While its current pop cultural airtime might suggest it, queer clubbing isn’t experiencing a renaissance, exactly. For as long as sound systems, low-lit rooms and, well, queer people have existed, the club has served as a refuge; a sanctuary from a hostile world, a site of creative resistance and (often self) invention that has shaped the world at large.
Even over the past two years, there are almost too many examples to my point. Era-defining musical outputs from Charli XCX, Troye Sivan, and FKA twigs (and soon, from mother Madonna herself); fashion collections from brands from GmbH and Oscar Ouyang to Seán McGirr’s McQueen and even Emilia Wickstead (whose spring 2026 collection drew upon the style of gay patron saint/sinner Robert Mapplethorpe); and just this week, Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid, which received a feverish reception at Cannes Film Festival.
Creatively impressive as these examples are, and important as their presence at the forefront of culture is, most seem to stop short at the aestheticization of queer club culture—similar to how fetish culture has been popularized, too, in my opinion. Few mainstream representations really get under the skin of these spaces, predicating on telephone-game conveyances of hedonistic substance use, the carnal writhe of bodies caught in strobes, and the shock appeal of what goes down in a darkroom.
Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife—a new anthology of archival photography and commissioned texts—bucks that trend, faithfully encapsulating “the essence of queer nightlife [and] the innovative ways queer photographers have chosen to document it,” according to its author, Amelia Abraham, a London-based writer, editor, and queer dance floor regular. A chronicle, study, and love letter to queer clubbing and its lore—seen through the eyes of creatives who have committed significant parts of their lives to it—the book comprises an intentionally “quite porous or slippery” dialogue between word and image, from Asa Seresin’s sparkling essay on the spatial contingencies of sexual identity to a Wolfgang Tillmans image of a rat going into a drain. “I have no idea if this was taken in a queer nightlife context, but the metaphor amused me!”
“I think the obvious way to do this book would have been lots of photos on dance floors. Those are in there, but there are photos of daylight in the book and also photos of domesticity—nightlife isn’t just about being ‘out’—it’s the before and the after, the getting ready, the time you never make it to the club because you’re having too much fun at home, or you can’t afford or be bothered to go out in the end,” Abraham says. “It’s the kiss outside the club or the person you unexpectedly wake up with. I wanted the book to encompass all of that.”
What you’ll take from the book will hinge on your relationship to its subject matter—after all, queer nightlife is, in itself, an embodied, sensorial vignette of life at its most voluptuous, emotionally heightened, and progressive. A particularly salient line of commentary that runs through its pages, though, is less about how integral style is to queer night culture, but how integral queer club style has been to style—nay, fashion!—culture at large. Just think of the influence that movements like ballroom, or figures like Leigh Bowery, have played in the development of fashion’s contemporary vernacular. So many of them find a home alongside one another in Sex, Clubs, Dissent’s pages, which, below, Abraham unpacks in all their grit, intimacy, and glorious style.
Bernice Mulenga, Priince & Majeesty, 2021. © Bernice Mulenga. From Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham (MACK, 2026). Courtesy of the artist and MACK.
#Queer #Clubbing #Shaped #Fashion
