Four days in the California desert, surrounded entirely by queer women, trans, and nonbinary people. Healing workshops led by queer facilitators. Live music under Joshua Tree skies. A body-positive pool party where every body is celebrated. A vendor marketplace built entirely by and for LGBTQ+ community members. And all of it designed not as an escape from your life, but as a reminder of what your life could feel like when you are fully, unapologetically surrounded by your own people.
That is Know Other Festival. It runs April 16–19, 2026 in Joshua Tree, California. And if you haven’t heard of it yet, that ends now.
What Is Know Other Festival?
Know Other Festival is a 4-day, 3-night queer wellness camping experience created specifically for LGBTQIA+ women, trans, nonbinary, gender-expansive, and gender-fluid identities. It is not a music festival in the traditional sense, no headliners, no VIP wristbands, no corporate sponsors quietly watering down the vibe. It is something harder to find and more valuable: a fully realized queer cultural gathering where community is the entire point.
Over four days, attendees move through more than 30 dynamic sessions led by queer facilitators and artists. Think healing practices, thought-provoking discussions, interactive art installations, and joyful celebrations that run from morning workshops into late-night themed events.
Past editions have featured Queer Field Day Games, Paint and Sip sessions, and the now-legendary “Everybody Swim” — a body-positive pool party that has become one of the festival’s most beloved traditions. The queer vendor marketplace runs throughout, offering everything from handmade art and crafts to therapeutic services and wellness products, all sourced from within the community.
Tent camping is included with attendance, meaning this is a fully immersive experience. You are not driving back to a hotel at the end of the night. You are waking up in the desert with your community.
The Founder Who Built It
Know Other Festival exists because of Yinka Freeman, a Black queer woman, immigrant from Sierra Leone, and one of the most intentional event producers working in LGBTQ+ spaces today.
Freeman’s story is extraordinary. Born in Sierra Leone, she fled the country during the civil war and grew up between multiple African countries and the United States. She built a career as a full-service event producer through her San Diego-based company Triple Pocket Events, working with organizations including San Diego Pride and ClexaCon. But the work that matters most to her is the work she does for her own community.
The festival was originally called Sum of Us, a queer wellness gathering created to give LGBTQ+ people a space to connect outside of traditional nightlife. Freeman, who had been deeply involved with the event, later acquired it and rebuilt it under its current vision and name. Her guiding belief is clear: the most impactful approach is not to retrofit queerness into existing structures, but to build new systems where queerness is foundational, not an afterthought, not a marketing angle, not a June activation. A foundation.
Freeman has also been direct about what these spaces mean politically. Queer gatherings, she has said, are not entertainment. They are critical infrastructure for visibility, safety, and collective power. In 2026, that framing hits with particular force.
Why Joshua Tree?
This year’s edition marks a significant upgrade in location, moving to Joshua Tree, and it is a choice that matters. Joshua Tree is not Palm Springs. It does not have a gayborhood or a resort strip. What it has is something quieter and more layered: a genuinely progressive small desert town that has been organically building a queer community for years. Pride flags line the windows along Route 62. Queer-owned businesses are woven into the fabric of the town. Artists, healers, and LGBTQ+ creatives have been quietly claiming the high desert as their own for over a decade.
The landscape itself, vast, dramatic, radically beautiful, is exactly the kind of setting that makes sense for a festival rooted in healing and self-expression. There is something about the desert that strips away performance and invites presence. Know Other Festival is counting on that.
Why It Matters Right Now
We are living through one of the most hostile political moments queer women have faced in recent memory. Hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ bills are moving through state legislatures. Federal protections are being stripped. The spaces where queer women have historically gathered — bars, clubs, community centers — are disappearing faster than they are being replaced.
Know Other Festival is part of a direct response to that reality. Alongside festivals like Stargaze in Massachusetts, ELLA in Mallorca, and The Dinah in Palm Springs, it represents a growing movement of queer women building their own infrastructure — on their own terms, in their own image, in the middle of the desert if necessary.
Four days. Three nights. Thirty-plus sessions. One community. Joshua Tree, April 16–19.
You didn’t know you needed this. Now you do.
