Last Hurrah for a Gay Playground
By ERIC KONIGSBERG
At five minutes before 10 on Saturday night, the Roxy’s manager, Jason McCarthy, lined up the folks who staff the discothčque’s massive front bar. “O.K., everybody, remember what I told you,” he said. “Smile a lot. Hug people a lot. Tell them how important the gay community has been to this place. O.K.?”
The Roxy, on 18th Street near the West Side Highway, was about to open for its last night. Since 1991, this warhorse of a club, which operates during the week as a roller-skating rink, has made its name as a gay dance hall on Saturday nights. But last month, the word went out that the Roxy would be shutting its doors for good after a final bash on March 10. The building’s owner has plans to sell it to developers.
“The end of an era,” read the copy on a stack of promotional cards that sat on a column near the Roxy’s 6,000-square-foot dance floor. The card listed a few employment statistics — “53 disc jockeys”; “781 go-go boys” — in addition to the four “live music icons” (Madonna, Cher, Bette Midler and Beyoncé) who were known to turn up nominally unannounced every now and then and perform a short set.
But the Roxy’s significance, said people from both sides of the velvet rope, has less to do with such performances than with the droves of gay men who cycled through its gates weekend after weekend.
“I’ve seen so many people come here, it’s like I watched a lot of them grow up,” said John Blair, a club promoter who has been putting on Saturday nights at the Roxy from the start.
He said on Saturday that he was expecting a full house — it holds about 2,300 people at a time — for the final night. “We’ll be letting them in in shifts, from 10 at night until 9 in the morning,” he said. “I used to always go home at 2 a.m., but tonight I’ve got to stay until 4.”
In fact, the club stayed open until noon yesterday, and all told, took in close to 4,000 people. The final D.J., Peter Rauhofer, played a remix of Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” twice.
The doors opened at 10 p.m. sharp, and a thick column of men and the odd female friend here and there advanced up the sloping entry hall, checked their coats and dispersed on the dance floor. The price of admission ranged from $10 to $40, depending on the hour and whether a patron had been issued a gold or white Roxy loyalty card.
Lines formed at the club’s three bars, and drinks — vodka cocktails and Jägermeister shots were staples, said the head bartender, Kathy Condon — were served in plastic cups. The lights dimmed, and strobes flashed along the walls. Progressive house music tracks ran together, peaking on the matched beats.
The clubgoers were in their 20s and 30s. Most had short hair or shaved heads. They wore low-slung jeans, sneakers or work boots, and faux-vintage T-shirts that bore the insignias of athletic departments that don’t exist.
“Oh, my God, I had my coming-out party here 11 years ago,” said Terrence Cairy, a reed-thin, 35-year-old jewelry designer from Melville, on Long Island. “I brought my friends and broke the news. Some friends I lost, some friends I kept.”
But, he said, “This place stayed. Oh, my God, I used to come here every weekend. One friend, I brought him here three years ago to come out. It’s a safe place to come out, and oh, my God, it has the best D.J.’s in the city.”
A good number of men on the dance floor went with a bare-chested look. This typically included barbed-wire tattoos encircling their biceps, dog tags around their necks and baseball caps with curved bills, such that a visitor unaware of the event taking place might have thought he had walked onto a set where somebody was reshooting the volleyball scene from “Top Gun.”
“The Roxy is a rite of passage for gay New Yorkers, an essential stop on any gay tourist’s agenda,” Matt Kalkhoff, a contributor to The New York Blade, wrote in 2005.
In a telephone interview, he added: “Musically, it’s been very influential. When one of the D.J.’s, Larry Tee, was working there, it was a time when you would hear records on the dance floor and then hear them on the radio six months later.”
Joe Panetta, 36, who had driven to the city from Newburgh, where he is studying for a master’s degree in education, said: “This place has molded me. The people here are doctors, lawyers, professionals. The people I met aren’t the stereotypical gay men that I used to see on TV.”
Mr. Blair said that when he started Saturday nights at the Roxy, “we were just coming out of the dark ages of AIDS, and there was a real move away from the sort of pageantry of clubs and drag queens and that whole thing where the clubs threw glitter on the people.”
He went on: “This was the emergence of the Chelsea era, and the Chelsea Boy look. Everyone worked out really hard. And they all worked on the same body parts.”
Mr. Blair, who had owned gay health clubs, explained the coding system that he and his business partners devised for the Roxy’s loyalty cards and mailing lists. “We rated everybody on a scale from 1 to 4 based on how they looked,” he said. They kept the rankings in a database, so that for certain events they could direct their invitations to a specific mix of loyal customers and trophy guests.
“We gave out very few 1s — that’s the worst-looking, or for straight people,” he said. “Then, most people got 2s; if they’re pretty, they got a 3. Four is for people we have to let in free — either they’re really hot or they’re a friend of mine or somehow important in the club community.”
He explained that 3s were actually more desirable guests than 4s. “A 3 is a cutie that pays,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/nyregion...amp;oref=slogin