MEATPACKING FETISH SCENE
Efrain John Gonzalez's Camera Captures The Lurid Lure
From its heyday in the late-1970s through to the end of the era in the late-1990s, Efrain John Gonzalez documented the gay clubs, fetish, S&M, and body modification scenes in lower Manhattan. He focused his lens on the gritty nightlife and iconic New York City character —specifically in and around the Meatpacking District.
Bronx-born and Long Island raised, he came to New York City in 1975, after dropping out of the agricultural program at Farmingdale State College near Levittown, NY. He lived on 10th Street (monthly rent was $165), got a job as a cab driver and started taking photographs of the city, but was soon fired.
Gonzalez’s photographs are in the permanent collection of the Museum of the City of New York, and have been published in the New York Times, and The Village Voice.
We met at a coffee shop in the Meatpacking District, on the northeast corner of West 13th Street and 9th Avenue.
He has allowed us to share these photographs, but he has thousands more that document countless stories of New York City’s gay history, nightlife culture, and seedier side in the last decades of the 20th century.
ALONG THE HIGHWAY
Some of his earliest models were the transgender streetwalkers, “nice ladies, very well dressed, who were just waiting for business,” who used to walk along the West Side Highway in the late-1970s.
For this photo, Gonzalez was chatting with a person in “boy mode” who suddenly said “I gotta change.” He snapped the flash right after “she took off all her clothes and put on her dress for the night so she could work the street.”
He pulled up another photo of a group of “young kids who’d been working the streets.”
“You see they’re just young kids trying to be cross—” he stopped himself, and corrected to say “you know trangender. They dress up and were either partying or working the streets.”
Gonzalez emphazied that “a lot of these kids would just hang out, just schmooze because this was a place where you can be gay and be safe. Where could you go late at night safe for someone that was gay, to be with other gays? Well, the West Side Highway!”
ON THE WATERFRONT
Across the Highway were dilapidated piers. They were mostly gone by the late-1980s. When Gonzalez read in the newspaper that some of the last of the piers were being torn down, he splurged on color film and ran down to take a series of photos.
Such as this one of two guys sitting on the edge of a pier building “in complete disrepair, with an old barge visible behind them.”
These crumbling structures were also a rent free place for painters and sculptors to find artist studios.
“On a Sunday afternoon, you’d have all these gay guys just hanging out on the riverfront, cruising, schmoozing, walking up and down.”
AN EVER CHANGING CITY
Gonzalez has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of how lower Manhattan buildings were transformed, sold, retrofitted, and demolished from the late-1970s through the late-1990s.
One such place was a multifaceted building in the Lower East Side on 1st Ave and 2nd Street. Formerly a Jewish steam bath, the pools in the basement became the site of Club Baths, the city’s first openly gay-owned bathhouse. It shuttered during the AIDs crisis in the 1980s, and became Cave Canum.
Gonzalez pointed out the tiled walls of the steam room. “There’s the pool,” he said. “And the girls are skinny dipping in the pool, they were the Sirens, a ladies motorcycle gang.”
That bath house building was actually a composite of two structures: one facing 1st Avenue, and the other went back and angled up to 2nd Street.
Within the twisting behemoth —but above the “intertwined underground chambers”— was the Nouvelle Justine, a fetish restaurant. “You could order like a burger, fries, and a little spanking. Or some Tarot card reading with the musician Velocity Chyaldd. Or a little rope bondage.”
The building later became Lucky Changs, before it was an alleged purchase by an oil heiress. After sitting empty the building was condemned by the city, and torn down.
AT HOME IN MEATPACKING DISTRICT
In a post-Stonewall New York, Greenwich Village was the gay mecca but (because the spaces were big and the rents were cheap) gay bars and clubs pushed north and fetish clubs developed in the Meatpacking District.
While Gonzalez and his camera transversed throughout lower Manhattan, he felt an affinity for the Meatpacking District. Bordered to its north by Chelsea, and to its south by the West Village, today the Westside neighborhood is best known for its high-rent fashion, art, and food scene —and as an access point to the southend of the High Line greenway.
But back in the late-1970s through the 1990s:
“The Meatpacking District was a place to go at night if you wanted to fall in some kind of fetish. You could do just about anything you wanted here. You could dress up, dress down. You could find a place to get fist fucking or you know, this or that. You had gay bars, and fetish bars, and underground clubs. Some would come and go; some were long term. But this was the place to go. You could come down here on a weekend, and the nice thing was that they were all within walking distance. If you didn’t like the Hellfire you could go to Mother’s. If Mother’s having a private party then you go to the Lure. If the Lure had too many leather daddies then you could go to Paddles on 21st Street. It was all within easy walking distance.”
Belle Du Jour, the “Grandmother of S&M,” at the Limelight.
Women competing in a fetish contest at the Hellfire club.
Gonzalez got to know the venues and their owners. He shot at events, openings, and fetish-theme nights. Many of the clubs were in converted meatpacking facilities.
