“I feel like I caught the tail end of the “old” New York nightlife,” Frank, a bartender at East Village’s Phoenix who tells me. My roommate and I just sat in a booth and talked. No one tried to dance with me or flirt with me or leave with me. Like everyone had received the memo to spend their adolescent years working out and not dancing to Rihanna’s Loud album (a masterwork of pop music, BTW). Something felt off about the whole experience. There was so much to take in: Muscled go-go boys dancing in jockstraps, muscled bartenders pouring drinks, and, again, muscled patrons standing around and devouring each other with their eyes. I can’t remember the name of the spot, or what Manhattan gaybourhood it was in, but I can remember how dark the space was and how chaotic things felt. “Let’s change that.” So we went to the lamest event you can think of: an 18+ night. “I can’t believe you haven’t gone out to a gay club yet,” he’d been saying to me for months. My roommate, a gay white boy, invited me out on a lacklustre Thursday with an obvious, slightly condescending, gay-fairy-godmother foundation to his actions. I was 19 and a sophomore at New York University. Then they rip their shirts off and dance like no one’s watching. You know, those EDM-soundtracked visions of gay men experiencing a sudden sense of belonging and liberation. The first time I went to a gay club was nothing like how it is in the popular imagination.
