To understand the capacity of queer architecture today, it is necessary to understand how it has been constructed. The ‘queer’ as in ‘queer architecture’ is not simply an adjective; it is also a verb that performs. Queerness is now often received as a given, as something detached from its historical trajectory. The questions it attempted to address have been lost through a form of collective sublimation. Queerness can only remain queer if its reactive nature is preserved. To respond to the question of what queerness inherited we need a collective endeavour of recollection, an assembly of past examples to create a genealogy, an essential component to build up an emancipatory process. This brings us to New York City, to the early years of the HIV crisis, to a time in which queerness embraced architecture as a means of survival. The history of nightclubs as queer spaces is crucial in constructing a queer genealogy. In that time, nightclubs served as laboratories for socio-political experiments; where the definition and advocation for queerness were approached through experimental ways of understanding architecture. One such “laboratory” was the Palladium, designed by Arata Isozaki in 1985.