![]() After three weeks, it became a weekly Saturday sex-positive, party clubhouse attended primarily by gay men, with a high concentration of ACT UP members. MEAT originally alternated weeks with the Clit Club beginning on Friday, August 17, 1990, and was operated by Aldo H ernandez, a DJ and ACT UP and Art Positive member. ![]() Clit Club boosted the space with themes enhanced by art, video, and multiple performative experiences that included go-go dancers (cis male and female), trans dancers, dragkings, genderbenders, and girl-for-girl and gay men dancing for gay women in sexually provocative performances.Īfter the lease ended at this location in 2000, the Clit Club remained active for two more years, first at Marion’s Continental, 354 Bowery, and then at Flamingo East, 219 Second Avenue. This was reflected in the wide range of age, race, class, and gender presentations, its association with activism, its go-go dancers, pool table, dark corners, deep house music, VCR porn, dark room, and welcoming staff. Clit Club was known for its hot energetic vibe, diversity of patrons, and interior. There are few photographs depicting the interior of the party due to its no-camera policy that aimed to enhance the club’s intimacy and explicit environs as a safe space. These parties opened a larger dialogue in art and politics across communities to include the diverse experiences, voices, and practices of young and older working-class creatives, women’s sadomasochism groups, AIDS activists, students, and feminist collectives. Led by the Clit Club, this was reflected in explicitly named parties that were taking place internationally. In the 1990s, lesbian sexuality increasingly gained visibility. Hernandez soon hosted the Saturday night party MEAT at this location (see below). By 1991, Tolentino ran Clit Club as a weekly party with a dedicated staff on Friday nights and Aldo Hernandez as its first DJ. The party was conceived and initiated by activists/artists of color Tolentino and Jocelyn Taylor (aka jaguar mary), a videomaker. It became known as a sex-positive mixed party for cis and trans women who self-identified as lesbian, queer, and androgynous, and their friends. Two such parties were and Click + Drag.Ĭlit Club was the first party to occupy the space as a queer venue on July 27, 1990. ![]() ![]() They renamed it Mother, which hosted parties and events catering to a mixed crowd, including drag queens, trans people, and subversive women. In 1996, with the success of Jackie 60, two of its co-creators, nightlife impresario Chi Chi Valenti and DJ Johnny Dynell, purchased the lease and took over the management of Bar Room 432. That was soon followed by other queer weekly parties including MEAT and Jackie 60. Tolentino established the space as a queer venue first with Clit Club. Julie Tolentino, a professional contemporary dancer turned performance-installation maker, was introduced to Bar Room 432, a new, yet mostly vacant, jazz bar in the Meatpacking District, by a downtown choreographer whose husband co-owned the bar. ![]() The space operated as Bar Room 432 from 1990 to 1996, when new management took over the space and renamed it Mother, which operated until its lease ended in 2000. A portion of the ground floor and part of the basement of this former market building was a venue that hosted popular parties in the 1990s. ![]()
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