University Honors

My project aims to photograph queer people of color in underground nightlife in Los Angeles and New York. The main project question is: how do queer people use nightlife and fabulousness to decompress from societal pressures by uplifting their emotional wellbeing? Fabulousness is considered dangerous, political, and practiced by queer people who make themselves a spectacle because their bodies are constantly suppressed as stated by Madison Moore in ​Fabulous: the Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric​. I will use an auto-ethnographical methodology of portraits, interviews, and my observations to provide a cultural analysis of the underground queer nightlife community. The report will showcase the differences between locations and how aesthetics of fabulousness is created and celebrated in these hidden underground spaces.