This is from a photoshoot for a uniform magazine that he did at the basement of The Lure. “These were walk-in ovens, where you would cook like 100 turkeys at a time. It looked like some sort of horrible jail.”
ILLEGAL NEEDLES
In addition to the S&M and fetish scene,Gonzalez was part of, and documented the tattoo and body modification artists. At the time —actually from 1961 until 1997— tattoo parlors were illegal in New York City. But tattooists would simply open up shop “in backrooms, or they would paper over a store window,” advertising their services with discrete “ad in the back of the Village Voice,” and skirting the law by giving free tattoos to local police officers.
Gonzalez got to know Jim Ward and his store Gauntlet, which promoted urban primitives and body modification. Back when it opened in the early-1980s “piercing was off-the-wall. I mean tattooists would run away screaming from you. I remember going, I had my nipples piercing in 1980 and people would like run away from me. And now it’s like, I take my piercings out so that I won’t be confused for a high school student.”
A CITY OF CHARACTERS
Between the art scene, clubs and tattoos world, Gonzalez came to know many iconic New York City characters.
Through classes in the late-seventies at the School of Visual arts, he struck a longstanding friendship with “a nice Jewish girl from Long Island,” Ellen Steinberg aka adult performer Annie Sprinkle “who got her name because of her speciality —she liked to pee on people.”
Gonzalez has been an official photographer for her events, recently at MOMA, and back in 1990 at her performance of Post-Porn Modernist. “At the end of the show she would have people come up, take a flashlight, put a speculum inside of her –onstage– and take a look. And see the secrets of the universe.”
Sometimes meeting such characters was by happenstance, such as at an early-1980s party where a friend encouraged him to chat up and photograph “someone important.”
He did and later found out it was Liz Eden. In the 1970s, Eden was a transgender woman undergoing a lot of stress about financing her operations.
“Her boyfriend said Don’t worry, I’ll help you get a sex-change operation. He was a really nice guy. He goes to a bank, and gets a withdrawal, and it doesn’t go well. So he goes to prison. He writes a script. The script goes to Hollywood. Al Pacino played him in the movie Dog Day Afternoon. And [Liz Eden] was the woman who he robbed the bank for.”
Other characters he would run into at parties and clubs throughout the city.
“Danny the Wonder Pony, he was an icon in the underground club scene. He was a man who had a saddle designed for his back. He actually had it crafted to fit his back. He would give people pony rides. He loved to give ladies pony rides.”
Gonzalez photographed drag queens at yearly gay pride events, including a then little-known Ru Paul in the early 1990s.
THE END OF AN ERA
He kept documenting the neighborhood through that decade.
But in Gonzalez’s retelling, the Meatpacking District changed almost overnight in 2000, after the death of notorious cheapskate and real estate mogul William Gottlieb. A character who Gonzalez described as the kind of guy who “had billions but dr[o]ve a rusty old car” and “would deliver his multi-million contracts in a paper bag.” Gottlieb. owned seemingly dozens of properties that his family quickly began to flip and sell.
“Before 1999, everything stayed the same. The rotten paint stayed the same. The grease in the streets stayed the same. The falling down bricks stayed the same.
After 2000, the properties began to flip. People began to buy the property and upgrade them. More and more and more. And I was stunned and shocked and amazed in 2005, when I heard that a corporation by the name of Apple had bought that building on the corner and was gonna open a store there.”
Today the neighborhood’s look and vibe is a stark contrast from Gonzalez’s photos.
A NEIGHBORHOOD TOUR
Just by chance, the Hellfire Club used to be right beneath the coffee shop where I had suggested that we meet. We head around the corner and down a flight of stairs to the Asian-inspired cocktail bar that now occupies the space.
He chatted up the bar’s current co-owner and held up a photo on his phone showing what the space used to be.
Gonzalez is a licensed New York City tour guide. Pre-COVID he gave tours of the neighborhood, usually to out-of-towners, or to new transplants to the city.
After leaving the bar, Gonzalez gave an impromptu tour around, circling the block by heading towards the highline on West 13th Street, he stops before we head north on Washington Street to reference a before and after photo.
The old Nebraska Meat Company building that was there for years is gone and replaced by the Standard Hotel. And there was the one way sign that’s been flipped. But there was still the telltale awning of the (former) Atlas Beef building in both photos.
Standing there, Gonzalez remarked that “now I have to do a whole new before and after photograph because they tore this down and now they have the Tesla showroom building there.”
As we walked toward the subway, he pointed out everything had been cleaned. “Even this loading dock has been sanitized” he remarked.
Across from the Apple Store (the southwest corner of West 14th Street and 9th Avenue), he pointed up at the windows above what’s now a Kiehl’s cosmetics store. That 2nd floor space had been veritable “Walmart for crossdressers and trans people. It was a place where a 300 lb, 6’ 9 crossdresser could go to get size-12 high leather boots —or a blonde babydoll wig.”
“I got a thousand stories about the neighborhood,” he said before rushing down to a train.
