Milkshake organization comes up with new, multi-day camping festival

The organization behind the popular annual queer festival Milkshake is working on a new, multi-day camping festival. The three-day event will be called Strawberry Starlight and will not take place in Amsterdam like Milkshake. The first edition will take place in the summer of 2025, Milkshake director Marieke Samallo announced on Wednesday.

Discussions with the municipality where Strawberry Starlight will take place are well advanced, said Samallo: "We are in joyful anticipation," she summarized. "At this festival, we want to continue to explore the Milkshake feel and do things we can't do at Milkshake. A festival with day guests can feel relatively fleeting."

Samallo is exploring some venues that are "ideal. We need to make a decision in the near future," she explains." It's a festival concept I've been working on for a few years, so you have to take care of the venue choice as well."

Tickets for Strawberry Starlight will only be sold for three days, so all visitors will be on the festival site for the entire period. "It's meant to feel more than Milkshake, like a mini vacation," Samallo describes the initiative. "We really want people to have the space to relax for a while, combined with the typical Milkshake atmosphere." She hopes to be able to announce soon where and when the first edition will take place. The number of tickets for Strawberry Starlight depends on the venue, but she estimates it will be "several thousand."

The 12th edition of Milkshake takes place this weekend in Amsterdam's Westergasterrein. The festival actively conveys that visitors are allowed to be themselves, which makes it very popular in the queer community. The 18,000 tickets per day are usually sold out within half an hour.

The queer festival is an open-minded electronic dance festival that has made its mark in the city center of Amsterdam. According to the festival organizers, nine stages per day showcase (inter)national event promoters, artists, and performance artists, playing music genres such as pop, techno, house, disco, R&B, and dancehall.