DRUMMER FEATURE ARTICLE
©Jack Fritscher. See Permissions, Reprints, Quotations, Footnotes

MEN’S BAR SCENE
Manhattan’s Divine Decadence...

The Mine Shaft
by Jack Fritscher

AUTHOR'S HISTORICAL CONTEXT INTRODUCTION
DRAFT VERSION

Written August 1977 and published in Drummer 19, December 1977.

This feature article was one of the first “out” features that detailed an actual sex club; particularly, this was the first article written about the first and always foremost sex club, the immediately legendary Mine Shaft, 835 Washington Street, New York.

            I must make warning that anything and everything anyone has ever said or written about the Mine Shaft is true. Timing is everything; the Mine Shaft could only have happened in the 70’s; if it occurred today, its mystique and power would be offset by viruses. The 70’s was a more innocent, but not naive, time that those who were there remember, and those who weren’t often trash out of envy that they missed the decade. The Mine Shaft, where the only erotic limit was snuff, was an actuality that made every potentiality possible.

            The best media “fictionalization” of the Mine Shaft, featuring actual Mine Shaft regular customers as atmosphere extras, is the William Friedkin film, Cruising. Non-leather Manhattan gays famously picketed the film during its shooting on location, but Friedkin’s depiction of leathermen holds up as a psychological murder mystery in which male sexual identity is the main theme. Also, it is fun to freeze-frame Cruising to see a veritable gallery of otherwise lost-to-history familiar faces “acting” around star Al Pacino, including the 60’s Latin porn star, Fernando.

            My friend, Jack McNenny, who owned the flower shop–the scatologically intentional Gifts of Nature–at 6^th and Houston, introduced me to the Mine Shaft, which really needed no introduction, as from its first night it was a word-of-mouth scandal even to New York. It was the height of the Titanic 70’s, and everyone who was anyone traveled from Studio 54 down to the West Village to try to get into the after-hours Mine Shaft.

            Art and artists got down on their knees like everyone else to play in the democracy of the Mine Shaft.

             Mick Jagger was turned away for showing up with a couple of women, who, like sneakers and business suits, were not on the list. Once in awhile, some women disguised as men made it into the Mine Shaft. Like Woodstock and Stonewall, if as many of them made it as claim, the place would have been crowded with women.

            Punk rock singer and poet, Camille O’Grady, was actually admitted to the Shaft one night when she showed up in full leather with a couple of very hot male slaves in tow. Camille O’Grady was rivals at CBGB’s with punk diva Patti Smith who was coupled with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe the way Camille O’Grady was coupled with Drummer writer and photographer, Robert Opel, who streaked the 1974 Academy Awards, and was murdered in his San Francisco gallery, Fey Way, by a gunman who mercifully did not shoot Camille who was present during the robbery.

            My friend, Robert Mapplethorpe, shot many photographs in the Mine Shaft, including one of the Mr. Mine Shaft contestants, DATE. Manager Wally Wallace was quite conscious of the documentary value of photography in the legendary Mine Shaft. Most of the Mine Shaft photos by Mapplethorpe have disappeared, presumably into the Mapplethorpe Foundation, because they are not as formal and technical as Robert’s exquisite studio photography. See the outlaw memoir of what happens to outlaw art, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. For all his bad-boy reputation as an artitst as well as his involvement with Wally socially at the Mine Shaft, Mapplethorpe really preferred private sex to public sex, and told me so frequently. In the area of photography, the Mine Shaft broke the historical taboo against cameras in gay bars and venues. Thousands of photographs, shot by hundreds of photographers, actually exist, as do videos like Fisting Ballet, shot by the Skulls of Akron–and long-since censored by the United States government.

            In 1989, Wally Wallace, the founding and only manager of the Mine Shaft, and its total creative force and code enforcer, granted me a three-hour interview which I recorded on videotape for Palm Drive Video’s history project. At that time, he offered access to more than one hundred photographs shot inside the Mine Shaft for inclusion in the video documentary as well as for historical publication. So unassuming were we all with one another in the 70’s (when we were all rather much friends and not the competing artists and personalities that emerged viciously in the 80’s and 90’s), that Wally–who always called Robert Mapplethorpe “Bob–had a couple of original Mapplethorpe prints tossed unprotected into his suitcase with the other photographs. I lifted the Mapplethorpe photos up with two fingers by the corner, as if they were sacred objects, and told Wally how much they were worth in dollars. He shrugged, because he was totally unassuming, but also so very disgusted with gay culture at large when he gave me his documentary interview which I intended to excerpt in Drummer. The ultimate irony was that, after Drummer’s offices were destroyed by the 1989 earthquake, the knowledgeable publishers sold the magazine off. During the 90’s, when that interview was ready to publish, the very latter-day editors twisting Drummer to their own agenda, shunned the very idea of an interview about a long-over sex club by “Wally who?”

