Description
Question: What if the most radical queer movements weren’t just undocumented – but actively erased by excluding memories of the majority?
Breaking Taboo – Recalling the Spirit of Leigh Bowery’s London is a cultural intervention that returns to the unruly margins of the city in the mid 1980s.
It’s a conversation about the spirit of a time that was wiped out by forces of the 80s and left few traces. Invoking 22 voices, 22 contradictions and clashing perspectives, Biba Bibitch reconstructs a subculture that flourished from around 1984 to 1987 - between the New Romantics and Acid House - seizing the style crown from the Blitz Kids and challenging taste, gender and time itself. At the centre of it was Leigh Bowery, but the spirit belonged to many. Whilst Leigh and the other figureheads of scenes that came before and after are increasingly celebrated in current museum shows, those around him conjure the true, peculiar spirit of a movement that still resists explanation.
Set against a backdrop of deregulation in the City and AIDS in the community, Breaking Taboo traces a volatile transformation of alternative gay life in London, before it was erased by disease and democracy, and tamed by curatorial logic.
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a reckoning — for everyone who knows queer history is still being rewritten.
‘Compelling’ – Queerguru
‘She knows’ – Princess Julia
‘This is an important record of alternative London’ - Peter Paul Hartnett
Details
Publisher - Mobile Media Ltd
Language - English
Perfect Bound
Contributors
By author
Biba Bibitch
Published Date - 2025-09-19
ISBN - 9781836884842
Dimensions - 19.8 x 12.9 x 2.2 cm
Page Count - 304
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