Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife

This vivid history of queer nightlife unfolds through photographic works and essays exploring how image-making has both fostered and jeopardised the formation of queer practices and subcultures.

Sex, Clubs, Dissent charts an expansive visual history of queer nightlife through the lens of photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Edited by author Amelia Abraham, the book explores how image-making has fostered, and at times jeopardised, the formation of queer practices, subcultures, and forms of resistance. It asks what our decades-long quest to catalogue and understand nightlife spaces through photography and film can tell us about our various relationships with them, and how photography intersects with pleasure, politics, and protest.

 

As much as an assertion that ‘we were here’, images of queer nightlife – real or otherwise – can be erotic, amusing, alienating, violent, or exuberantly joyful, moving us to seek out our own dancefloor, strip club, or sauna. Rather than a comprehensive catalogue or chronology of queer nightlife, Sex, Clubs, Dissent is a love letter to those who went out and stayed out, felt the urge to document or reflect what was happening, or who have used their artmaking to dream new modes of being into existence.

 

With essays and conversations by Amelia Abraham, Brontez Purnell, McKenzie Wark, Rene Matić and Ajamu X, Jack Parlett, Tavia Nyong’o, Adam Zmith, Sita Balani and Sunil Gupta, Ariel Goldberg, Sweatmother, Asa Seresin, and Legacy Russell and Tourmaline