to refuse the squeamishness that still polices which bodies, which pleasures, and which anatomies are permitted in public discourse. One hole, one whole: the pun collapses the distinction between insufficiency and completeness. It insists that the merged, the unseparated, the multipurpose body is not broken.

Wim Delvoye's installation "Cloaca" (2000) — a mechanical digestive system that consumed food and produced faeces in a gallery — gave the word an art-world afterlife as a provocation about consumption and bodily materiality. But the queer resonance cuts deeper than Delvoye's conceptual joke. The cloaca is not metaphor here. It is structure. A space where differentiation stops.

If this is Berlin — and that remains an if — the series enters a city whose queer nightlife has long traded in anatomical frankness. The leather bars of Schöneberg in the 1970s, the present-day ecosystem of parties like Cocktail d'Amore and Herrensauna: these scenes have refused to euphemise the body. But Berlin in 2026 is also a city whose club landscape has been contracting for years. Rising rents, noise complaints, the professionalisation of nightlife into a tourism product, the closure of venues like Griessmühle — each new party launches into a narrower corridor. The question is not whether Berlin's history supports a party like Cloaca. The question is whether Berlin's present still does.

Ask a punk, as a venue concept, nods to infrastructure that predates Berlin's techno mythology. SO36 in Kreuzberg — open since 1978, still operating, still hosting punk and alternative acts — established an operational grammar of DIY venue-making that electronic music scenes later inherited. Locations shared by trust, not by flyer. A venue called Ask a punk is a citation of that grammar. Whether the organisers are conscious of the citation or simply borrowing the posture is a question the night itself will have to answer.

The DJs — Smoko and Formosa — have virtually no public-facing press or discography that I can verify. This is worth stating plainly rather than romanticising. Some significant nights did start with unknown names on photocopied posters. Many more unknown names stayed unknown. What matters is not the anonymity but what happens in the room.

So what does Cloaca promise? Structurally, a cloaca is a refusal to differentiate. Applied to a rave, this could mean the dissolution of genre boundaries, social hierarchies, and the velvet-rope gatekeeping that calcifies even in supposedly radical scenes — queer spaces included. The name makes the claim. The €30 door (or $30, depending on which listing you believe) makes a different kind of claim: that the organisers intend to pay their artists, or that the concept alone will command the price. Both are gambles.

The most radical thing about the name is its refusal of shame. A cloaca is the body part that makes people look away. Naming your party after it says: we are building from the thing you find disgusting. We are not interested in making it palatable. Whether the party itself delivers on that promise or whether it remains a clever name on a flyer — that distance is the only one that matters. Berlin, Pittsburgh, or wherever the room turns out to be: the word has already done its work. Now the night has to.