About

Dockside Interview is a gay bookstore based in New York City. We source, preserve and curate printed works of political, artistic and intellectual relevance: revolutionary materials from the politics of desire.

We believe in the urgency of safeguarding and circulating gay cultural memory: printed evidence of what Michael Warner called the “resistance to regimes of the normal.” We aim to (re)activate political conversations through symbiotic relationships with readers, collectors, artists, researchers and institutions.

Dockside Interview honors the photograph of the same name by Arthur Tress (b. 1940), made in 1977. It documents a conversation between two men—one nude, one clothed—on Manhattan’s West Side piers. During the 1970s, the abandoned and dilapidated industrial piers on the Lower West Side presented extraordinary opportunities for artistic and sexual experimentation. Alongside David Wojnarowicz and the photographers Frank Hallam, Leonard Fink and Peter Hujar, among others, Tress was one of many gay artists who both cruised and made art on New York City’s periphery. We invite mischievousness back to the center.

Emilio Gonzalez-Coya