Book launch: Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988–2003

Gay’s the Word and Book Works present Dark Room: San Francisco Sex and Protest, 1988-2003 by Phyllis Christopher. Phyllis Christopher will be in conversation with Brooke Palmieri at Gay’s the Word on Thursday 9th June. Doors open at 7pm and the event will start shortly afterwards.

This is a free event but places are limited and pre-booking is essential. If you book and then find yourself unable to attend please cancel your booking as early as possible before the event day so others can get a chance to go.

Phyllis Christopher’s photographs fuse lesbian sex and queer protest against the backdrop of a city in flux. Relocating to San Francisco from her hometown Buffalo in the late-1980s, Christopher began to collaborate with her subjects to make images in which documentary and performance converge.

Both professionally, as photo editor of On Our Backs, and in her personal life, Phyllis spent the next fifteen years documenting and celebrating her community, a community simultaneously defining radical articulations of queer lesbian sexuality and defending its bodily autonomy in the face of right-wing politics, the AIDS crisis and urban gentrification.

Reproducing photographs of startling intensity and sensuality alongside new writing by collaborators past and present, Dark Room is a heartfelt record of Christopher’s devotion to an analogue tradition, to the pleasures of photographs and the community that made them.

Please do not attend this event if you are feeling unwell or discover you have been in close contact with someone who has recently test positive for Covid.

Brooke Palmieri is a writer, printer, and educator. When they're not selling books at Gay's the Word they run Camp Books (@camp.books), a platform for widening access to gender non-conforming history, art, and activism through zines, prints, and workshops.

Phyllis Christopher is a photographer whose work documenting LGBTQ+ sexuality and protest in San Francisco has been published widely in anthologies and magazines. Recently, her photographs have been included in various exhibitions including On Our Backs: An Archive (The NewBridge Project, Newcastle, 2017), Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance (Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, Bristol, 2019) and Rebel Dykes (SpaceStation Sixty Five London, 2021). In 2021-22 her work has been the subject of two solo shows at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, and Grand Union, Birmingham. Dark Room is her first book.