Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife
Amelia Abraham
MACK
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.
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
Paperback with die-cut cover
24 x 28 cm, 284 pages
ISBN 978-1-917651-52-3
May 2026
€65 £50 US$65 AU$115
‘The book isn’t didactic, nor does it present the images as canonical (although many are iconic); it simply celebrates queer nightlife as a space for experimentation where ways of loving and living are enacted fully.’ Frieze
‘A thrillingly unsanitised new photo book captures the liberating power of queer clubs in all their sexy, messy, kinky, cacophonous glory.’ The Guardian
‘A chronicle, study and love letter to queer clubbing and its lore’ Vogue
‘Sex, Clubs, Dissent is less interested in producing a definitive history than assembling an archive of possibility.’ AnOther
‘From the dancefloor to the afters, this hedonistic book is an unfiltered photographic history of queer nightlife’ It’s Nice That
‘The photos revel in the expansive textures and temporality of a night out—from the frisson of communal ecstasy to the intimate prelude of getting ready. From the sauna to the drag show to the campground, they are a paean to the scrappy yet sexy art of queer place-making and its tenacity against all odds.’ Cultured
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