The Girls: Capturing Queer Nightlife in 2010-2013 NYC by Bex Wade

Before social media shaped cultural narratives, NYC’s queer nightlife thrived in spaces like Bloody Mary, a legendary club night hosted by Susanne Bartsch and Amanda Lepore. This exhibition, I Know Who I Am By Being With You, features six images taken at Bloody Mary, including The Girls and Menswear, capturing radical self-expression and creativity.

Photographer Bex Wade documented these nights before influencer culture, when nightlife was about living in the moment. These images serve as a testament to a time when queer spaces were sanctuaries of freedom, existing before same-sex marriage was legalized in NY (2011) and before gender diversity became a political battleground.

More than just parties, nights like Bloody Mary were acts of self-expression and resistance. The photographs in this exhibition reflect a time when club kids, underground artists, and fashion icons gathered to celebrate individuality. Visitors are invited to consider how queer nightlife shaped culture then—and how its echoes still influence art, fashion, and identity today.

Bex Wade (they/them) is a UK-based trans non-binary artist and photographer. Wade documents queer lives with a focus on power, complexity and defiance, capturing moments of joy, rage, communion and resistance. Their practice builds an archive of contemporary queer experience that insists on visibility, survival and self-determination.

Wade's work seeks to challenge dominant narratives of gender and identity, explicitly highlighting how queer people reshape their worlds. Their images resist the assumptions of cis-heteronormativity, offering a vision of multiplicity, kinship and refusal. Their current focus is documenting overlooked queer narratives, centering trans lives and communities who are marginalised within LGBTQIA+ spaces.

Wade is the first trans artist to be displayed permanently by the Victoria & Albert Museum, after five of Wade’s photographs were acquired by the V&A in 2023.

'I Know Who I Am By Being With You' , their first solo exhibition opens on 24 April until 17 May 2025 at SLQS Gallery.

Wade's photography has been featured in Dazed & Confused, Huck, VICE, British Vogue, BBC, The New York Times and The Observer. Their work also appears in recent publications; Calling the Shots: A Queer History of Photography by Zorian Clayton (Thames & Hudson / V&A, 2024) and Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between by Gemma Rolls-Bentley (Frances London, 2024).

Previous group exhibitions include: Design Gives Us a Voice, Young Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2023); Grown Up in Britain: 100 Years of Teenage Kicks, MOYC, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (2023); Reframe the Movement, Shambala Festival (2023); Photographing Protest: Resistance through a Feminist Lens, Four Corners, London (2022); Protest to Progress, POW Thanet, Margate (2021); Why We Shout: Art and Protest, VOMA (2021); Art & Protest, GIANT, Bournemouth (2021); NY Nights, Margate Arts Club, Margate (2021); THERE CAN BE NO LOVE WITHOUT JUSTICE, QueerCircle & Buildhollywood, Billboards across the UK (2021); GIRL TOWN, Photomonth East London International Photo Fest, London (2016); Perform, View Art Gallery, Bristol (2009).