Book Event—Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife with Amelia Abraham and Linda Simpson

Journalist and editor Amelia Abraham is joined in conversation with artist Linda Simpson to celebrate the release of Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, Abraham’s latest editorial project during a special late night at ICP. Abraham and Simpson will be signing select titles following the conversation,

This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and include access to ICP’s galleries.

Image: Kary Kwok, Alternative Miss World, London, 1995. ©  Kary Kwok. From Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham (MACK, 2026). Courtesy  of the artist and MACK

About the Book

This vivid history of queer nightlife unfolds through photographic works and essays exploring how image-making has both fostered and jeopardized the formation of queer practices and subcultures.

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 jeopardized, 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.

As much as an assertion that ‘we were here’, images of queer nightlife – real or otherwise – can be erotic, amusing, alienating, violent, or exuberantly joyful, moving us to seek out our own dancefloor, strip club, or sauna. Rather than a comprehensive catalogue or chronology of queer nightlife, Sex, Clubs, Dissent is a love letter to those who went out and stayed out, felt the urge to document or reflect what was happening, or who have used their artmaking to dream new modes of being into existence.

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

About the Speakers

Amelia Abraham is a journalist, editor and author from London. She has written several books, including Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ+ Culture and she writes regularly for The Guardian, The Observer, Dazed and other titles on queer arts, culture and politics. She is the editor of Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife, a photography survey book bringing together the work of over 85 photographers and artists in and around queer nightlife, including Linda Simpson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sunil Gupta, Lola Flash, and many more. 

Since emerging from NYC’s East Village drag scene in the late 1980s, Linda Simpson has been a multi-faceted drag queen as a nightlife promoter, journalist, playwright, actress, game-show hostess and publisher of the underground gay magazine My Comrade. Her photos from her formative drag years in the 1980s and ‘90s have been featured in books, magazines, art exhibits and documentaries, as well as in her acclaimed touring slideshow and photo book, both titled The Drag Explosion

Header Image: 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