AMELIA ABRAHAM

Sparkling, Sweat-Soaked Dance Floors

Spyros Rennt, Menergy backs (red light), 2018. © Spyros Rennt. From Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK

BY: Sunny Sunday

Amelia Abraham admits to not having the best memory. In an interview with Dazed, the writer speaks about the power of photography for its ability to reclaim memory. In one swift stroke, it can call a person back to a night long gone; to the sparkling, sweat-soaked early hours of a dance floor enshrined with friends, strangers, or a lover. In their newest book, Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, Abraham documents history and offers a non-linear, but comprehensive, view of queer nightlife from the 60s up to the modern day in all its bliss, chaos, and rebellious nature.

Linda Simpson, Linda Simpson, Gillian, Honey Dijon, and Candis Cayne at Wigstock at the Palladium, 1995. © Linda Simpson. From Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK

Including photography from a range of contributors and archives — photographers and artists both established and lesser-known — Sex, Clubs, Dissent is primarily a photo book. Yet the work is solidified by Abraham’s journalistic background, offering essays from iconic LGBTQIA+ figures and artists who are actively shaping the culture of today.

While joy, freedom, and boundless abandon are all present throughout the works, the concept of risk emerges throughout; the threat of being seen and documented in the backlit corners of clubs where a flash can temporarily illuminate the scene, solidifying an image into permanence. One Jean-Marc Armani photograph from 1995 shows two shirtless men in a black-and-white dance floor embrace, haloed by a shimmy of blurred figures. Caught in the spotlight at the center of the frame, one man leans his head back in pleasure, his partner’s mouth pressed to his neck, a sweet history erected in their temporary gratification.

Meryl Meisler, Two Women Embrace on Floor Next to Judi Jupiter’s Legs, Les Mouches, NY, June 1978. © Meryl Meisler. From Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK

“Both the club and photography, in their respective ways, are sites of experimentation and vectors of fantasy,” says Abraham in the book’s foreword.

Throughout the book’s pages, the photographic and sexual “darkroom” conflate and merge, offering insight into the steamy, intimate queer venues of past and present. The nightlife scene is more than a party. As writer Brontez Purnell notes within the book, “This is the infinite, magical, life-saving portal that is queer nightlife; nightlife: where the cloak of darkness renders safety, or some version of it. The regular world sleeps, and we emerge nocturnally, safe from the eyes of the everyday world, to go to our shrines.”