![]() ![]() Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones even took a turn at the theater in 1990, launching a music club that seems to have lasted a red hot second. (Courtesy of Queer Music Heritage)īy the 1970s, the subterranean rooms were absorbing glam rock and avant garde punk, including sounds by The Stilettos, featuring an up-and-coming Debbie Harry. In the 1950s and 60s, when drag was still considered dangerously subversive (and illegal), queens performed a famous revue here in the mafia-run Club 82, “New York’s After-Dark Rendezvous.” Elizabeth Taylor was known to drop by, along with other forward-thinking celebrities, and it’s said that Errol Flynn once played the piano with his penis.Ĭlub 82 revue. It is an incredible space, but then the Bijou Film Forum, like the Adonis, has its own remarkable history. The soundtrack was the man’s belt buckle, clattering to the floor. Latifah contemplate suicide on the ledge of a hotel. One man began to trail me, so I slipped into the cinema and sat down to watch Ms. They silently invited me in by flashing their cocks. As I did a lap through the corridor that hugs the cinema in a U-shape, they stepped to the doorways of dark, cell-like booths outfitted with wooden benches. “I guess it doesn’t get much use,” Wranger says, to which his friend replies: “Guess again.”)īack at the Bijou, I clocked the age and builds of the other men: older, mostly 50s, some with bellies, others wearing clothes and baseball caps that made them seem closeted, possibly married. (“The ladies room’s right here,” says one character to Wranger. There was also a group of all-male theaters occupying converted movie palaces - places like the 1,433-seat Adonis Theatre, which the legendary porn director Jack Deveau had immortalized in A Night at the Adonis (1978), starring Jack Wranger and Mandingo. “There was literally women walking around in lingerie and fur coats,” he recalled, “and kung fu stores, and exploitation movies, and deflated blow up dolls that were kind of collapsing in all the windows.” Ewalt had lived near Times Square in the wild, pre-Giuliani days of the late 1980s. I first became intrigued by New York’s gay porn theaters after visiting the museum-like Bowery loft of artist and DJ Scott Ewalt. The Adonis Theatre, an icon of the pre-Giuliani Times Square days, is memorialized in the art of Scott Ewalt.Īccording to photographer Stephen Barker, who documented New York sex clubs during the early ’90s, the Bijou opened around that time.
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