Amsterdam Pride ️‍: Nacht op scherp/Night on the Edge book presentation

Join us in Amsterdam for the presentation of Nacht op scherp/Night on the Edge by Steve Malenka, BEP Mous, and Geert-Jan Kuipers.
About this Event

Please join us in Amsterdam for the presentation of the photo book Nacht op scherp/Night on the Edge by Steve Malenka, BEP Mous, and Geert-Jan Kuipers. This crowd-funded book and memorial, in both Dutch and English, will be published just in time for Amsterdam Pride Week!
About the book:
Nacht op scherp/Night on the Edge is a photobook and oral history about the Amsterdam queer performers of the 90s: a decade in which ecstasy and fear met on the dance floor: the iT, Mazzo (Club Chique), the Trut, and RoXY. Clubs etched into the city's memory. Dedicated to Manfred Langer.
Bep Mous and Geert-Jan Kuijpers, two icons of that nightlife, look back together with writer and journalist Bamber Delver on a period in which art and survival coincided. Their private archives are opened: the book is full of never-before-published photos; costumes and memories form the basis for this richly illustrated book about performance, identity, grief, and resilience, and stories of people they worked with and who inspired them, such as Mayday, Howie Getman, Erwin Olaf, Vera Springveer, and Hellen Zelluf.
Approximately 160 full-colour pages. Hardcover. Beautifully produced, designed by the Silvestri Brothers.
About the speakers:
Steve Malenka arrived in Amsterdam in 1974 — and never really left. His first stop was the American Discount Bookshop, now ABC, where a budding photographer found his feet and his city.
It was his camera that opened the first door. Shooting the DISCO parties at the Brakke Grond theatre on the Nes led to a partnership with the organiser — and from there, a Greeting Card business was born.
But Malenka always needed to do more. In 1981, together with a team of friends, he re-opened the DOK — the legendary gay dance club on the Singel. In the late ‘80s, his energy turned toward AIDS awareness, devoting years to programs that mattered.
Steve is a Disco Dinosaur by his own admission — his professional life has been parties, promotions, events, and more parties - via RoXY and De Bijenkorf. Malenka is now retired, keeping his finger firmly in the Amsterdam mix of music and events. And he always will.
Joost Mous (1950) became Bep the moment he arrived in Amsterdam — stepping straight into the thick of it: de Rooie Flikkers, the Anita Bryant protests, and the first gay demonstrations on Dutch soil.
From 1978 to 1983 he performed with theater group de Softies, playing stages across the country. Later, under the banner of Hellun Zelluf at MAZZO, Bep brought his theatrical instincts to HIV and AIDS awareness — using performance to promote condom use at a time when it mattered most.
Together with his great friend and collaborator Geert-Jan Kuijpers, Bep took to the stage of iT — Amsterdam’s legendary discotheque — as performer, costume artist and host of the gay nights. Between them, they built a world of characters, costumes and controlled chaos that defined a decade.
Their personal archive of photographs — gathered across those extraordinary years on the “iT” stage — is a living document of Amsterdam club culture at its most colourful, most fearless, and most alive.
Geert-Jan Kuijpers (1963) has spent most of his life in Amsterdam — a city that shaped him, and that he helped shape in return. Trained at the Vogue Academie and the Rietveld Academie, he arrived at the ’90s with an eye for beauty and a taste for the extraordinary.
Through that decade he performed and hosted alongside Bep — Joost Mous — on the stage of the legendary iT. Amsterdam was alive with colour, creativity and controlled chaos. But the shadow of AIDS fell across it all, leaving marks on the LGBTQ clubbing scene that no amount of glitter could fully hide. Those years had a profound impact on many — and Geert-Jan was right in the middle of it.
After the clubs, Geert-Jan moved into theater production, and over the past 15 years has established himself as a successful portrait painter, with gallery shows in Amsterdam, Paris and Bangkok.
The artist never stopped performing. He just found a different stage.