The Sum of all Questions

Abstract

Founded in New York City in 1990, the Clit Club was a nightclub and performance venue that offered a sex-positive, racially, economically, and culturally-mixed queer space of encounter for self-identified lesbian, gay, and trans people for over twelve years. Drawing from archival material and responses to a questionnaire previously sent to Clit Club staff, this article provides an introduction to the space, affect, and practices at the Club, and riffs on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s concept of the undercommons, and the improvisational and renegade space it opens up. We posit the Clit Club as a sexual “undercommons” that, through the care of its dedicated staff, created a landscape of open possibilities for sexual play and social intimacy in its tiny, hot, crowded spaces. The polyvocality of this coauthored article mirrors the Clit Club’s own expression and negotiation of multiple and at times divergent perspectives among its staff and extended family. Returning to the Clit Club today also entails naming the structures that contributed to its absence from queer history, while recognizing the nuanced ways in which the Club resisted the glare of visibility and capture.

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