I was out in undergrad and everything, but I didn’t have a community and I hadn’t found a place yet. Gwen Shockey: The project came to be while I was in graduate school, and I was thinking about queer space and the space of the bar. Hyperallergic: What first inspired you to begin your project in mapping out sites of lesbian bars in the Addresses Project (2015 – ongoing)? Gwen Shockey, “Henrietta Hudson” from the Addresses Project This suggests that nightlife spaces are adapting to more fluid definitions of queerness. To be sure, while the lesbian-specific bar has diminished, new all-encompassing and intersectional queer events and spaces such as No Bar in the East Village have opened. Relying on storytelling and word-of-mouth, Shockey creates a counter-archive by mapping these sites that were hidden from law enforcement and thrived covertly from the general public. The photographs reinforce the vivid and often sensory memories from people who frequented these spaces, arguing for the significance of remembering them. The photographs enable us to glimpse ghostly presences.” To this point, Shockey’s Addresses Project similarly encapsulates the past through the dissonance of photographing spaces as they are today, having been transformed into something else. They speak to the problem of absent archives, by cultivating a capacity to see things that don’t seem to be there.
During a panel discussion called Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts, at California College of the Arts on September 28, 2012, Cvetkovich described, “Leonard has suggested that the photographs document how losses from AIDS reconfigured the city. Gwen Shockey’s photographic prints of buildings that once hosted lesbian nightlife in Addresses Project recalls Zoe Leonard’s Analogue (1998 – 2009), which archived disappearing storefronts and remnants of urban life in different New York City neighborhoods - notably the Lower East Side. These anecdotes call to attention the formative role of nightlife spaces in shaping and strengthening LGBTQ identity, and how it continues to be a fecund site for activism, resistance, and expression. Shockey’s thoughtful research on nightlife heavily centers on oral histories garnered through dozens of interviews with the generation of lesbian and queer-identified community leaders who organized and experienced these spaces, dating as far back to the 1950s and through the gay liberation movement.
Addresses Project takes on multiple forms, including photographic prints, a library of oral history interviews conducted by Shockey, and a comprehensive online map of the ghosts of New York’s queer past. On October 5, 2018, I spoke with artist Gwen Shockey at her studio in Prospect Heights about documenting and archiving lesbian and queer nightlife, and tracing the sites of past and present lesbian and queer bars in New York City in her continuously expanding Addresses Project (2015 – ongoing). Gwen Shockey, “Sahara” from the Addresses Project (all images courtesy of Gwen Shockey)