What On Earth is a Queer Ranch Festival? And Where Do the Goats Go …

…when the queers roll in from Berlin?

Revellers danced on hay until sunrise. Photo: Vovette Recto Verso/ Ohana Lesvos

The Queer Ranch Festival 2024 launches for the third consecutive year this week.

Since its inception, it’s doubled in size; 300 queers are currently flying into the Greek island of Lesvos, ready for 5-days of salt water on Sapphic skin and techno on the beach.

Before I plunge into the poetic pandemonium in Sappho’s hometown this week, here’s a voyage into the inaugural Queer Ranch Festival, back in 2022. And the inside scoop on the creation of the Ranch, and Festival from one of its founders, Samra Kurtovic.

Festival-goers — who’d ventured from Montreal and Paris, Cape Town and London — walked along a dusty river road. An ocean of stars rippled overhead as moonlight shone on slender stalks of bamboo, casting shadows on the path ahead.

Electronic beats grew louder with every step, as the Saturday night crescendo of Ohana’s Queer Ranch Festival grew closer. Usually the nocturnal rhythms in these parts are reserved for frogs and crickets, but this weekend, some of the finest queer DJs from capitals across Europe played from a booth made of bamboo over a dance floor made of straw.

Baselines usually heard in sweaty basement clubs in Berlin drifted across the valleys of the Greek island of Lesvos until dawn broke, turning the zaffre skies pale blue.

The three-day festival — the first of its kind on the island — was the brainchild of Ohana Collective, in collaboration with Anaïs Carayon, founder of Paris’ Brain Magazine and producer Audrey Saint-Pe.

Ohana is a Lesvos-based collective of (primarily) queer women who packed their bags three years ago, leaving city life behind in order to live together, in community, in the great outdoors.

Though expanding and contracting in size, the Collective has four founding members, one of whom is Serbian-born artist Samra Kurtovic.

“Ohana means family,” Samra tells me over a mango lassi by the sea after their premier Ohana Queer Ranch Festival. “It’s a Hawaiian word, meaning big, extended family. In life we were born into a family, but as queer people, we can and often must choose where and who our family are.”

Queer joy abounds at Flamingo Beach Bar. Photo: Ohana Lesvos

Through the summer months the Collective live on a slice of land in Skala Eressos (the birthplace of queer poet Sappho) called ‘Ohana Ranch.’ They’ve adopted eight cats, three goats, two ponies ,and anyone who needs a loving community to call home. In the winter they live in Ohana Rooms, a women-and-non-binary hotel a stone’s throw from the sea.

“We came to live in the nature, because it’s easier to connect to each other in this environment. In capitalist systems in the city, you’re forgetting yourself, who you are, what you need. Out in nature, you’re reminded that we’re here to connect to each other, to learn from each other — people and animals alike,” Samra says.

Part of the family, an Ohana goat. Photo: Ohana Lesvos

Throughout the festival, Ohana’s ponies and goats were evacuated to a neighbouring field while queer fashionistas from near and far poured into the Ranch.

PVC harnesses danced alongside Hawaiian shirts, platform boots stomped next to flip-flops. “It was one of my favourite things about the festival,” says Samra, “to see all these city looks out here in wild nature.”

Samra sips her mango lassi reflecting on the festival, gazing out to the horizon. She looks like a sage-by-the-sea as she prophesizes:

This is the future even before the pandemic, you could see in Berlin and London, people moving out of the city. Then of course, the pandemic made people move even more. There’s nothing outside in the nature for queers, queer is always in the city, in the club, that’s where we feel safe. Queer ranches are the future for queer people when they go outside of their city.

Parisian queers at the beach bar in Lesvos. Photo: Ohana Lesvos

Naturally, a ranch festival can’t be all about nightlife — the blue cloudless skies, sandy beaches, and cool Mediterranean breeze call your hungover ass to action no matter what you imbibed the night before.

Throughout Ohana’s festival, people liberated their bodies and minds in yoga and meditation classes. There were volleyball tournaments, women’s circles, and self-defense workshops — all led by local instructors, queer women who live on the island year round.

One sunset, the supremely talented Athenian band Someone Who Isn’t Me (S.W.I.M.) took to the stage, serving their indelible indie-electro-pop melodies. Legendary London drag king extraordinaire, Don One opened the festival with a silky smooth performance at lesbian beach bar Flamingo.

“I feel at home,” Don tells me as they mosey around a bar. “I’ve never been here before but I feel home, it’s so strange.”

S.W.I.M. play on the eve of the all-night Ranch party. Photo: Ohana Lesvos

Though around a hundred queer women now call Skala Eressos home for all or part of the year, the festival brought an injection of youth to the community. Of the hundred queer women who reside here, three are under the age of thirty-five. (I am one of them!)

The village has been something of a Mecca for queer women since the 1970s, as they trace the steps of Sappho, the likely queer poetess who gave lesbianism its name. Even this week, I’ve met four delighted queer Ph.D. students from the States, sipping Piña Coladas at the beach bar: “Research,” they say.

Every September there’s an International Eressos Women’s Festival which again attracts hundreds, perhaps thousands of queer women, though again, mainly of a certain age.

“I was worried for this place,” says Samra. “It’s such a special, unique and historical spot and unless a younger, queer generation come in, it’s going to die.”

Many who live here share this anxiety. The decades roll by, the queer elders get older, and the queer youth don’t seem to be landing here.

“I really wanted the festival to bridge the gap between the generations, because I appreciate all the generations,” says Samra, who’s in her 40s. “The older generation fought for us, we could never be queer without them, and they hold so much pain from these years of fighting to survive.

“The new generation,” Samra continues, “with new style, music, vocabulary, identities, they are apprehensive of the older generation, and it’s the same the other way around. So I always tell my younger queer friends, without the elders you cannot be you. And I say to my older gay or lesbian friends, that without the youth, continuing to evolve, the work you put in will be for nothing.”

The first Queer Ranch Festival attracted some 150 out-of-islanders. Queerness, in all its glorious forms — a breathtaking amalgamation of ages, sexualities and genders — united on the dance floor, in yoga class, and at the beach bar.

For nine years, since Samra first arrived on the island, she’s wanted to bring something alternative and queer here.

Ohana have been believing and working on it in our quietness through the years: by getting the land, preparing the ranch, getting the hotel ready. And energetically spreading the word, speaking about queerness, inviting people from around the world, ensuring safety and community.

Nocturnal scenes from the Ranch. Photo: Ohana Lesvos

“Standing on the dancefloor,” Samra continues, “I had this moment when I looked around and thought, it’s real, it’s actually real and it’s amazing. To think I was holding onto this for nine years, thinking this and hoping for this and then in that moment, it was a reality, we collectively manifested all of this.”

Samra wasn’t the only one pinching herself on the Ranch that night. Many of us who moved here have — for the time being anyway — exchanged the hustle and bustle, the style and nightlife of the big city, to be here in paradise, in community, in nature, by the sea.

Tonight, there was no trade-off; the city and all her energy and looks came to us. Eyes closed, we were in Berghain, losing our mind and body to the thumping beat of techno. Eyes open, we were surrounded by our beautiful community, gazing up to the stars, on an island floating in the Aegean Sea.

Stay tuned for all the juicy gossip from this year’s (this week’s!) Queer Ranch Festival…

From a Queer Ranch in Lesvos, why not visit a Dali-esque Sapphic party in London…

Or find out more about life on the Greek Island of Lesvos…