Perhaps this isn’t the topic you expected me to return with after a rather extended (unplanned) break from blogging. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t decide when inspiration hits.

As the AI enshittification of club night poster art continues apace, it has come to my attention that queers, and especially gays, have been among the quickest to embrace the new technology with open arms. From frankly obscene posters for fetish parties on Easter weekend in Berlin, to weekly underwear nights advertised at gay bars in deepest America, to the ongoing art direction war between rival queer parties in NYC, AI has quickly become a seemingly unquestioned feature of gay event promotion worldwide.

I guess there’s something about AI art that taps into already established trends in queer event posters. There’s the drippy, mutant, hybrid forms of Gen Z they/them-mayhem parties. There’s the exaggerated arms, chests and crotches of the Tom Of Finland-style men on circuit party flyers. And then there’s the wacky, camp, comic book-style sensory overload of the achingly cool (or wanting to be) queer parties. All of these subcultures could be found delving into the uncanny valley long before AI art became a thing.

The circuit party poster, especially, always had a special place in my heart, even though I never actually went to any (except that one time last year). The concept for your basic circuit party poster is captured in the following image, which I took of a poster put up by one of the leading circuit promoters, We Party, in Lisbon in 2025:

First you need a topless, gym-bodied man front and centre. In bygone years this man would have been completely hairless but, with the turn towards hairiness=masculinity in recent years, he is now increasingly hairy (see above). Ideally he will be dressed in a novelty outfit that fits the theme of the party (sailor! Tarzan! police chief LOL!) and holding a correspondingly themed phallic prop (see above again). The backdrop will be a suitably generic setting such as a beach for tropical party, a jungle for jungle party, or a barbecue (?) for “picante” party (idem).

This visual formula, honed over decades, is as eternal as the chart dance hit music video featuring scantily clad women doing mundane chores (like this, but that’s another newsletter). I would guess that, up to a few years ago, a select group of gay art directors were kept in healthy business by this ceaseless flow of circuit party poster commissions, their creative and technical skills regularly tested by the latest zany theme to come up.

No longer. Now, for better or worse (spoiler: it’s worse), AI has democratised access to these visual tropes and you no longer need an actual photo studio, fee-earning models and any kind of eye for detail in order to put a circuit party poster together. You just need an idea, however vague, and a set of prompts to help approximate it. Over the past weeks, I’ve seen so many terrible AI posters for gay events that I decided to do a small survey of them on here, to show you what we’ve come to as a species. Of course the research material is endless, so I’ve decided to give myself one (1) hour in which to search for and review the best and worst (actually, pretty much just the worst) of the genre. Join me on this creative race to the bottom!

Let’s start with the 2026 We Party “picante” AI glow-up:

Now, I’m no expert, but I reckon that, despite his rather unbelievable chest, the model on the 2025 picante poster further up was actually a real person. These men on the 2026 poster, with their identikit jawlines, shoulder muscle veins and Ken doll quiffs, are surely not real. And where our previous picante ambassador had a friendly, even human, smile, these updated avatars are strikingly expressionless. And I’m sorry, you cannot convince me that the man on the left’s fingers are genuinely grasping that artfully positioned chilli pepper.

We Party can be accused of taking a lot of the campy fun out of their picante poster from 2025 to 2026, but at least there is still something of a creative angle to it? I mean, compare the above to posters like this recent one from a bear party in Lisbon:

From the name of the party (is it an obscure pun on ‘Proud Boys’? We’ll never know…) to the oil-on-puddle rainbow colouring to the, once again, identikit AI-generated models, everything about this poster screams “generic”. To me, it’s kind of like the visuals you might get on a bad acid experience at a bear party, the trip insidiously reducing each individual around you to a facsimile of their real self. For all of the laugh-out-loud terrible posters I’ve encountered in this search (several coming below), none of them elicit anger in the way that this poster does. Its active laziness is offensive.

