Last of the Legends: Getting a Friendly Door to the Face at a Legendary Downtown Smut Joint
Posted at 3:03 PM Aug 12, 2008
On Tuesdays, Charlie Vazquez writes Gotham After Dark, a peek into what goes on in Manhattan's queer nightlife, with club and event reports and profiles of fascinating New Yorkers.
I packed my camera, notepad and pen. Its urban myth was ripe with sleazy stories. I had to go: Hollywood actors playing pianos with their dicks, vicious 1980s drag queens, 1970s glam rock concerts, art films and pornography—um, what’s not to love? Add to that an illustrious and conflicted history of flooding, relocations and goddess-knows-what-else. A pariah among the rest—my kind of joint. Rumor also told me that you could take art classes there at certain times—nude model drawing. A life raft afloat after the Great Flood of Morality that continually tries to drown gay sex culture. What’s not to love? To imagine that there existed a manifestation of all of that fascinated me.
Feeling like a teenager, my adrenaline pumped as I opened the heavy black door, which slammed behind me like a guillotine. I descended a staircase framed with posters of Hollywood movies I was sure were not playing. There was a familiar vibe in the air—quite honestly I hadn’t been to such a place in years. These are the places where movies are playing and no one’s really watching them—they’re watching you or the guy next to you. You’re looking at someone who’s looking at someone else and one of two things happens: You have an anonymous sexual encounter (which can be hot or not) or leave feeling like the biggest retard on Earth.
I chose to respect the fellow queer Latino man behind the bulletproof-looking glass that looked terrified when I told him why I was there. He said I had to speak to a manager who wasn’t there, whose name and phone number he didn’t know. I did the right thing—I granted him his wishes to not “rock the boat”. I won’t tell, even though I was looking forward to it! I was furious about the pre-Stonewall paranoia—not at him, but the root of it all. Especially in this privileged, hypocritical age we live in, where Hollywood stars boast about getting blow jobs in upscale restaurant restrooms with no repercussions. I swear that when I introduced myself and asked if someone could walk me around and answer some basic questions, you would’ve thought I had a swastika armband on and was asking for the whereabouts of Anne Frank. Sad, but true.
Charlie Vazquez is a Brooklyn-based writer, part-time fetish clown and the assistant to Diamanda Galás--but really, he's nice.
more: Gotham After Dark
