Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife

Sex, Clubs, Dissent charts a vivid history of Queer nightlife and the photographers, artists, and filmmakers who dreamed it into being. Edited by celebrated author Amelia Abraham, the book explores how imagemaking has fostered, and at times jeopardised, the formation of Queer practices, subcultures, and forms of resistance. It asks what our decadeslong quest to catalogue and understand nightlife spaces through photography and film can tell us about our various relationships with them. 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 chronology of Queer nightlife itself, this book is a dive into its visual history, exploring how photography intersects with pleasure, possibility, politics, and protest. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate how Queer spaces have been sites for sex, sociality, and resistance. Above all, it is a love letter to those who went out and stayed out, those who felt the urge to document or reflect what was happening, even if they didn't know why.

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