Author Description

Dark Room is a rare collection of lesbian erotic and protest photographs taken by Phyllis Christopher during the period of her life spent living in San Francisco. This explosive and tender body of work connects struggles for lesbian visibility, sex positivity, and bodily autonomy to expressions of gender subversion and queer community. At the height of the AIDS crisis in the United States, amid mainstream censorship and misinformation about sex, Christopher captured a countercultural insistence on the politics of pleasure, a community fighting for sexual and artistic freedoms in both public and intimate settings. The book brings together fifteen years of Christopher's work.