MACK Cinema Club: Cruising with Amelia Abraham and Asa Seresin

MACK Cinema Club presents Cruising (1980) directed by WIlliam Friedkin, starring Al Pacino, to celebrate the publication of Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham.

As Abraham writes in the book: ‘When Cruising hit cinemas – a thriller in which Pacino plays a cop hunting a serial killer targeting gay men – protestors boycotted the film’s release, lambasting its representation of gay men as deviant or dangerous.’ However, with time and reappraisal, the film has ‘now come to visually symbolise the nightlife of the Meatpacking District at the time’.

Amelia Abraham will be joined in conversation by writer Asa Seresin to discuss the film’s changing place in queer cinema history. 

Tickets HERE

Wednesday 27 May
18:45 

Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall, London
SW1Y 5AH
United Kingdom

More about Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife

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 jeopardised, 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.

Can't make it? Order a copy here.