Name: Through a Butch Looking Glass – Queer Erotic Art
Start: 2025-09-19T18:45:00+03:00
End: 2025-09-19T19:45:00+03:00
Location: Town Hall

Through a Butch Looking Glass – Queer Erotic Art

19th September 2025 @ 6:45 pm - 7:45 pm

Sappho Women

Shelby Sharie Cohen

Town Hall

Buy Your Wristband Here

Debuting for the first time at the International Eressos Women’s Festival – Lesvos, Greece 2025.

At just 25 years old, a young butch lesbian professional photographer with a bold, artistic eye began documenting the raw, unfiltered beauty of lesbian life in the 1980s and 1990s in San Francisco — a world that lived in shadow, but pulsed with light.

Now, at 66, Shelby unveils this never-before-seen collection of black-and-white photographs: intimate, defiant, ordinary, erotic, joyful, candid and true. These images were captured at lesbian sex clubs, pride marches and out in public. They are not mere nostalgia — they are a glimpse into American lesbian life during that special free expression era.

*Some of these images are sexually explicit.

Shelby Sharie Cohen (nee Shari Cohen) has been a photographer in the San Francisco Bay Area for close to 44 years. Her recently discovered photographic archive offers a rare look at San Francisco’s lesbian, BDSM, erotic and queer communities during the Feminist Sex Wars and the AIDS crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s . The archive was sold to “The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection / University of Minnesota in August, 2024, and contains over 10,500 original photographic negatives and slides and more than 700 original prints by Cohen. These photographs, many of which were taken for the groundbreaking sex-positive magazine On Our Backs, document San Francisco’s lesbian leather community and the rise of sex clubs during the Feminist Sex Wars, as well as San Francisco’s wider queer community as reflected in Theatre Rhinoceros, AIDS fundraisers, the Gay Games, gay weddings, music festivals and political activism.

Cohen currently lives in Northern California and focuses on portrait photography. Shelby Sharie Cohen is an American Master Photographer and Healer. She moved to California from Denver, Colorado in 1982.

https://www.shelbyshariecohenphotography.com/