Photos by @morganemaurice (dinner) and @duross (party)

The model and activist Munroe Bergdorf joined forces with London's chicest IYKYK party Queer Frequencies to mark her birthday surrounded by friends, chosen family and a glittering array of London’s queer community (with a sickening dress code). For Munroe, though, the night was about something bigger: choosing joy when the world gives you plenty of reasons not to.

Munroe Bergdorf has always used her voice, even when speaking out has come with a cost, standing up for trans people while refusing to make herself smaller or more palatable in the process. But as well as fighting the good fight, Munroe has spent her career lavishing us with beauty, friendship, glamour and fun in everything she’s done. It’s fitting then that her birthday was a huge celebration of all these things. An intimate dinner with guests including Olly Alexander, Jodie Harsh, Shon Faye, Maxine Heron and Benny Cooper who organise Queer Frequencies, Hannah Jones, Tayce and others, followed by an exclusive party.

“I grew up quite isolated. I didn't have a lot of friends, so I got really used to not celebrating my birthday,” she told GAY TIMES the day before her party. “I kept it really small just with family, and I really just brought that through into my young adulthood.”

But Bergdorf’s relationship with getting older has changed as she’s fully inhabited herself. Along the way there has been loss, but also friendship, experience and the realisation that “You can't wait for the world to get better, 'cause there's always gonna be something,” she said. “Even though so much is changing for the worse in the world, there's so many incredible experiences that I get to have every single year, and new people I'm meeting.”

The love in the room for Munroe was palpable.

“I truly believe that my friends are the most incredible part of my life,” she said. “Birthdays are as much an opportunity for other people to celebrate you as much as you can celebrate yourself. And that almost just ties a little bow up on the year.”

For Bergdorf, choosing to say fuck it and enjoy yourself can carry its own political weight too.

“No matter how difficult it is, I think the conscious choice to celebrate your life is… like a defiance of… giving in to anything that has been an obstacle.”

That spirit ran through the birthday party itself, which Bergdorf threw with Queer Frequencies at Nikita in Mayfair for a one-night-only celebration.

“One of the best feelings is when there's a lot of trans women in the room,” she said. “When I first transitioned there wasn't such a visible community as there is now.”

“One of the best feelings is when there's a lot of trans women in the room,”

“It's the feeling of freedom that I really can't actually put into words. It feels really special… to be able to look around the room and feel reflected back at yourself.”

That reflection doesn’t mean sameness. “There's so many different ways to be trans and to be a trans woman,” Bergdorf said. “But it feels like there's a definite commonality there.”

Nightlife has historically offered queer and trans people exactly these kinds of moments: a space to find each other, see each other and temporarily construct the world we would quite like to live in outside the club too.

“I wanted this party to feel like a place where everyone can just go and feel free and have fun,” Bergdorf said. She pointed too to the importance of a trans community that is visible to itself.

“I wanted this party to feel like a place where everyone can just go and feel free and have fun,”

“The fact that we have such a visible community to each other, not just visible within the media, but that we can congregate in these ways,” she said, was something worth holding onto. So too was London Trans+ Pride, which Bergdorf described as a“really, really big” cause for celebration.

None of which meant anyone was excused from serving a look.

The dress code was terrifying: the most glamorous you have ever looked in your entire life.

Thankfully, Bergdorf’s definition of glamour was expansive.

“Glamour is subjective,” she said. “You can be camp and glamorous, you can be kitsch and glamorous, you can be sexy and glamorous, you can be butch and glamorous. You can be all kinds of things, all kinds of people.”

“You can be camp and glamorous, you can be kitsch and glamorous, you can be sexy and glamorous, you can be butch and glamorous. You can be all kinds of things, all kinds of people.”Beauty, on the other hand?

“Beauty can be quite boring.”

For Bergdorf, glamour was about something more active: “A glamorous person shows effort and a self-awareness.” Ultimately, she said, “glamour is like a universal language that is fun.”

And the birthday girl naturally set her own benchmark rather high, with an incredible Atsuko Kudo latex outfit. Stunning!

The guest list was curated according to a similarly exacting philosophy. Celebrity mattered far less than energy.

“Good vibes,” Bergdorf said when asked for her secret to a great party. “I don't want anybody feeling uncomfortable, so people that are nice. I want everyone to just have a great time.”

More importantly, guests needed to understand that showing up was only half the job.

“You don't just attend a party, you should be the party,” she said. “Fun doesn't just happen. It's not something that you just consume. I feel like fun is something that we make.”

And when is it time to call it a night?

“Don't wait for the lights to come on,” she advised. “It's very unchic.”

Her general rule is “Nothing good happens after 2:00 AM...But sometimes nothing good is fun.”