Losing the Meatpacking District A queer history of leather culture

The infamous “Triangle Building,” which housed an array of BDSM/sex clubs from the 1970s to the early 1990s, has been gentrified along with the rest of the Meatpacking District.

By Abby Tallmer

To write a recent history of the Meatpacking District for Gay Pride weekend, or any time of the year, is to tell 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 ensuing panic over it have effectively eclipsed memories of a time when “Meatpacking District” was not a real estate term but an ironic shorthand for the geographically delineated 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 the latest couture designs by Stella McCartney and others.

At the height of the feminist, gay and sexual revolutions of the 1960s and ‘70s through the mid-’80s, the Meatpacking District was home not to a strip of high-end boutiques and restaurants but to something altogether different: New York City’s then-thriving and mostly queer BDSM (Bondage and Discipline, Sadism and Masochism) 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 and staggered home in the early morning as the sun was rising and most New Yorkers were heading off to work. During the day, strongmen dragged animal carcasses through the garbage-filled streets. It was a site reserved only for those with strong stomachs, given the stench of dead flesh and rotting trash that characterized the area.

As a girl 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 tough-looking men clad in leather chaps and motorcycle jackets with hankies protruding from their rear pockets and keys dangling from their sides, lingering on street corners and purposefully eyeing one another, striking up conversations, offering each other a light, and often disappearing down mysterious alleyways or spilling out from or into 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 whom almost completely passed as women, and most of whom were as stunning as they were scantily dressed and were sighted most often awkwardly climbing into and out of the limos and trucks driven by the married men from Staten Island or New Jersey or some neighboring suburb 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 9 years old and was 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 and speculation. I remember riding my bike around the neighborhood, making special trips past the piers, the bathhouses and through the deserted side streets west of Greenwich Street, and down 14th Street and the short blocks just below. During my rounds, I frequently spotted leathermen who lived in my building going into the baths or darting down a flight of stairs.

Photo by Bob, courtesy of Matthew Cary and the Leather Preservation Society
Left: The front entrance of the Mineshaft Club, circa 1980. Right: The club’s old entrance is home to meatpackers today.

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, since the very same men who routinely and 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 in alleyways or in front of dimly lit clubs or bathhouses.

As I would learn much more thoroughly as I got older, 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 (and mostly gay) leather bars in the city during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Entrances to a stunning array of BDSM/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 BDSM/sex 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 before AIDS defined the era, roaming between the SM/leather bars in the Triangle District and the two most popular Chelsea leather bars, The Eagle’s Nest and The Spike.

Nearly all of these, except for the Hellfire Club and The Vault, were predominantly gay, and though this was a few years before a recognizable lesbian SM scene popped up in New York, a few stray women here and there could at times be spotted in some of the less strict men’s-only clubs. (Rumors also always circulated of the few women who had purportedly donned men’s clothing and passed as men so that they could enter the Mineshaft’s inner sanctum. Most of these women went out of curiosity only—and because it was such a taboo and a challenge—rather than because they wanted to fool gay men into having sex with them while being perceived as one of their own.) The Mineshaft’s door policy was notoriously strict, and many biological gay men were turned away each night for violating its strict leather/macho dress code.

I knew 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, etc. 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 (presumably the number of blows administered thus far) 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 or sighs were punctuated by the unmistakable sounds of flagellation: the sound of wooden paddles hitting flesh, or the snap of a bullwhip (or bullwhips) slicing through the air and landing sharply on its human target, or even the ring of a bare hand making contact with 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. (This turned out to be truer than I knew. Though I was admitted, my friend Saul, who stood behind me in line, was barred at the door because there was something “too effeminate” about him. So, what we had planned as a full evening there turned into a quick half-hour-plus tour before 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 was a full year or two before I discovered LSM—New York’s first and only lesbian SM organization, founded in 1981—at a time when I was fully convinced that no network existed for women who were interested in exploring SM with other women.

Which brings us back to the Mineshaft. I’m sure that the immediate and intense intoxication and pure exhilaration I felt upon getting past the guard and into the main play area was due as much to the liberating realization that there were no men there who cared about me (the real me, not the sock-down-my-pants-me), as well as to the overpowering smell of god knows how many bottles of poppers that hit me the minute I began to wade through the crowd. Being in the Mineshaft was, ironically, the first time I was ever able to feel what it was like to be in purely queer sexual space, a space that celebrated queer sexuality unconditionally and where anything—and I do mean anything—was possible. (Fortunately, a few years later I was able to experience similar feelings in a purely lesbian sexual space, when LSM co-founder Jo Arnone began hosting Ms. Trick, a series of women’s-only SM nights at the otherwise gay male Asstrick Club in the Meatpacking District). The Mineshaft—and I imagine the other clubs like it in the Meatpacking District—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 SM 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 “norms” and judgments.

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 then, as now, many extra-legal long-term gay couples existed, couples who were married in every sense but by law.

Back then we believed that gay liberation was rooted in sexual liberation, and we believed that true liberation of any peoples 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–’90s.

Today, when I try to explain to younger queers the history of the sexual liberation movement and describe the queer sexually liberating institutions we created, they often don’t believe me. It seems that the Meatpacking District during that period has attained an almost mythological or iconic status for the younger members of the LGBT community, so much so that it is almost impossible for them today to believe and accept the queer world of the Meatpacking District that most 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. History is so important because it teaches you never to take your present for granted, because there’s no telling how quickly and how thoroughly it will be erased.

Tallmer is a freelance writer who worked as an activist for AIDS Medical Foundation (now known as AmFAR) from 1983 to 1985, alongside Michael Callen, Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and Richard Berkowitz.