Express Yourself

During Express Yourself, hosted by Mass Bears & Cubs at Club Café, the assignment was simple: make room for people to be seen. The portraits gathered here move between confidence, affection, humor and performance, then take on a second life through a prism-and-flare treatment that pushes the nightclub light into something more dreamlike. This story is dedicated to Frank A. Ribaudo, the Club Café founder whose work helped create the kind of room where a series like this could exist.

Club Café's story reaches back to 1983, when Ribaudo and friends created a gay-friendly health club after experiencing discrimination elsewhere. A café in the same Columbus Avenue building became a place to eat, talk and stay awhile after workouts. As the AIDS crisis intensified, that gathering place took on a larger role: dinners, fundraisers, meetings and community organizing became part of what Club Café was for.

Ribaudo died in July 2026 at 81 after a two-and-a-half-year battle with glioblastoma. His work extended far beyond nightlife. He helped create the Harbor to the Bay AIDS Benefit Bike Ride and supported LGBTQ+ athletics and community organizations, while Club Café remained a place where social life and community infrastructure overlapped.

These are not portraits of Frank. They are portraits of what a community space can make possible: silliness, tenderness, spectacle, friendship, bodies taking up space, and the easy closeness of people who do not have to explain why they belong there. That is why this series feels inseparable from the room in which it was made.

For the public series, the photographs are finished with that flare treatment deliberately: not to turn people into something else, but to let the energy around them become visible too. The clean edits and broader event coverage live separately; this set is the more expressive version of the night.

Club Café is still here, and the most fitting tribute may be the simplest one: people are still gathering. They are still showing up, performing, flirting, laughing, posing, finding one another and making memories in a place built to welcome them. These photographs are one small record of that continuing life.