Los Angeles — The nightclub known as FUCK! ran from the Summer of 1989 until Spring 1993, when it was raided by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Vice Division. First hosted by Basgo’s Disco in Silver Lake, FUCK! constituted a gritty liminal space oppositional to both the neighborhood’s largely men-only leather bars as well as the clean-cut bars of West Hollywood. At FUCK! the modified, pierced, and tattooed body was front and center. Scarring, mummification, and piercing were staples at FUCK!, confronting fears of contagion while revealing the temporality of the body during the height of the AIDS crisis. Performances at FUCK! were both transgressive and theatrical, pushing the limits of what the performer’s body (and audience) could endure with a spirit of play.Collective rage about governmental indifference to AIDS manifested an urgency and intensity that pushed the boundaries of art, performance, and community at FUCK! A response to the unacknowledged trauma from the sudden and continual loss of largely young men and artists, FUCK! brought together a highly diverse spectrum of sexualities and people–punks, outcasts, and the art-damaged–to dance and perform to the soundtrack of industrial music. FUCK! was a key site of the alternative art and performance scene in Los Angeles at the time, blurring nightlife, performance, and activism. The club popularized a S&M, piercing, and body-modification-informed aesthetic (now prevalent in mainstream popular culture) that influenced artists of the time and the present, and that only recently has begun to be recognized.FUCK! Loss, desire, pleasure resurrects FUCK!’s historical legacy, placing archival material related to the club in relation to works by contemporary artists whose practices align with emergent themes of the club. Historical photographs, flyers, and objects from FUCK! punctuate the club’s importance as a space of community, friendship, and playful experimentation. The exhibition includes candid snapshots and ephemera from the club, documentation of FUCK!’s intervention in the 1991 Christopher Street West pride parade, and documentation related to the LAPD raid on FUCK! in April 1993, among other highlighted events.