Daniel Sanders

Around the world there has been an increasing pressure on LGBTQ+ venues to shut their doors, such as gay bars, sex stores, cruise clubs and community centres. Amongst many reasons, this increasing pressure is due to cuts in governmental funding, rising rents and a cultural sterilising consequential of gentrification processes. As a gay sex worker in Tāmaki Makaurau, I have witnessed similar tensions and devastating, destructive and demoralising consequences that new urban developments have had on LGBTQ+ venues and cultures. Recognising this global crisis for LGBTQ+ people and cultures, my work seeks to document how LGBTQ+ cultures are responding to these changes through recording my personal experiences and interaction with them. From the fossils and ruins of a nostalgic sexual liberation and ideas of radical love, to the fetishistic dreams that wish to carve out a queer future but are subsumed by colonial homonationalism, my work sifts through LGBTQ+ cultures and all their contradictory dreams and catastrophes in pursuit of what queerness means today.