We All Feel Better in the Dark

We All Feel Better in the Dark: the bathhouse as queer utopia

A visual lecture by Dirty Looks’ Bradford Nordeen

Blending artist video, historic porn clips and experimental music, Dirty Looks' Bradford Nordeen explores the recent re-emergence of the bathhouse in queer visual culture. From the reissued porn soundtracks of Patrick Cowley and Coil, musicians like Ruth Mascelli and Jake Muir bring techno and vaporwave into the steamroom to ply new forms of embodiment. From recent narrative features, like Love Lies Bleeding, Feud: Capote vs. the Swans and Femme, to visual art by rafa esparza, Oat Montien and Amina Ross, who build on archival art by Patrick Angus, Alvin Baltrop James Bidgood and Jimmy Wright with new queer strategies and Google Maps, these works spin their own digital utopias. Gaping the capacity for the bathhouse creates alternative avenues for pleasure that resound Cowley’s sacred pools while squatting them, revising that pearled white tile with a queer politics of the future.

Bradford Nordeen is a writer, curator and the founder of Dirty Looks Inc. His books include Because Horror (with Johnny Ray Huston), Check Your Vernacular, Dirty Looks at MoMA, Fever Pitch, and his writing has been anthologized in the Dopamine Press release, SLUTS and the Little Joe book. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz, though Los Angeles is his home.