“Queerness is not here yet” writes Joe Esteban Munoz in Cruising Utopia, “Queerness is an ideality.” According to the theorist, the aesthetic provides a blueprint of the worlds proposed and promised by queerness. For many young people who stumbled across Wolfgang Tillmans’ photography in magazines, books or galleries, it offered just that, a portal into another world. Here he speaks to Róisín McVeigh.

Many will know the Turner prize winning artist for his photographs of hedonistic clubbers in the late 1980’s and ‘90s. In 1988, when Tillmans first began going out in Hamburg, raving and taking ecstasy, he recognised that something new was happening and felt compelled to communicate it. These peaceful, fun-loving environments offered a glimpse of a possible society: one that was communal, sexually liberated and judgement free, a utopian ideal of togetherness. “There was a huge shift through acid-house in the late ‘80s when style and class distinctions were ironed out by smiley culture and just a t-shirt and jeans”, Tillmans says. “I found that so liberating at the time. This egalitarian utopia that existed, and hopefully still exists, in a club.”