[Photography World 01] Chloe Sherman: “Gender experimentation was central to our lives”
“I moved to San Francisco in my early 20s and fell in love with it: the vibe, the ocean, the hills. It’s a big city on small terrain and feels like nowhere else. But it also gave me access to something I longed for: a diverse, vibrant and radical queer community. It was shocking how many people made up the queer scene in San Francisco in the 1990s, which is when this image was taken. It all felt so fast; there was so much going on. I would walk out of the house and immediately run into people I knew. On any given night of the week, there was a club night, event or show that people would be at – often more than one.
We lived in tight circles of friends but our extended networks were vast and constantly overlapping. People moved in and out of your life; you drifted apart and you came together again. Our lives revolved around the Mission District, a predominantly Latin neighbourhood in the heart of the city.
This was a time when a queer community couldn’t be located easily online. To find people like you, you moved to cities like San Francisco. It’s easy to see, in retrospect, that this was a turning point for LGBTQ+ rights: it was long before marriage equality, but I think we were aware, even at the time, that we were part of a broad cultural shift. The world we lived in was a pretty radical counterculture: experimentation in terms of sexuality and gender was central to our lives, and we were not embraced by the outside world.”
Source: www.chloeshermanphotography.com/