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At first, they look like ordinary buildings, photographed in an ordinary manner. Each is shot formally from across the street, framed by thick black utility cables and poles, barbed wire fences, graffiti and flyposters carving horizontal and vertical planes, with glimpses of cerulean California sky and Arcadian palms beyond. It’s the city, but there are no people in sight, and the streets are clean of debris and dirt, except for a few oil stains left behind in a parking lot. The pictures are strangely silent.

None of these buildings have windows – if they do, they are boarded up, shuttered, blacked out. In only one photograph, the door is left mysteriously open – inside, I can just make out a security door, latticed iron bars, and beyond it a neon arrow sign directing the way in. These are photographs to tease your deepest voyeuristic desires. Only the titles direct you to what’s going on inside these locations – “12 stalls, 1 leather bunk bed, outdoor garden, 1 water fountain, 1 barber’s chair, glory-hole platform, Chinese decor” reads one.

American artist Dean Sameshima took these photographs, part of a series titled Wonderland, between 1995 and 1997. They depict Silver Lake’s queer sex clubs and bathhouses, illegal safe spaces hidden in plain sight, where the community could meet and hook up. Sameshima was in his early 20s at the time he took the pictures, and the Aids pandemic had already devastated Silver Lake’s queer community. His images seem shaped by a sharpened sense of precarity and wistfulness, a foreboding that these buildings will be effaced, disappearing like the bodies that once occupied them. The titles tell us that at least three of these clubs closed in 1995. He photographs them to mitigate grief and loss.

In the daylight, these places of illicit nocturnal activities – warehouses, industrial spaces and stores – are pretty unremarkable and perfunctory. A sign for a bakery rises behind one; the club formerly at 1800 Hyperion sits nestled beside residential homes. Did the neighbours know? One is painted sludgy grey, with no sign or markings at all. You could easily walk past them, the same way you pass someone on the street – unless you were there, like Sameshima himself, a devoted observer-participant. These pictures are devotional documents, anchored to a specific time and place, but they also resist the prying eyes of outsiders, the shaming gaze of heteronormative society. These places have also been subjected to surveillance and police raids – a reminder that sometimes visibility is dangerous, that being anonymous can be a strategy for survival.

There are seven sex club pictures on show. They are hung at intervals, with long pauses between them along the white walls – a pacing that is akin to the feeling of getting in and out of a car and driving to the next spot in a sprawling city like Los Angeles – the prints (all 1990s originals) too stretch horizontally, giving a wide, panning vista, the impression of looking from a car window. They cut a series of blank spaces, parentheses in the urban landscape, a part of the city’s architecture and history concealed and sequestered by necessity.

Hidden around the corner is a suite of photographs documenting famous spots for cruising after dark in two public parks (Griffith Park and Harbor City Recreational Park). They take an unsensational, prosaic approach distinct to Kohei Yoshiyuki’s famous up-close flash pictures of sexual encounters in Tokyo’s public parks, taken at night in the 1970s. Sameshima is about as sensationalist as a damp teabag. Shot again in the warm daylight sunshine, there are no people in his park pictures. Rather than sylvan sex, it’s the quiet, natural solace of these small open spaces, shrouded by shrubbery and the dappled light falling through the trees, that you notice. They might even make for a good picnic spot, and you’d be none the wiser. But they also bristle with tension, between being seen and being safe, being caught out and being concealed, between living publicly and private passion. By taking the sex out of cruising, these sites simply exist, embedded in the everyday. And then on the ground in one picture, among the stones, I can just make out a tiny detail – a discarded blue condom wrapper.

Wonderland gives a deeper sense of Sameshima’s slow, unshowy approach to documentation and representation of communities, centring the importance of communal spaces as islands of freedom and autonomy. His approach is especially striking compared with Catherine Opie – who started documenting California’s queer community at the same time, currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery. Opie’s portraits are brash, loud and proud, unapologetic and often unflattering – Sameshima deals in subtleties and shadows, finds power in the unseen, and sad poetry in a condom wrapper. It’s a more nuanced, open-ended picture of queerness, presence and belonging, a celebration of the fleeting, radical nature of pleasure. Even when it takes place in the bushes.

• Dean Sameshima: Wonderland, is at Soft Opening, London, until 23 May