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THE BEAUTY AND THE TERROR: THE PHENOMENON OF THE BIG GAY CLUB Nishit Saran 1091 words December 7, 2000 Restaurants, bookshops, bars, health centers, NGOs, internet sites - one can make a long list of real and virtual spaces that devote themselves exclusively to gay communities across the developed world. But there is no space that brings more gay people - or at least more gay males - together in the largest numbers as does the space, the phenomenon even, of the Big Gay Club. Twilo in New York, Le Queen in Paris, The It in Amsterdam, Heaven in London all attract crowds in the thousands every weekend. Getting in is often not easy: ruthless and vicious bouncers turn many an unfashionable hopeful away. Getting in is also never cheap: up to $25 per person, traveler's checks accepted, thank you. Nonetheless, in such droves do those of the faith flock to the Big Gay Clubs every week, and with such passion, such joy, such religiosity, that one might truly call them the high cathedrals of modern gay culture. For someone from an emerging gay culture like ours – someone who might be more accustomed to furtive encounters at once-a-month pay parties or to desperate quests for love on the Internet – the spectacle of the Big Gay Club can be a truly inspiring and moving phenomenon. That such freedom, such power, such sheer strength in numbers, is possible in a matter of merely three decades – this is truly worth celebrating. I cannot forget the waves of feeling that rose to my throat when I entered my first Big Gay Club – and I distinctly remember repeating to myself, in a voice choked with emotion, the famous slogan of Virginia Slims cigarettes: you’ve come a long way, baby... In retrospect, no accident, this, to be simultaneously reminded of religion and advertising by the Big Gay Club – “pay 25 US dollars and find your God” is quite commonplace in economies of the commodity and the spectacle, in cultures of ‘the new and the more’ and the ‘use once and throw away’. But the Big Gay Club truly takes it all to new extremes. Twilo, for example, which many a gay New Yorker proudly calls “the best club in the world” offers its patrons “Media Ecstasy” – a clubbing experience where the weather itself changes smoothly to the beat of the music! In a flash, the temperature drops ten degrees, a harsh wind blows, and the entire world is cut off from you in the thickest fog you can imagine. Not your old disco fog machine, this, for the changes take place in a split second. One moment you were lost and presumed yourself dead… and the next moment, you are back on Mother Earth as if nothing ever happened. Talk about playing God with the weather… But Media Ecstasy, or even its country cousin, the Ecstasy pill, is not the only trip available. Drug dealers abound, peddling everything from poppers to peyote, cava-cava to cocaine, hash to heroin. Not that you need dealer-spotting skills to discover this. The ten-foot sign at the entrance that says “Drugs Strictly Not Allowed” gives it all away immediately. The commodity and the spirit so rarely find a common form as neat as that of the pill. But, in the Big Gay Club, what passes as the biggest commodity – and the highest icon – is, of course, the body. As easily traded as it is worshipped, the beautiful male body circulates through this space as a force that is truly terrifying. This body is monstrous: it is no longer a real body, since it has become merely the carrier of signs, interpretations and meanings that live up to (or fail to live up to) an impossible cultural vision of masculinity. Paradoxically, it is also more real than a real body – for it is pure flesh and blood, stripped of name and history. This unreal-all-too-real body is impossible to resist, and one often finds oneself, half ashamed half excited, following it into the “dark rooms” or “boys rooms” that the Big Gay Club invariably has. The dark room is exactly that: a dark room, with the extra condition that you check your inhibitions, and often your clothes, at the door. For a dark room is a place you enter to have sex in, but what strange, what terrifying sex this is! No sound, no vision, just touch… Just bodies touching bodies, bodies entering bodies, bodies exiting bodies, sex without cultural baggage, without race, class or creed, sex as one could imagine it at the beginning of time… Again, unreal yet all-too-real, this is the highest altar of the high cathedral of modern Western gay life. A few caveats: One must remember that the Big Gay Club is not the only thing that Western gay movements have achieved - one must not neglect the substantial degrees of freedom in many other aspects of individual and communal gay life that they have made possible. One must also not underestimate the importance of safe spaces – and meeting places – to gay life nor the importance of the gay club as one such space. Finally, one must not infer that the analogy with religion here is meant to be specifically Christian. There indeed might be a profound connection between Western gay culture and Western religion, but for the purpose of this essay, words like ‘cathedral’ and ‘altar’ can be easily replaced by ‘temple’ and ‘prayer room’ for what is of importance is the religious feeling. I described both the beautiful male body as well as sex in the dark room with the adjective ‘terrifying.’ I am not necessarily being judgmental. Certainly, there is much to be condemned about the Big Gay Club – its unabashed commercialism, its superficiality, its nihilism – and emerging gay cultures must be careful in their construction of safe spaces so as to not trip headlong into the traps of Big Business and mental neo-colonialism. Nonetheless, there is beauty in the Big Gay Club – as well as a beautiful politics. If sex could indeed be so playful, bodies and names and histories so fluid, if we could just let go of all the unnecessary baggage with which we overload our bodies and our organs – not just for a magical, dangerous night but in our daily lives – we would perhaps be healthier and happier individuals and communities. And it is only at the limits of capitalism, after all, that one finds the beautiful monsters, the strange new animals that will deliver us to a new world. I am reminded of Rilke here, specifically of the sense of terror that emerges in his unforgettable lines:
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