Meatpacking Remembered

In this week's Gay City News is a terrific article/essay by Abby Tallmer, a lesbian who grew up in the Meatpacking District during the 1970s. In its heyday, when the area far west of the West Village was the center of NYC's thriving BDSM scene, it was also the site where the nascent LGBTQ community was asserting their rights to their bodies, as this essay eloquently speaks about.

Nowadays the neighborhood is more associated with trendy restaurants and shops than transsexual prostitutes. In 2004 New York Magazine named it NYC's most fashionable neighborhood, and fans of the show "Sex and the City" will recall the promiscuous Samantha resided there.

More about the Meatpacking District to come but in the meantime, please check out the article, reprinted below!

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http://gaycitynews.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18554250&BRD=2729&PAG=461&dept_id=569341&rfi=6

A Liberation Erased
By: ABBY TALLMER
07/05/2007

The recent history of Manhattan's Meatpacking District is a story about the homogenization of our city and the erasure of a generation of its people and their history. It is a story of how the intersecting forces of rising real estate prices, the Disneyfication of Times Square and Manhattan at large, the conservative national shift over the past two decades, and the onset of AIDS and the panic surrounding it have effectively eclipsed memories of a time when "Meatpacking District" was not a real estate term.

Instead, the term was ironic shorthand for the patch of West Village blocks, centered roughly at 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, to which countless visitors flocked, seeking the alternative sexual universe that existed there before the invasion of slumming heterosexual tourists looking for Stella McCartney's latest couture designs.

At the height of the feminist, gay, and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and '70s through the mid-'80s, the Meatpacking District was home to the city's thriving and mostly queer S/M and sex club scene.

Far from being a desirable destination, the Far West Village, as it was known back then, was unknown territory to most New Yorkers except for butchers, neighborhood residents, and the select group of queer and kinky people who roamed the streets and filled the clubs there in the late-night hours, staggering home in the early morning as the sun was rising and most others were heading off to work. During the day, strong men dragged animal carcasses through the garbage-filled streets. It was an area reserved for those with iron stomachs, given the stench of dead flesh and rotting trash that permeated the air.

Growing up in the neighborhood, I was ashamed to invite my grade-school friends over for fear they would think I lived in a garbage dump. But at night, the place came alive and the unlit, otherwise desolate streets became filled with other men, also tough-looking, but clad in leather chaps and motorcycle jackets with hankies protruding from their rear pockets and keys dangling from their sides. They lingered on street corners, purposefully eyeing one another, striking up conversations, offering each other a light, and often disappearing down mysterious alleyways or spilling into or out from unmarked but much-trafficked doorways.

There were other characters as well - adventurous male/female couples; groups of nervous young gay men and women clearly new to the area and intent on a mission, most often clad not in leather/fetish gear but in "regular" clothes; and the ever-present trans hookers, most, but not all, of whom were black or Hispanic. Many of the hookers almost completely passed as women, most of them as stunning as they were scantily dressed. They could been seen most often awkwardly climbing into and out of the limos and trucks driven by the married men from Staten Island or New Jersey who traveled there just for them.

In the early 1970s, I lived five blocks north of Christopher Street and three blocks from the Hudson River. I was then about nine years old, a queer kid waiting for the right time to spring this news on my parents. I was raised in a very permissive household and often walked the streets alone even after dark. Needless to say, the night action in my neighborhood hardly went unnoticed by me and, in fact, served as the object of much curiosity.

I remember riding my bike around the neighborhood, making special trips past the piers and the bathhouses and through the deserted side streets west of Greenwich Street, and down 14th Street and the short blocks just below. Though I wasn't quite sure what exactly went on behind these hidden and locked doors, I knew somehow - God knows how - that whatever it was had something to do with being gay, with being sexual, and even with a particular form of gay sexual expression that I gathered was considered in some way shameful. The very same men who cheerily said hi to me in my building's elevator usually looked more horrified than happy to see me when I greeted them from my bicycle as they loitered, regaled in leather, in alleyways or in front of dimly lit clubs or bathhouses.

As I would learn later, the unofficial center of all of this action was the "Triangle Building" on 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, which now houses Vento, a popular Italian restaurant opened in 2004, but was then the site of some of the most notorious leather bars in the city. Entrances to a stunning array of S/M and sex clubs and backrooms lined both the Eighth and the Ninth Avenue sides of the Triangle.
Those directly on the Triangle included the nationally known Hellfire Club, the Vault, J's, The Man Hole and many others.

Queer clubs within strolling distance included the notorious Mineshaft, the Anvil, the Asstrick, the Cellblock, the International Stud, the Glory Hole and, later, the Lure. Many patrons migrated back and forth all night long, every night of the week back when sexual freedom defined an era.

Nearly all of these clubs, except for the Hellfire Club and the Vault, were predominantly gay, though a few stray women here and there could at times be spotted in some of the less strict men's-only clubs. The Mineshaft's door policy, however, was notoriously strict, and many gay men were turned away each night for violating its strict leather/macho dress code. That didn't keep some inventive women from testing whether it was foolproof.

