“I love my gay boys, don’t get me wrong,” says photographer Tamara Schumacher, “but sometimes I don’t want to be forced into a ‘queer’ space which is overrun with men.” While the survival of any queer space is increasingly important amid growing political hostility towards LGBTQ+ communities, dedicated lesbian and FLINTA spaces have historically been far harder to come by. But in recent years, a surge of FLINTA-led parties and collectives has bloomed in Naarm (the traditional indigenous name for Melbourne), fronting what Schumacher calls a “FLINTA renaissance”.

Before that shift, she says, queer parties often meant something else entirely. “Gay men have a huge scene already – before Melbourne’s FLINTA renaissance, queer parties would just be hundreds of gay men and I’d be squished between their bare-chested muscles on a sweaty dancefloor.”

It’s this wider queer scene that the photographer has been documenting for seven years, after moving to Naarm from a smaller, more conservative city and coming into her own identity. “I was just happy to be partying in any form and the subjects of my photos were the same: young people who have just moved out of home, excited to live it up and have fun”.

But as for lesbian-specific nightlife, the options were far more limited. “There kind of wasn’t any,” she says. “A few bars have popped up, but often they shut down quickly.” Spaces like Flippy’s in Brunswick and Bernie’s Bar in Fitzroy North offered a place to meet, but not necessarily to fully lose yourself in. “Bars are great, but they can be a bit rigid socially,” says the photographer. “And who doesn’t love a dancefloor kiss with a stranger?”

In the absence of dedicated club spaces, community organisers have improvised, building nights wherever they can, from abandoned warehouses to DIY event spaces. Over the past year, parties like Dykotomy, Menace, Luna Blessings and Buba Mara have begun to create environments which the city’s FLINTA communities can call their own. “Without these collectives, our community would be far more disconnected,” she explains, listing The Pyramid, Girly Pop Party, Cater 2 U and Unicorn as part of the same growing scene.

As both a photographer and a partygoer at these events, Schumacher gets deep into the crowd: “People kissing, shaking ass, grinding, just having the best time – these are the moments I want to capture,” she explains. She points to the hallowed meeting ground of any club space, the smoking area, as the site of some of her best portraits.

In her photos, intimacy shows up in different forms – friends collapsing into groups with arms wrapped around each other, or faces caught mid-conversation. “I love a kissing photo, I have so many of them,” she says. “Three-way kisses, couples kissing, friends kissing.” Across the work, motifs of dyke culture recur: fans striped with the lesbian flag, boxers with RAIL ME across the back, patterned ties, and The L Word intro theme printed onto a T-shirt.

While it’s easy to celebrate the emergence of these spaces, keeping them going is always more difficult than it looks from the outside. Schumacher describes promoters and performers having to constantly rebuild audiences after losing access to the Meta-run platforms they rely on, which forces their events to exist through email lists, word of mouth, and trust that people will still show up. “It seems like everything is being censored right now,” she says. “It’s our duty not to let these people be silenced and to be actively engaging with the platforms and spaces where they can freely exist.”

The images sit within a long lineage of queer documentation: Schumacher is inspired by archival publications like Tiger Salmon’s Wicked Women and Phyllis Christopher's On Our Backs, for example, which captured lesbian nightlife and sexuality decades earlier. “Seeing those parties and photos from years ago was so inspiring,” she says. “It feels like they paved the way for what we’re doing now.”

She hopes that her own work will one day become a similar archive. “I want people to know that we were desperate for these spaces to be created, to express ourselves in the most authentic way, and to have silly, flirty fun,” she says. “Melbourne’s FLINTA community built these spaces from the ground up so we can have that sense of connectedness and expression.”