Understanding the emergence of contemporary gay identity is impossible without considering the history of parties. A party is an event: a provisional and temporary coming together of diverse elements, people and things. A festive mode of social participation. Neither temporally permanent nor spatially fixed, parties nevertheless leave their imprint on cultural memory, urban geography – even political identity. And although party practices are immensely variable and historically diverse, patterns can be traced that reveal much about the shifting relations between sexual minorities, social authorities and cultural economies. In Pleasure Consuming Medicine, I argued that greater attentiveness to pleasure and its varieties and social dynamics might enable new ways of reflecting on policies and practices of care. Here I supplement that analysis with a more historically and geographically specific investigation of parties as they have featured in the formation and imagination of urban gay identity, with a particular focus on Sydney and some of the metropolitan histories on which its gay community draws, such as that of New York.