Mineshaft gay club

The Mineshaft was a members-only BDSM leather bar and sex club for gay men located at Washington Street, at Little West 12th Street, in Manhattan, New York City, in the Meatpacking District, West Village, and Greenwich Village sections. But a queer historian has given modern-day queers a close look at one of the most well-known gay leather bars of that era — the Mineshaft.

Historian Jack Fritscher interviewed Wally Wallace. The most legendary was the Mineshaft, a popular sex club that opened in and became one of the most famous such spaces in the world, but was forced to close in It became the first gay venue shut down by the City as part of its then-controversial AIDS prevention measures.

However, the building’s most intriguing stories may come from its time hosting the Mineshaft, a gay BDSM club whose patrons challenged biases about radical sexuality amid the HIV/AIDS crisis. The Mineshaft is probably the most legendary and 'infamous' gay crusing bar: after more than 30 years from its closing, the Mineshaft legend is still alive!. How to Quote from this Material.

Copyright Jack Fritscher, Ph. Volume 1 by Jack Fritscher, PhD. Also available in PDF and Flipbook. October 8, November 7, Legendary Twentieth-Century Sex Club. Pull Up A Chair. Macho men who survived Mineshaft nights bragged every morning after about the night before.

However, the building’s most intriguing

Wally Wallace managed that Roman orgy pit that ran 9 years and 9 days from October 8, to November 7, , at Washington Street in the Meatpacking District in Greenwich Village. Located, without irony, next door to an all-night loading dock with burly butchers in white coats shouldering bloody cow carcasses from trucks into florescent abattoirs after midnight, the Mineshaft was one of the great performance spaces in New York.

Freddie Mercury came for the sex and bought the T-shirt designed by Rex. It was at the Mineshaft that music producer Jacques Morali zeroed in on the four fetish archetypes that became the pop stereotypes of the Village People. Glenn Hughes, the leatherman biker in the Village People, was a sex-player at the Mineshaft as well as part of the leather salon around Drummer in San Francisco. The Mineshaft changed the character of sex and ritual in the s when homomasculine men came out to try everything to make up for time lost in the closet, and to create erotic interaction, no matter how existentially extreme, to achieve fully human male pleasure.

Wally encouraged negotiation and consent.

Special events, a On March 28, , I shot a two-hour video interview of this iconic New Yorker who lived New Yorkers often live in single rooms or small apartments with nosey doormen. Guys went to the baths for fun they had no room for at home. It was safer than taking strangers home. We had some pickpocket problems we controlled rather well.

Through the years, I played at the Mineshaft more than nights with armies of men uniformed in jockstraps and combat boots. We tucked brown bottles of popper into the necks of our gray wool socks while searching for any scene and any kink with any freak from anywhere around the globe. All kinds of faces and bodies made for great scenes. Mineshaft sex was not about wham-bam as much as it was about sustained edge play in a gladiator arena where leathermen could turn the magical thinking of masturbation into reality.

Fetish scenes escalated from one intensity to the next, from the mud to the stars, while players changed identity within a scene, so that a man could enter any intimate scene upstairs, or leave any orgy scene downstairs, or go up on the roof where a shirtless blacksmith tended a fire to heat branding irons. The erotic dynamic was pitched so far beyond the boundaries of civilization that a man had to have self-discipline not to get swept away in action or voyeurism too extreme for himself, but not for the other guy.

I had a doorman keep tabs for ten-days over two weekends. It was something like 33 states and over 40 countries. The only countries missing were behind the Iron Curtain. I had fun with the Germans and the Dutch. New York is supposed to be this cold city, but we did everything not to be that way.