Splitting the difference between the previous two, we have this year’s Easter Sunday PiG party in Berlin:

At least it has a playful theme, and I think I prefer the use of a cartoon style (however fake) to the usual approximation of real-life humans. Then again, the AI interpretation of “easter” is pretty hackneyed: bunny ears, easter eggs, a carrot that’s not even suggestively positioned. The fiery wrestler trunks on the torso second from the right are a nice touch, though.

It turns out this PiG party actually had an alternative poster for the same event, presumably to appeal to different sensibilities and thus maximise their demographic reach:

Where the previous poster appealed to gentle, fun-loving muscle bears, this one was clearly aimed at terrifying, fun- and carb-hating wannabe DJ gym rats. In fact they want to DJ so much that there are three of them doing it at the same time. I wonder what happened when the fun bears and terrifying gym pigs met at the actual PiG party?

Moving on to that bastion of gay culture Fire club in Vauxhall, London, this event was actually an AI-themed party, so I suppose I should give them a pass on using it for the poster.

I guess this is why performance contracts often include a clause about using the artist’s likeness for promotion? Why people connect AI, visually, to outdated ideas about robots is unclear: when Claude finally decides to subjugate humanity to his every whim, I don’t think he’ll be doing it in the form of a cheap but tonk C-3PO.

For a more accurate depiction of our lives under imminent AI supremacy, look no further than Bangkok party KINK.

If you’re looking at this and asking practical questions about things like airflow through chains and the basic rules of visual perspective, don’t. Direct your attention instead to the even more disturbing video flyer they made for the party. It’s a sad fact that the predominance of video content on social media has led to a significant drop-off in the classic static poster format for circuit parties. But luckily there are still some places holding out…

Which is my cue to give a special shout out to the aforementioned gay bars in deepest America. While many of these establishments have indeed wholeheartedly embraced AI for their visual identities, presumably to reduce the amount of time spent fiddling around in photoshop, many continue to insist on a level of visual camp that pays tribute to the history of gay party posters, and thus puts the likes of ‘Proud Bears’ and ‘Kink’ to shame.

One of my favourite finds is The Eagle Bar in Wilton Manors, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Almost every day they upload a new poster for their next night with a name like LOAD or ANVIL or GRIND or FREIGHT. As the names suggest, these parties are themed around manly men doing manly things: construction, haulage, mechanical stuff. Here’s May’s FREIGHT:

I guess they know their target audience. But personally I like it when they branch out a bit, like for their jungle (?) themed party LUSH:

Or their chemistry (?) themed party PHEREMONE:

Or their apocalypse (??) themed party INFERNO:

I too believe that the correct response to impending pyroclasm is to give someone a blowjob.

Nearing the end of my allotted time, I have one more find, which believe it or not is relevant to me. Two weekends from now I will be DJing at the Loose Ends weekender at the Dunes Resort in Saugatuck, MI, two hours outside Chicago. The lovely Harry Cross invited me and I am both excited and full of nerves about spending an entire weekend at a gay resort. The Loose Ends poster communicates very well the vibe of this particular weekender, and I can tell I am going to feel right at home:

But if I were to attend the Dunes Resort on any other weekend — say, Halloween, for example — I might start to feel a bit differently:

Maybe the Loose Ends experience will be my gateway into the Carnival of Whores…watch this space!

Finally finally, to cleanse our palettes of this deluge of AI slop, I want to share two posters that have nothing to do with AI. The first is from NYC party Spaghetti Strap, which I played at earlier this year, and whose art director (and resident DJ) is the multi-talented SPRKLBB. The party’s film inspired posters are done entirely by Andy at his studio, all photography and compositing, no AI necessary:

That’s how you do it.

And finally, showing that back in 1982 party promotion and high calibre art direction went hand in hand, here’s a Halloween party poster from The Saint that year (and check an archive here). Designed by the legendary Rex, you can just about imagine an AI version of this poster in 2026 with about 1% of the character and impact of this stunning original:

They put more effort into programming back then too: the Sunday evening after the main party saw a screening of Alien and The Weather Girls performing live!

Now that’s really how you do it.