In 1989, New York artist and photographer Nan Goldin organised a seminal group show at Artist Space in response to the AIDS crisis, called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing. David Wojnarowicz, Greer Lankton and Peter Hujar were among th artists whose work embodied a tense rage against state indifference and against death itself. The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP) became a flag around which artists, activists and the LGBTQ+ communities at large rallied. And it was into this febrile scene that Alice O’Malley became immersed in the 1990’s, not only documenting the events but eventually singling out some of the characters for portraits. It is for these stately, dignified images that O’Malley has become most well known, tracing the lineage through the Lower East Side. Alice and Nan had subjects in common, namely Joey Gabriel and Chloe Dzubilo but their practices were poles apart. `And what of those early years - the protests and the clubs? I asked Alice to tell me more.

John Marchant: You’re known primarily for your large format studio portraits, but this portfolio  is documentary and juxtaposes two stories from early 90’s New York - on the streets with ACT UP and behind the scenes at the Clit Club, a legendary lesbian nightclub in the Meatpacking District. 

Alice O’Malley: That was a very intense time in the city. When I arrived in 1991, it was still the height of the AIDS epidemic, the period just before drug cocktails. There were funerals all the time. Our friends were dying, one after the other, and they were young. ACT UP was the main organising body; every week we took to the streets for protests, die-ins, civil disobedience. We were making demands on the government, the drug companies, Wall Street…and basically trying to wake everyone the fuck up!

JM: The photograph titled Chloe, ACT UP Die-In, New York City, c1994 was part of the 2016 Bronx Museum of the Arts exhibition Art AIDS America. It’s a remarkable portrait of Chloe Dzubilo. Can you talk about her?

AO: Chloe was an AIDS activist, a visual artist, the lead singer of a punk band and an equestrian. She had had HIV for 28 years when she died. She organised around housing, trans-sensitivity training in hospitals, prisoner rights, needle exchange and horses. The photo is from the early 90’s. We’re at an ACT UP ‘Die-In’ - we were lying on the street during rush hour, disrupting business as usual. Chloe’s make up is perfect and her hair is newly bleached. She embodied that true queer aesthetic that serves over-the-top glamour even in the most dire of times. 

JM: In the introduction to your book Community of Elsewheres, Lia Gangitano writes about ‘a new  political imperative on the part of artists who, in the wake of so much death, wanted a future’.

AO: Yes, and our future was very much in the present. A bunch of us lived in a loft in Tribeca, under the auspices of a ‘comic book company’. Because it was a commercial lease, the heat went off at 5pm. There was a wood stove in the centre of the space. On winter nights we burned trash and furniture we collected off the street. There were small rooms built around the perimeter, connected by crawl spaces like a rabbit warren. And it was all happening: there would be a film shoot, then an ACT UP committee meeting, and a big party on the roof on the same night. It was a nexus of queer activism. JM (aka Jocelyn Taylor) was my loft mate and one of the original producers of the Clit Club, and she gave me a job checking coats. Occasionally I brought a 35mm camera and high-speed black and white film to work. My job was to stay with the coats, so my range was limited to a back corridor in the basement. I later found out there was a ‘no ‘photography’ rule, which explains why these images are among the few archives from that time and place. 

JM: Let’s talk about the Clit Club.

AO: The Clit Club was a notorious lesbian club in the Meatpacking District in the early 90’s. It was a different kind of party, for one because it was produced by women of colour, and because it was sex positive. There were go-go dancers on the bar, X-rated videos playing downstairs, leather dykes, high femmes and women dressed to go out. It was the era of lesbian chic. Toni C., one of Whitney Houston’s songwriters, was the house DJ. Madonna was there, too. There was a lot of cross-pollination between gay women and men during that time, which also gave queer nightlife a new spin. We left the club at 4am and passed butchers in aprons unloading whole pigs on hooks, from refrigerated trucks, on our way to breakfast at Florent. People went to after hours clubs. Trans sex workers crossed paths at the bagel shop on 14th Street. It was a different city. 

JM: One of the photographs in this collection is of the performance artist Diane Torr, who died this summer in Glasgow. What can you tell us about her?

AO: I’ve been thinking a lot about Diane because she died recently. This photo is from the Drag King Ball at Roseland in 1996. It was a competition along the lines of the drag queen balls of Harlem. Diane was the Master of Ceremonies, and she crowned ‘Dred’ as the reigning king that night.