City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [108]
In 1975 a hard-core S&M monthly magazine, Drummer, started publishing. It had fairly technical information about how to torture and submit to it—we read it with avidity. The whole look and smell of gay New York culture was changing toward beefier bodies, beards, and the odor of brew, harness, sweat, and Crisco. Keith McDermott said that New Yorkers were so pale and unhealthy looking that black leather was the only look that suited them.
The leather bars kept pushing farther and farther uptown until they reached Twenty-first Street and Eleventh Avenue with the Eagle’s Nest. There all the men seemed older and bearded and muscular and over six feet tall. At five foot ten I’d never felt short before except in Amsterdam. Now I was a shorty in my own city. To get from the West Village up to the Spike and the Eagle, gay men had to go past three blocks of projects on Ninth Avenue starting at Sixteenth Street. Gangs who lived in the projects would attack single gay men. We started wearing whistles around our necks to summon other gay men to our defense—a fairly effective system. I thought back to the fifties when everyone was a sissy boy with straightened hair, cologne, and a baby-blue cashmere sweater and penny loafers. Back then we would have been terrified of gangs. Not anymore. Now many of us were taking judo classes.
And now the dress code was strict:
At one time, the Mineshaft was New York’s most notorious “members only” club. Membership was granted on the spot if one passed muster—no designer clothes, no sneakers, no cologne. Located on Washington Street at Little West Twelfth Street in the heart of the meatpacking district, it was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a clothes check, dungeons, and other amenities. Yes, one was allowed to check all one’s clothes and stroll about naked or in a jockstrap—undress was encouraged. The Mineshaft opened in 1977 before the AIDS era and was finally closed by the city’s Department of Health in 1985, four years after AIDS was first diagnosed.
People from out of town were astonished by the club and the neighborhood. All night long in the neighboring blocks, butchers in streaked aprons were unloading skinned and dressed calves and lambs onto overhead hooks traveling from the refrigerated trucks parked on the sidewalk (slick and smelly and black as varnish with blood) into the huge refrigerated warehouses. The butchers’ voices were loud and their faces lurid as they bent over oil drums containing warm-up fires.
Within the nondescript street-level door of the Mineshaft were stairs leading straight up to the doorkeeper sitting on a barstool, no longer the stogie-smoking Mafia guy of yore in a porkpie hat but rather a bearded and equally heavyset gay man in jeans and workboots. Inside was the big bar area with its low lights and pool tables. Behind a partition was the “action” part of the club on two floors. There was an entire wall of glory holes with people kneeling in front of crotch-high holes and servicing disembodied erections. A fist-fucking sling was suspended on heavy chains from the ceiling, and a small crowd of men stood around looking at the nearly gynecological examinations. A whole rabbit warren of small rooms was downstairs and in one was a bathtub where men would take turns being pissed on.
In 1979 I wrote an essay in the left-wing New Times justifying gay S&M. I acknowledged,