![]() ![]() All you would hear is house music, all you would see is Chelsea boys, all you would see is the typical drag number, which could sometimes be phenomenal and other times be whatever. But there’d definitely be something missing from gay clubs. Sometimes I’ll go to gay clubs and have a good time. With me and with certain gay people that are similar to me, you’re sort of in this purgatory state where you go to a lot of straight clubs. ![]() Michael T (DJ and co-promoter of the club night Motherfucker) It wasn’t really on my radar of things I would conceivably want to do, but after thinking about it for a while, I thought that would be an opportunity to create the very club we all complained didn’t exist. Would you be interested in maybe putting something together and promoting it?” I said no. He said, “We’re running this club and we want to do a gay night. I make clothing for entertainers – I didn’t really do clubs at that time, and I had never done a club before. In 1994 I had a friend named Patrick Briggs, who had been a friend of mine for ten years and was managing a bar called Don Hill’s, a rock ’n’ roll bar. Michael Schmidt (co-promoter of SqueezeBox!) And long after it ended, the club’s influence was clear not only in quintessential pansexual New York parties like Motherfucker, Misshapes and Berliniamsburg, but in the rock revival and electroclash movements that would soon rule over Manhattan and Brooklyn. They didn’t have a friend in Rudolph Giuliani, either, who upon taking office instituted a veritable war against nightlife, wielding an early-century cabaret law to close clubs down at will.īut SqueezeBox! survived. ![]() ![]() The darkest days of the AIDS epidemic had passed, but the gay community remained on edge, remembering lost friends at the mercy of the caustic and careless mayor Edward Koch. The party birthed bands, revolutionized the drag scene and served as a hothouse for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which went on to become an off-Broadway hit and a big Hollywood movie. Every Friday, pretty boys, glam girls, rough rockers and cool celebs converged upon Don Hill’s, wearing their dirty, filthy, punk-rock best. SqueezeBox! gave gay (and straight) revelers a different kind of outlet. As techno became de rigueur in Brooklyn warehouses, muscle queens danced all night in big Chelsea superclubs, and Michael Alig led club kids on dystopian drug binges at Limelight, another music subculture emerged downtown in Tribeca, on the far edges of the west side of Manhattan at a tiny, divey rock club called Don Hill’s.īored with the options for gay men and women, rock ’n’ roll fashion designer Michael Schmidt teamed up with Pat Briggs of the industrial band Psychotica, drag queen Misstress Formika and DJ Miss Guy to create SqueezeBox!, one of New York City’s last great parties. And the gay club scene, though not yet as iconic as in its ’80s heyday, was starting to coalesce into something that could claim a spot in New York’s rich nightlife history. Williamsburg was a Polish/Hispanic/Hasidic neighborhood “hipster” was not a pejorative description for every kid from New Jersey wearing tight black jeans and the Meatpacking District still had actual meat-packers. After four years of Mayor David Dinkins’ meager one-term run, New York City still had its gritty and dangerous parts, with many pockets of Manhattan not yet gentrified to the teeth. ![]()
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