Clit Club

House of Color (Robert Garcia, Wellington Love, Robert Mignott, Jeff Nunokawa, Pamela Sneed, Jocelyn Taylor, Julie Tolentino), I Object, video, 5min., 1990
Nguyen Tan Hoang, Maybe Never (But I’m Counting the Days), video, 15min., 1996

The Clit Club was a “floating” queer and sex-positive lesbian nightclub held in NYC that promoted safe sex and existed as an intergenerational, multi-racial, and mixed class venue for women. The party was founded by Julie Tolentino and Jocelyn Taylor in 1990 and ran until 2002.

Revisiting the Clit Club is an opportunity to reflect on the intense labor, love, relations, and creations that came out of years of showing up together publicly and privately, interpersonally and politically.

On this evening, attendees will have the opportunity to engage with an interactive display of ephemera, a film screening, discussion, and to activate records of memory and current reflections surrounding the twelve year running party, community, and force known as the Clit Club. The film screening component of the program consists of three works chosen by the curators to express their sentiments towards the Clit Club as a means to explore the historical, cultural, and aesthetic modes of queer desire, sexuality, and connection.

I Object by House of Color, an ACT-UP affinity group consisting of Robert Garcia, Wellington Love, Robert Mignott, Jeff Nunokawa, Pamela Sneed, Jocelyn Taylor, Julie Tolentino is a forceful objection to the exclusion of images of people of color in the media via the powerful embracement of connection and desire shared amongst each other.

Nguyen Tan Hoang’s video Maybe Never (But I'm Counting the Days) centers queer Asian American sexuality, pop culture, and the experiences of growing up in the age of AIDS. Through a litany of "I've never…" voice-overs played over a soundtrack of pop love songs and subsequent shots of condoms and gloved hands, Maybe Never offers a playful, campy, and poignant view into how queer sexuality and erotic desire become transferred through time and generations.

Since its establishment in 2001, Participant Inc. has been a long-standing alternative artist space that has centered collaboration amongst visual artists, curators, and writers to develop ambitious and transgressive projects. Once occupied by the gay S&M Club, El Mirage (1999-2006), the gallery’s current site upholds generations of social and cultural history as a continued thriving artist space in the Lower East Side.

Curators: Leeroy Kun Young Kang + Vivian Crockett