Surveying community and resistance in LGBTQ+ nightlife
- Text by Miss Rosen
- Photography by Various. See Captions.
Sex, Clubs Dissent — A new book collates queer nightlife photography over the past 50 years, and the people who found refuge and safe spaces after dark.
For over a century, queer nightlife thrived in the margins of society, driven underground by the criminalisation of sexuality and genders beyond the binary. Here in bars, clubs, ballrooms, warehouses, bathhouses, dungeons, cruising grounds, and strolls where sex is sold, generations have come together as an act of love and resistance against a world that shunned them. In those clandestine spaces, queer culture took root, becoming the lingua franca of music, style, beauty, glamour, and attitude – to say nothing of political activism and mutual aid that has saved lives and changed laws.
Progress, however, can be a double-edged sword with the price of conditional freedom being cultural appropriation by a mainstream all too willing to erase the source. Ballroom colloquialisms like ‘the tea’, ‘kiki’, ‘shade’, ‘slay’, ‘reading’, ‘gagging’, and ‘giving’ are often mislabelled as ‘gen Z slang’ while contemporary and historic Black, brown and LGBTQ+ creators are paid dust.
“There’s an acceleration of ubiquitous hyper capitalism and absorption of queer culture,” says author Amelia Abraham, on the phone from the streets of London. She’s just had a pop into The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop, where her latest book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife (MACK), is set among the new arrivals. The book’s red cover beckons with a keyhole glimpse of unbridled amour, revealed to be Meryl Meisler’s photograph of two women on the floor of Les Mouches, a members-only queer nightclub on Manhattan’s west side in the late 1970s. It’s a delectable promise of things to come.
In Sex, Clubs, Dissent, Abraham explores the intersections of community, creativity, desire, and liberation, spotlighting the originators and innovators who blazed their own paths over half a century. Bringing together the work of artists including David Wojnarowicz, Sunil Gupta, Mariette Pathy Allen, Bruce LaBruce, Reynaldo Rivera, Linda Simpson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Clifford Prince King, and Chloe Sherman, the book is a panoramic landscape of the power and pride that’s only found when the night comes alive.
Although Abraham started clubbing as a teen, it wasn’t until she discovered The Joiners Arms at the age of 21 that she finally had a place to call her own. “It was really chaotic. The floor was sticky with beer, the toilets were flooded, and it felt lawless and exciting to me,” she remembers fondly of the fabled Shoreditch dive bar. “It was loads of people from different subcultures coming together, a real melting pot, like the 60-year-old trans matriarch Stephanie, who always sat at the bar. It was one of the first places where I really fell in love with queer nightlife.”
Drawn to the intergenerational aspect of Joiners, Abraham struck up a friendship with photographer Jeffrey Hinton, whose portrait of dancer Michael Clark, appears in the book. “Jeff is in his 60s and I’ve had the pleasure of hearing his stories about the nightlife that came before,” she says. “He has the same kind of attitude that Joiners had, which is quite DIY, egalitarian, and messy. That’s what we’re talking about with the word ‘dissent’ – a kind of disorderliness. Fuck it! Just do it – and do it for the love of it!”
It is this ethos that Abraham brings to the book, crafting a tour de force that is as much a photographic history as it is a family album, particularly in light of the criminalisation of queer sexuality around the globe. “The Gay Rights Movement started with visibility. Before that, the camera was dangerous,” she says. “Photographers from that time talk about how they couldn’t show their photos because someone might lose their job or their family. And that’s true for now for certain people.”
Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife (2026) by Amelia Abraham published by MACK. It will have its US launch on September 8, 2026, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York.
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