Book excerpt: For nearly a decade, through his enigmatic and compellingPolaroids, Jeremy Kost has been telling the stories of NewYork nights from within its hottest party spots. In 2002, while staying with friends in Chelsea, Kost borrowedthe camera of one of his hosts and took it to The Cock. Eversince that fateful night, year after year, Kost has been thesole photographer to capture a complete millennial portraitof New York's famed drag queens, go-go boys, transsexuals,and wild-partying celebrities. An exhilarating trip through underground New York, It's AlwaysDarkest Before Dawn puts you on the guest list for a worldof vivacious creativity, performance, costume, and evidence(if you needed it) that a certain kind of fabulous madnessain't dead yet, and was around way before Lady Gaga! Celebration, angst, drunken revelry, joy, exhaustion,vulnerability, honesty, and pomp and circumstance areall captured in the uncompromising immediacy of Kost'sPolaroids of personalities such as Amanda Lepore, SophiaLamar, and oddly enough even former President Bill Clinton,Pamela Andersen, Paris Hilton, and many more. It's Always Darkest Before Dawn is Kost's first monograph andcollects the best, most outstanding images of New York'sclub culture created in the new millennium.