Interviewed By Ken Lustbader

Today on the blog, Ken Lustbader, co-director of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, interviews David Kennerley, author of GETTING IN: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s. This meticulously researched book showcases over 200 examples from Kennerley’s club ephemera collection with connections to the historic venues, as well as quotes from denizens of New York’s nightlife scene in the 1990s. The book is available here.

What was your motivation to collect these club flyers that were designed to be discarded?

When I moved to New York around 1990, having grown up in rural Pennsylvania, I had few friends and was struggling with my career, identity, and sexuality. One night my roommate dragged me to a dance club called the Roxy on the western edge of Chelsea. When we walked into the cavernous space the size of a football field packed with hundreds of clubgoers, I was gob-smacked. It was a heady mix of gay muscle boys, lesbians, drag queens, trans folks, straights, and skinny bi-curious geeks like me, dancing to the pulsating house music. It was then I realized I had found my tribe. We were a glorious, throbbing confederacy of misfits.

Back then, when you would exit a club, promoters handed out flyers for other parties. This was before the internet took hold, when the main vehicle for promotion was via these printed flyers. Everyone would glance at them and throw them away, but I always hung onto mine. I loved the dazzling images of the drag queens, celebrities, and shirtless hunks –– they were like mini works of art. By the end of the decade, I had managed to collect over 1,200 club flyers. Flash forward three decades later, when I decided to share my favorite examples with the world in the form of a stylish, coffee-table-style book.

You contend there was an explosion of LGBTQ nightlife options in Manhattan in the 1990s. Can you describe the factors that led to this surge?

The ‘90s proved to be a perfect storm resulting in a profusion of queer venues.

One major factor was real estate. There were plenty of fringy, sketchy areas in Manhattan, such as the Meatpacking District and the East Village, where rents were remarkably affordable. Another factor was the emergence of free gay guides like HX and NEXT magazines, which encouraged folks to go out. They were carefully researched and, for the first time, provided reliable info like which DJ was spinning on a given night, or which drag queen was hosting a certain party. Another key component was the AIDS crisis, which motivated many LGBTQ folks to come out of the closet, join together, and maximize visibility to enact change. In the book, we chronicle nearly 100 venues, though I’m sure there were many more.

What was your favorite club, and can you describe what made it so special?

I’d have to say it was the Roxy, a mega-club on far West 18th Street. It opened as a roller rink at the peak of disco-mania in 1978 and became a queer-centric dance club around 1990, boasting a massive 6,000-square-foot dance floor with oval bars on either end. On top of each bar was a phalanx of gyrating, nearly naked go-go boys. The club exuded a celebratory, circus-like atmosphere –– often the entire space was festooned with mylar streamers. You’d come home with glitter in your underwear. The Roxy danced its last dance in 2007 and the building was demolished. Now there is a luxury condo on the site.

Can you talk about some of the other popular gay venues from the decade?

Another legendary mega-club was Limelight, located on Sixth Avenue and West 20th Street. It was built as a Gothic-style Episcopal Church in the mid-1840s and became a nightclub in 1983, led by club king Peter Gatien, who also owned the Palladium, Tunnel, and Club USA in the ‘90s. The space was enormous, encompassing over 12,000 square feet, and the architects retained many of the original details like the arched wooden beams, stained glass, and wainscotting. They held parties like Lick-it! and Res-Erection that featured a back room for sexual shenanigans. Limelight closed for good in 2003 and currently houses three restaurants.

Perhaps the most culturally significant bar to open that decade was Splash Bar, on West 17th Street. Opened in 1991, it ushered in a new era of gay bar design, with high ceilings and a row of large windows. Pedestrians could walk by and actually see patrons inside, a sharp contrast to the traditional dark, cave-like bars with windows painted black. Splash expanded into a multilevel dance club and thrived until 2013, when the gayborhood had migrated north to Hell’s Kitchen. Somewhat ironically, the space now houses a retail store that sells scuba equipment.

One of the longest-running venues was Pyramid Club, a music and drag-centric performance space on Avenue A near E. 6th Street in the East Village. Opened in 1979, it was long considered a vanguard of counter-culture, where pioneering drag artists such as Lypsinka, Lady Bunny, Sister Dimension, and RuPaul got their starts. Pyramid shuttered in 2021, a casualty of the COVID pandemic. In its place is Baker Falls, a bar/coffee shop and outpost of The Knitting Factory.

As previously mentioned, a looming presence in the 1990s was the AIDS crisis. What role did these clubs play during that horrific period?

The AIDS crisis was raging at the start of the decade, and had claimed the lives of 90,000 people in the U.S. alone. Tragically, being diagnosed HIV-positive was tantamount to a death sentence. The drugs available at the time were woefully inadequate and came with debilitating adverse effects (the lifesaving, protease-inhibitor “drug cocktails” would not become available until later in the decade).

Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. government was in deep denial about the epidemic, so groups like ACT UP were formed to demand funding for treatment research. Activists were literally fighting for their lives, and their actions continued throughout the 90s. The LGBTQ community needed to come together to enact change. Gay men and women came out of the closet and flocked to the clubs to celebrate their sexuality and cultivate a supportive community. More than one-third of the club flyers in my collection mention benefits to support AIDS causes.

Can you describe a few examples of the flyers in the book, and how they represent the culture from that era?

One of my favorites promotes a 1992 party at the Palladium called Divas Fight AIDS. It is a prime example of a club promoting AIDS causes, in this case a benefit for LifeBeat, the music industry group to fight AIDS. The flyer boasts a list of popular female performers like Loleatta Holloway, The Cover Girls, and Grace Jones.

Another standout is for the Positively Queer party in 1991 co-hosted by the Empire State Pride Agenda, a political action group, and Queer Nation, a spinoff of ACT UP. Queer Nation is arguably the first major organization to adopt the normally pejorative word “queer” to help reclaim the term. The party was billed as “A benefit to elect our friends and defeat our enemies.” It also promised “Go-go-sluts from hell.”

Perhaps the most memorable flyer supported Democratic candidate Bill Clinton during his bid to wrest the presidency from Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush in 1992. Meant to encourage people to vote, it sported a digitally manipulated image of Bill Clinton and Al Gore as shirtless, muscled party boys in short shorts with their arms draped around each other. The flyer, created by Jon McEwan and Jason McCarthy, promoted a party called Purgatory at Sound Factory Bar.

How many of these venues still exist today and what led to their demise?

Many of the buildings survive, but most of the clubs have closed. For example, all of these storied mega-clubs are gone, and in recent years new queer dance parties have popped up in warehouse spaces in Brooklyn and Queens. Only a handful of the smaller venues have hung on, such as Barracuda lounge in Chelsea, The Monster in Greenwich Village, and The Cock in the East Village. The simple reason is economics. The derelict areas where the clubs thrived became gentrified, with rents in some cases being quadrupled and beyond. Zoning laws were changed to allow more residential development. Community boards became stronger and fought hard against nightspots. And in 1994 Mayor Rudy Giuliani started a war against nightlife with his massive “civic cleanup,” forcing many venues to close. Some experts have argued that the rise of geolocation-based hookup apps resulted in fewer gay men bothering to go out to gay clubs and bars. It should also be noted that clubs today rarely issue printed flyers, opting instead for digital versions.

Can you describe what else can be found in the book?

GETTING IN is more than just eye-popping images. We interviewed over 40 people whose names were on the flyers, including drag queens, club kids, DJs, photographers, go-go-boys, and a few ordinary clubgoers as well. It includes a foreword by nightlife journalist Michael Musto, and maps showing the location of venues open during the ‘90s. There is one timeline showing dates the key clubs were open, and another timeline highlighting milestones in LGBTQ cultural history, to provide sociopolitical context.

You’ve amassed an important and valuable archival collection that connects transient spaces to their built locations. Did you realize that you were creating a unique resource for people like me who would be exploring LGBTQ site-based history?

Looking at the collection now, I see how they can be used by historians to map the locations and track information about each club. I didn’t realize it at the time, but each flyer is a snapshot of a moment with vital information such as the club name, hosts, location, event, and in some cases, the complete date. What were meant to be disposable ads are now compelling pieces of ephemera that you can’t find in guidebooks or oral histories. In the book, we’ve mapped these locations, which create a cultural and geographic landscape of queer nightlife in the ‘90s. For me, personally and as a Manhattan resident, it’s been fascinating to revisit these spots to see their current incarnations. Some buildings survive, which has rekindled my emotional connection to those places. That speaks to the power of place and the value of LGBTQ history.

David Kennerley is a journalist and historian specializing in LGBTQ culture. For nearly two decades, he has been an Arts & Entertainment reporter for Gay City News, the NYC-based LGBTQ newspaper and website. Several examples from his ephemera collection were shown in the “Letting Loose and Fighting Back” exhibition at the New-York Historical Society honoring the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. He is a graduate of Vassar College, where he studied Art History. His fully illustrated book, GETTING IN: NYC Club Flyers From the Gay 1990s, was published by Daken Press in January 2024 (2nd Ed.).

Ken Lustbader is a co-founder and co-director of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project, an award-winning cultural heritage initiative and educational resource that is documenting and memorializing LGBT site-based history in New York City. For over 30 years, he has been a national leader in issues related to LGBT history, documentation, and historic preservation. His prior work experience includes serving as the Historic Preservation Program Officer at the J.M. Kaplan Fund, consultant for the Lower Manhattan Emergency Preservation Fund, and Director of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Sacred Sites Program. Ken holds a B.A. in Economics from Vassar College and M.S. in Historic Preservation from Columbia University.

Preserving a Lost Chapter of NYC Queer History Via Club Flyers: An Interview with David Kennerley