I know this to be true firsthand, for one night just after I turned 18, my best friends, Saul and Brian, decided that it would be fun to dress me up and sneak me in with them. As I am rather the femme type of lesbian, I was terrified about passing the rigid door inspection, but Brian and Saul had picked my outfit - white T-shirt, black leather jacket, jeans, and boots, with a sock in my pants prominently displaying package - done my hair so expertly, and even given me a fake five o'clock shadow. I remember shuffling after Brian and before Saul in line, though I pleaded to be last - Brian said this would look suspicious - and I vividly remember trying not to stare at the floor too obviously as the doorman inspected my ID. After what seemed like forever but was undoubtedly a matter of seconds, the doorman muttered "Next" and that was it. I was in.

All I remember is seeing a sea of nude, half-nude, harnessed and chained male bodies (the bottoms) and muscular men in full leather (the tops) broken off into groups of three, or four, or two, or eight, or more. Some, but not all, of the tops held whips and paddles of various sorts, and many were noisily using them on their willing victims.

I remember all sorts of sounds - cries and whimpers and gasps and moans and shrill but insincere pleas of "Stop!" and so on from the bottoms, and orders barked sternly or angrily or calmly or in in-between voices from some masters to their slaves, while others yelled numbers to their subjects for them to repeat or let out long strings of outrageously profane, and usually effeminizing, epithets or simply emitted a series of guttural, primal groans. All of the collective words and sighs were punctuated by the unmistakable sounds of flagellation - the sound of wooden paddles hitting flesh, or the snap of bullwhips slicing through the air and landing sharply on human targets, or even the ring of a bare hand making contact with a buttocks.

I knew from the moment I entered that I wouldn't be able to stay in the Mineshaft for long before being found out, so I was determined to take it all in. (In fact, my friend Saul, who stood behind me in line, was barred at the door because there was something "too effeminate" about him. After a half-hour, we reluctantly left to meet back up with him.) As I stood there transfixed, I thought to myself, "This is what men do when women aren't around."

This adventure took place a full year or two before I discovered the Lesbian Sex Mafia (LSM) - New York's first and only lesbian S/M organization, founded in 1981. I came upon the group just as I was growing convinced that no network existed for women who were interested in exploring S/M with other women.

Which brings us back to the Mineshaft. The immediate and intense exhilaration I felt upon getting past the guard and into the main play area was due to the liberating realization that there were no men there who cared about me (the real me, not the sock-down-my-pants-me) - not to mention the overpowering smell of God knows how many bottles of poppers that hit me the minute I began to wade through the crowd.
Even as a woman, I experienced the Mineshaft as my first purely queer sexual space. The club imparted a feeling of immense optimism, opportunity, safety, and community. When you were gay and in the Mineshaft or in any of the other queer S/M clubs in the Meatpacking District - or even gay and walking down those streets in the 1970s, '80s, and into the early '90s - you felt, often for the first time in your life, completely divorced, immune, and removed from socially imposed heterosexual judgments.

Fortunately, a few years later I was able to capture similar feelings in a purely lesbian sexual space, when LSM co-founder Jo Arnone began hosting Ms. Trick, a series of women's-only S/M nights at the otherwise gay male Asstrick Club.
These clubs gave us a place to feel as if we were no longer outsiders - or, rather, they made us feel as if it was better to be outsiders, together, than to force ourselves to be just like everybody else. This was at a time and in an era long before everywhere we looked, our self-appointed gay leaders seemed to be telling us that getting married was and should be every queer person's highest goal, although certainly then, as now, many extra-legal long-term gay couples existed.

Back then many of us believed that gay liberation was rooted in sexual liberation, and we believed that true liberation was rooted in the right - no, the need - to claim ownership of our own bodies, to celebrate, experience, and enjoy sexuality in as many forms as possible, limited only by one's time and imagination. We believed that gay pride was impossible without sexual pride, including leather pride. We were living - though we did not know it then - through one of the most permissive times in modern history and in one of the most permissive places in modern history - the Meatpacking District of the 1970s through the early '90s.

Today, when I try to explain this history to younger queers, they often don't believe me. The Meatpacking District during that period has attained an almost mythological status for the younger members of the LGBT community that makes it impossible for them to believe the concrete reality many of us took for granted back then. We were kids then, chronologically, and in terms of experience and the sense of possibility we felt. We fully expected that being gay was only going to get better and easier as we got older. Ours was the first generation to celebrate and experience our sexuality in all of its alternative forms - and that we did as much as possible. Most of us never foresaw a more restrictive world and never imagined that our joyful experiment would end. Little did we know that many of us would never live to adulthood, that this time and moment would be gone in a flash, and that an entire people, a moment, an era, and a geographic and symbolic neighborhood would vanish with it.

Never take your present for granted, because there's no telling how quickly and how thoroughly it will be erased.

©GayCityNews 2007