In Market Street Cinema, photographer Leon Mostovoy presents an unflinching, intimate chronicle of a radical moment in 1980s San Francisco—a time when queer identity, feminist theory, and sex work collided on the neon-lit stage of a now-shuttered adult theater. Rooted in the gay and lesbian underground, these images captures a lesser-known facet of American LGBTQ history, foregrounding a community of young, sex-positive lesbian feminists who defied both patriarchal norms and the moral rigidity of second-wave feminism.
These women—dancers, performers, and sex workers—saw bodily autonomy not as contradiction, but as revolution. Through erotic labor and self-stylized performance, they reclaimed power, capital, and narrative. In one haunting image, a dancer wears a shirt emblazoned with Margaret Thatcher's face, overlaid by the punk slogan: WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES—a subversive convergence of feminist critique and street-level resistance.
Mostovoy's camera is not voyeuristic but reverent. "This series is particularly dear to my heart," he writes. "These women were friends. We shared love and life together—hard, dirty, brilliant, punk rock, fierce." Market Street Cinema is both archive and elegy, a tribute to women who, in Mostovoy's words, "forged new ground and turned patriarchy on its ear."
More than a document, the work reframes how we view sex, agency, and the margins of power—challenging the erasures of queer and feminist history alike.
Leon Mostovoy is a transsexual artist who has been creating on the front lines of the queer and political art movements for decades. Formerly Tracy, Mostovoy started his queer art career producing erotic images for On Our Backs magazine in the early 1980s. Mostovoy's most recent projects explore transgender identity, transformation, sexuality, and gender roles in contemporary U.S. society.
Annie Sprinkle has been making and disseminating all manner of media about sex for almost five decades, doing photography, writing books, filmmaking, performance art, theater, and visual art.
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