Market Street Cinema is rooted in the 80s’ San Francisco gay community at a time when old school lesbian feminists were pitting themselves against the young and sex positive lesbians who felt public flaunting of their raw sex was an expression of their feminism. Young lesbians saw working in the sex industry as a vehicle for accessing and addressing power, control and capital through the liberation and control of their own bodies and sexuality (one uncanny photograph features a t-shirt printed with Thatcher’s face overlain by the rioted statement ‘WE ARE ALL PROSTITUTES’).
Mostovoy hails them as women who ‘forged new ground and turned patriarchy on its ear’; these women were truly radical at a time still fraught with suppression for women and gays. Market Street Cinema is an unknown chapter of American LGBQT history.
Mostovoy’s work stands as a tribute to the women photographed, to the sex positive lesbian feminists he so well knew and admired. ‘This series is particularly dear to my heart as these women were friends and we shared love and life together’, he said, ‘hard, dirty, brilliant, punk rock, fierce’.
Links
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The Guardian
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