Photography can act like a portal – transporting you to a space, showing you new possibilities, and preserving histories that would otherwise be lost. But it can also intrude – shining a light on moments that you would rather keep private, leaving people exposed or surveilled. 

For many queer people, this tension is perfectly captured in the photography of nightlife. Under the cover of night, queer people have created spaces in which they are the majority in a world which seeks to marginalise them, building places where they can express themselves at their most free. People have tried to capture these moments – posed in studios or with pictures snapped on iPhone and digicams – but what changes when a camera enters the room? 

In their new book, Sex Clubs Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, Amelia Abraham examines the act of photographing queer nightlife, exploring how photos have helped to preserve and celebrate queer practices, even though it has at times endangered those spaces. Featuring a mixture of photography shot by artists and found in archives, taken across the world from the 1960s to the present day, Abraham’s book curates a visual record of queer nightlife’s possibilities. 

In a conversation with Dazed, Abraham spoke about nightlife as a space of resistance, the violence that’s inextricably tied to photography’s history, and how many of our queer nightlife traditions are inherited. 

To start at the beginning, what drew you to the topic of queer nightlife? Why did you want to make this book?

Amelia Abraham: I think it comes from a deep place of personal love. Queer nightlife has had such an impact on me – finding spaces where I could meet my people and where I was exposed to other ways of doing things. A more academic interest grew over time, as I started to read about and witness shifts in social geographies around queer nightlife in London.

I wanted to make the book because I really love queer photography and I thought it was really strange that there wasn’t a survey book looking at queer nightlife photography. There are a lot of artists who have monographs and we’re starting to see more books looking at the history of queer photography, but there’s nothing that looks at the relationship between nightlife, movement building, and photography.

When I was reading Mackenzie Wark’s epigraph, one of the things that stood out to me was her saying, ‘Why make pictures of nightlife at all? Why write about it?’ Why do you think your interest went from enjoying those spaces to wanting to make a photo book?

Amelia Abraham: I think that celebrations and love letters in themselves are really important, especially in social histories and social documentation. I don’t have the best memory, so I’m really pleased when I see a photograph or see someone writing about a place that I enjoyed, because that brings all of that back in technicolour.

When you began to approach the book, how were you thinking about the word ‘nightlife’?

Amelia Abraham: I’m sure everyone has different associations with the term nightlife. To me, nightlife conjures Time Out magazine, the clubs on high streets I used to go to when I was 16. It conjures a lot of the conversations that I think that we’ve been having within the queer nightlife space over the last ten years, which have been very bound up with closures, which is important for good reason.

With this book, I wanted to slightly step away from that and open our idea of what nightlife can mean. Is it domestic spaces? The party that’s in the kitchen or the bedroom? Is it an activist march where people come together? Is it a sex club that you visit during the day? I wanted to do something to show all the different things it can be.

My guess is that when a lot of people come to the book, they’ll assume that it’s a pure-play celebration of the act of photographing nightlife, but the reality is more complex. Let's start with the positives: what are they?

Amelia Abraham: On a practical level, some of the photographers in the book were shooting for On Our Backs magazine, which was a radical dyke magazine based in San Francisco. Those magazines were sent around the country and literally attracted people to go to these cities and find their people. So, I think many of the photos in the book demonstrate possibility. Visual imagery can be really powerful in terms of reflecting back who you are, or who you might be able to become, or who you could be in communion with.

Some of the images are activist images; they’re documentations of protests. Some of the images were created out of pleasure, like Dean Sameshima’s series, which began as photos he took on his iPhone in porn cinemas so he could get off to them later. And then documentation too, which is a kind of political imperative. In the case of El Archivo De La Memoria Trans Argentina and México, these are people’s personal photos that, within the context of those archives, have been sort of re-politicised.

To offer a counterpoint to that question, where do the difficulties arise?

Amelia Abraham: There are so many and I think this is an especially relevant question now because we’re seeing this shift back to no photography rules in clubs. People can feel freer to express themselves when they’re not having their photo taken, especially if it’s someone’s first time coming to a queer club or expressing their gender authentically.

I think that for queer people, the history of photography is bound up in state surveillance. There is a version of photography’s history that's quite violent and that manifests in criminalisation, mugshots, or outings, even.

And then photography can present jeopardy to a queer space too; it can attract the wrong people. There’s such a fetishisation of queer nightlife. We know how to have fun! People see that through photography, and then they want to come and it changes the nature of the thing.

There are images in the book that date back to the 1960s. How do you think the images show how queer nightlife has evolved?

Amelia Abraham: I think something that struck me is actually that a lot of things have been happening for a long time that we don’t expect. I came across these photos of a lesbian strip club in São Paulo in 1978. Obviously, there are dyke strip nights that exist, but I’m like, ‘Where’s my local lesbian strip club?’ There’s a huge precedence for drag king culture that perhaps isn’t always acknowledged. I found so much amazing drag king imagery –  Del LaGrace Volcano’s photos, Efrain Gonzalez’s photos. I think a lot of our ideas are actually inherited and it’s beautiful to honour that.

There’s a lot of joy to be found within the photos, even though many of the people captured in the photos are vulnerable. How do you think nightlife operates as a space of resistance?

Amelia Abraham: Some of the images in the book might seem utopic but when you research that photographer, you find the story behind the image is actually one of people living in complete precarity. They’re finding a slice of intimacy within a backdrop of extraordinary violence. That, in itself, is transgressive.

There’s a perfect example in a photo taken by Susan Kravitz of the Invasion of the Pines event in Fire Island in 1989. It’s a beautiful photo of people in drag. They’re wearing pearls, but if you look more closely, you can see the Kaposi sarcoma [a complication of advanced HIV] on one of their cheeks. I don’t know how long this person in this photo lived, but they’re defiantly out having a good time anyway.

Do you have a favourite photo in the book?

Amelia Abraham: I love basically every photo, which is why they’re in the book and I’ll probably answer this question differently every time to be diplomatic. But I really love Jean-Marc Armani’s ACT UP Paris photos. There are absolutely heartbreaking photos of huge die-ins alongside intimate and beautiful domestic pictures. There’s a photo of two people on the dance floor, holding onto each other for dear life. Or another of a person with their arms in the air and everyone’s topless, and the way the spotlights fall on them gives a sense of ascendancy, which I find so poignant, given that so many of these people wouldn’t survive. 

What do you think you've learned that surprised you the most from working on the book?

Amelia Abraham: You could just work on this forever! It would have been impossible to do a photographic history, because there's just too much out there. There are so many photographers, so many lost clubs, so many hidden archives, and so many brilliant artists.

If you were going to give advice to people in a club with their phone or their camera, what would you say to them?

Amelia Abraham: It’s important to ask, does everything need to be a photo? And it’s important to think about consent. A lot of the photographers that I’ve worked with, especially the younger ones, seem to be thinking about the ethics of what gets photographed and what doesn’t. And there’s also a lot of generic queer nightlife photography out there! Look for things that really stand out. Capture worlds and histories within your images.

Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham is published by MACK and available here.