Homotopia Festival 2026 is officially live, and the full programme is here. This year, We Come Together is an invitation. Are you ready?
To gather around a stage. To fill the dance floor. To join a workshop. To sing with others. To discover a new artist. To celebrate Queer brilliance. To remember our histories and imagine new futures together.
From 17th October to 1st December 2026, Homotopia Festival returns to Liverpool with a programme of performance, visual art, film, music, workshops, conversation, club culture and collective joy. As the UK’s longest-running LGBTQIA+ arts and culture festival, Homotopia has spent more than twenty years championing courageous artists and creating spaces where Queer stories can flourish. We Come Together continues that work: celebrating the artists and communities who paved the way, while making space for new voices, new ideas and the next generation of Queer creativity.
A festival built around coming together. The 2026 festival begins with a landmark celebration of Liverpool’s Queer creative history, as House of Suarez marks its 20th anniversary with a special Runway event on Saturday 17th October. From there, the programme moves across theatre, live art, comedy, film, club nights, workshops, conversations and community-led events. On Saturday 7 November, Thick & Tight bring Natural Behaviour as part of the festival launch celebrations, alongside an evening programme that also includes Queer Cxntry Burnin’ Daylight, an LGBTQIA+ country music club night from PINK SUITS.
Later in the festival, Young Homotopia and QueerCore come together for a special showcase, creating space for emerging LGBTQIA+ artists and young creatives to share their work. We can’t wait to see QueerCore alumni Stephanie Trujillo and Harry Garner’s exhibition, Tender from Thursday November 19th, and visit an immersive exhibition by local artist Kiya Major, another QueerCore alumni member.
The programme continues with work spanning performance, film, workshops, club culture and conversation, including Raising the Wreck, a Sea-Change Theatre Company production accompanied by a workshop; All The Devils Kink Drawing Workshop, inviting audiences to get creative (and kinky!) through drawing and zine-making; and First Take 40 … And Queer!, celebrating four decades of First Take through film.
Elsewhere, Fag Packet’s DYKE Systems Ltd serves up an anarchic cocktail of comedy and physical theatre, taking aim at pyramid schemes, heteronormativity and corporate feminism through a gloriously queer 1990s corporate fever dream. Congregation by Fatt Butcher brings performance together with a community choir; comedian Kim Blythe brings the laughs; and Unity Scratch Night creates space for work in development and emerging ideas. The incredible No Funny Business, present Wasters – a gloriously chaotic collision of clown, character and comedy on the 13th November – not to be missed!
Later in the festival, EAT ME presents HORRIBLE HERSTORIES, a filthy night of drag, cabaret and ancient gossip that dives into Liverpool’s Queer past – with all the gaggy bits left in. Expect forgotten histories, bawdy singalongs, games, DJs and some of the North West’s finest kings, queens and things. A special Homotopia edition of Sonic Yootha also joins the programme, alongside many more incredible events, screenings, workshops and gatherings to get stuck into.
We Come Together concludes as it began: in community. On Tuesday 1st December, we gather at Liverpool Parish Church to mark World AIDS Day with a vigil – a moment to remember those we have lost, honour those living with HIV today, and reflect together. A poignant and fitting close to a festival centred on the power of gathering, connection and collective care.
At the heart of We Come Together is a simple idea: coming together does not mean being the same. It means making space for one another. It means sharing ideas, celebrating difference, finding common ground and recognising that Queer culture has always been built collectively.
Across the festival, audiences can encounter fearless new work, communities preserving Queer histories through archives and storytelling, young people finding their creative voice through Young Homotopia, and artists creating the culture that will carry us into the future. Every performance, conversation, workshop, screening and gathering becomes part of something bigger: a vibrant, evolving artistic community shaped by artists and audiences alike.
Since 2004, Homotopia has supported artists from Liverpool City Region and around the world to tell stories that deserve to be seen, commissioning public artworks, nurturing emerging talent and creating opportunities for LGBTQIA+ communities to connect through creativity. The festival is where those threads come together. It is where established artists share space with emerging voices. Where local stories sit alongside wider perspectives. Where audiences do not simply watch, but participate, question, celebrate and create something new together.
Homotopia Festival 2026: We Come Together 17th October – 1st December 2026 in venues across Liverpool.
Explore the full programme, book tickets and come together with us this autumn.
