Fervor: The Cult Rave Saving Pride From Rainbow Capitalism

Utah’s queerest growing cult craze started not in a sacred grove, but with a single holy blunt in a Salt Lake City parking lot. Gizmoe, founder of Fervor, was venting to friends about how suffocating the pioneer city felt as a queer Pinoy rave kid. “I just wanted a space where we could feel everything,” Gizmoe says. Two years later, Gizmoe and multidisciplinary art director Danny Elvis would watch DJ Mister Hoochiemama play to a sweaty, sold-out room, while hundreds of bodies surged in defiant and hedonistic queer pleasure.

“There’s no such thing as a completely safe space … Not for us. Not here. But you can build a space that’s intentional, that’s awake, that’s held.”

Founded in 2022, Fervor was born to theorize and manifest liberation through community movement and to resist assimilation. Queer and trans communities of color needed a space that didn’t just play their music once a month, but centered their unique creative contributions — before they’re co-opted by uninspired culture vultures, I might add. They needed freedom, Gizmoe says, “not in the way bars here sometimes pretend it exists, but real, radical freedom — on the dance floor, in how we treat each other, in how we take care of our people.”

Gizmoe is tapped into an ancestral current that pulses somewhere between decades of sweat-slick warehouse raves in Detroit and New York, where queer and trans artists pushed the future of electronic music forward under crumbling, strobe-lit ceilings. Invoking this revolutionary dance at home, Fervor feels like a horny communion with those historic dance floors, channeling brown and queer histories that refused erasure.

Fervor is a party where equity isn’t a buzzword — it’s built into the architecture: sliding-scale tickets, prioritized access for queer and trans people of color and security personnel trained in de-escalation over domination. “There’s no such thing as a completely safe space,” Gizmoe says. “Not for us. Not here. But you can build a space that’s intentional, that’s awake, that’s held.” That ethos bleeds out of the event production from every pore. Danny, the creative director behind Fervor’s visual world, rejects sanitized rainbow capitalism.

“I just wanted a space where we could feel everything.”

Instead, they pulled from Paradise Garage aesthetics, the DIY ecstasy of ‘90s raves and the coalition-building practice of hand-painted art. “We wanted people to feel the art, not just consume it,” Danny says. “We wanted to create something that looks like us, sweats like us, loves like us.” Every banner and poster is touched by real human hands, often volunteers from the community — many of whom don’t even stay for the party itself. It’s all intentional and defiant.

In Utah, even the rainbow symbol feels Mormon; just sterile enough for our local beige gays, an archetype coined by Violet Chachki. You know the type: Beige apartment, Tom Ford coffee table books, LeLabo or Diptyque candles. But SLC’s counterparts are particularly rancid. They preach inclusion — but only to justify holding hands with congregations who legislate exclusion in their fascist red caps. It’s pick-me ass behavior. Fervor refuses to worship at that altar. “Pushing against this Mormon ideal here in Salt Lake City, we really try to stay away from the rainbow,” Gizmoe says. “It’s been pinkwashed, co-opted by capitalism.”

“Pushing against this Mormon ideal here in Salt Lake City, we really try to stay away from the rainbow … It’s been pinkwashed, co-opted by capitalism.”

They don’t reject the symbol itself — they reject the way it’s been drained of its blood, de-clawed and weaponized by the very forces it was meant to resist. “We’re here to take care of our people,” Gizmoe says. “We’re going to overpay our artists. We’re going to pour money back into the community. We’re going to dance until the walls shake.” If you’re looking for real Pride, you’ll find it where sweat beads on your forehead before you even hit the dance floor. Where strangers tuck Naloxone kits in each other’s pockets without asking. Where liberation isn’t a corporate slogan.

Fervor’s mini-festival will be THE destination this Pride, from June 6-8, 2025. Follow @fervor.slc for your chance at scoring tickets to what’s sure to be a sold-out party. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you’ll get caught up in it, too.

Read more about local events here:
Inside The Galactic Cabaret, a Portal to Utah’s Artistic Future
Forbidden Freedom: The Fetish Cabaret Turns Five