Exhibition Overview
As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston explores the relationship among community photographic practices, queer nightlife, and gay liberation in Boston. In the early 1970s, the Boston area became an important hub of gay culture, activism, 
and nightlife, and home to a flourishing scene of photography. Many queer artists and community members, such as Avram Finkelstein, Gail Thacker, and Allen Frame, among others, turned to photography to chronicle, elevate, and enrich their disparate experiences of nightlife.
As the World Burns assembles a non-chronological archive of lesser-known images, collections, and stories across three overlapping categories of nightlife photography, rarely in conversation with one another in art history or curatorial practice: (1) works by photographers involved in teaching and exhibition contexts of “fine art”; (2) works by photographers contributing to the gay press; and (3) vernacular works by other community members. This exhibition reveals that nightlife practices and photographic projects alike contributed to the production and consolidation of LGBTQ identities and communities in the public realm during a period of tremendous tumult and transformation. Coming out, going out, photographing, and being photographed were intertwined activities through which new forms of queerness and community became visible.
Queer Nightlife
Gail Thacker, Jack in Tub, 1980. Analog color print 16 x 20 inCourtesy of Candice Madey © Gail Thacker Photo: Adam Reich
Tufts Resource
After the Party by
Winner, 2019 ATHE Outstanding Book Award, given by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Winner, 2018 Errol Hill Award in African American theater, drama, and/or performance studies, presented by the American Society for Theatre Research A new manifesto for performance studies on the art of queer of color worldmaking. After the Party tells the stories of minoritarian artists who mobilize performance to produce freedom and sustain life in the face of subordination, exploitation, and annihilation. Through the exemplary work of Nina Simone, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Danh Vō, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Eiko, and Tseng Kwong Chi, and with additional appearances by Nao Bustamante, Audre Lorde, Martin Wong, Assata Shakur, and Nona Faustine, After the Party considers performance as it is produced within and against overlapping histories of US colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Building upon the thought of José Esteban Muñoz alongside prominent scholarship in queer of color critique, black studies, and Marxist aesthetic criticism, Joshua Chambers-Letson maps a portrait of performance's capacity to produce what he calls a communism of incommensurability, a practice of being together in difference. Describing performance as a rehearsal for new ways of living together, After the Party moves between slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, the first wave of the AIDS crisis, the Vietnam War, and the catastrophe-riddled horizon of the early twenty-first century to consider this worldmaking practice as it is born of the tension between freedom and its negation. With urgency and pathos, Chambers-Letson argues that it is through minoritarian performance that we keep our dead alive and with us as we struggle to survive an increasingly precarious present.
Call Number: Tisch and ebook: HQ76.25 .C425 2018
Queer Constellations by
Hardcover sales of more than 30,000 copies confirm the growing interest in perennial gardening and a natural garden style."If you want lots of helpful advice, if you want a garden that reflects nature rather than the artifice of conventional gardens, and if you want to look at some quite splendid photographs, this is the book for you." -The Scotsman
Call Number: Tisch and ebook: PN56.H57 C55 2005
Queer Nightlife by
The mass shooting at a queer Latin Night in Orlando in July 2016 sparked a public conversation about access to pleasure and selfhood within conditions of colonization, violence, and negation. Queer Nightlife joins this conversation by centering queer and trans people of color who apprehend the risky medium of the night to explore, know, and stage their bodies, genders, and sexualities in the face of systemic and social negation. The book focuses on house parties, nightclubs, and bars that offer improvisatory conditions and possibilities for "stranger intimacies," and that privilege music, dance, and sexual/gender expressions. Queer Nightlife extends the breadth of research on "everynight life" through twenty-five essays and interviews by leading scholars and artists. The book's four sections move temporally from preparing for the night (how do DJs source their sounds, what does it take to travel there, who promotes nightlife, what do people wear?); to the socialities of nightclubs (how are social dance practices introduced and taught, how is the price for sex negotiated, what styles do people adopt to feel and present as desirable?); to the staging and spectacle of the night (how do drag artists confound and celebrate gender, how are spaces designed to create the sensation of spectacularity, whose bodies become a spectacle already?); and finally, how the night continues beyond the club and after sunrise (what kinds of intimacies and gestures remain, how do we go back to the club after Orlando?).
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: GT3408 .Q84 2021
Open Access
Gay Press in Boston
Allen Frame, Kevin in polka-dotted dress, Cambridge, 1974, Gelatin silver print, Courtesy Gitterman Gallery © Allen Frame
Open Access
- Gay Community News (Publication) Collection Gay Community News began in 1973 as a local newsletter featuring a calendar of events for the GLBT community in Boston and New England. Its news coverage quickly expanded, and in a few short years, it was a national publication in both scope and readership.
- Gay Community News Photograph Collection Gay Community News was a weekly journal published in Boston from 1973 to 1992 by the Bromfield Street Educational Foundation. It was an important resource for the LGBT community, reporting a wide variety of LGBT related news.