            My own experiences at the Mine Shaft, which I attended religiously for years, are glossed, of course, in this 1977 feature article in which I was tub-thumping for the Mine Shaft as a place of necessary pilgrimage for any grown-up masculine-identified gay man. I lived bi-coastally between New York and San Francisco during the 70’s. When I was in Manhattan, I’d alternate nights between the rather vanilla Everhard Baths, which burned down in 19XX, and the Mine Shaft with its more extreme action of nipples, slings, fisting, piss, bondage, whipping, and scatology. The group dynamic was such high energy that you had to be in control of yourself so as not to get swept away in action that was too extreme for yourself.

            Sometimes the very personal is the way to, if not universality, at least to historical feel.

            Scenario 1: Interior Mine Shaft. 2:30 AM. A very handsome leatherman and I, both stripped to the waist, pec to pec, nipple to nipple, began bumping belt buckles, and playing with our leather belts, which turned into a mutual belting session, chest and back and shoulders, which turned on a third man who joined us, increasing the round of beltings, as the energy shifted and two ganged up on the third, and the trio of us migrated slowly away from the crowded room to a more private corner, and the belting increased to the intensity of, say, two guards in a Georgia prison beating an inmate, escalating in consensual intensity until the ferocity rose to a level of awareness of what being beaten by belts was about, to the moment where the quintessential intellectual curiosity is satisfied, is transcended, and the scene having reached its apogee begins to descend into nothing but physical subjection to brutality, and I said, stop, and they continued, and I said, No, stop, and they continued, and I crawled out from under them and said, Really, no, stop, and they stopped in the wonderful bonding, knowing finally that I meant stop. I got the point–the experiential definition of what belting and beating is–and reached my limit, and we smiled, and I rose up, and as quickly as I rose to my feet from under their belts, a fourth man, who had been watching from the doorway, fell to his knees at the booted feet of the three of us, and the belting began all over again, on him.

            The very architecture of the Mine Shaft as well as the shifting crowd allowed scenes to flow from one intensity to the next, and the players to change within a scene, so that a man could enter any scene, or leave any scene, exactly when and how he chose, always careful not to break the erotic trance of the scene.

            Scenario 2: Interior Mine Shaft. 3:30 AM. Another night. In a corner, on the first floor of the Mine Shaft, an incredibly handsome man, well built, started out giving a certain vibe in the middle of the room. He was soon backed into a corner by about a dozen men worshiping his wonderful body. For almost a half hour, the small gang stroked, petted, and licked at his flesh naked but for a dirty piss-soaked jockstrap and boots. On their knees and standing, they shuffled in towards him, and reshuffled themselves among themselves, sucking on each other’s cocks, working nipples, writhing in orgy between his big, hairy thighs. On a closer look at him, he was well worthy of desire.

            I reached my right hand over and through the scrum of men thrashing around his legs and torso and touched his nipple. Surprisingly, he looked up, smiled, and reached out toward me, leaning into him, both judging what this erotic negotiation meant. He had that light in his eyes that made me feel he read us both. He was so hot I figured to do anything he wanted. He wasn’t shy. He grabbed onto my nipples and pulled himself out of the worshiping suction toward me, and kept flowing by me, towing me by the pecs into the next room where a sling hung momentarily vacant. Neither asked the other our motivation. And what happened, happened very fast. He walked me up to the sling hung from huge 8x8 posts, unbuckled my belt, peeled my jeans down around my ankles, knocked me back into the sling, and I was thinking was I ready for this specific trip within the general erotic possibilities of the Mine Shaft, when my ankles went up into the stirrups, and loose change fell to the floor from my jean pockets, and he leaned into my biggest arch, and drove his hand skillfully, and most importantly, realistically, into me, with no foreplay but an intense smile, and no drug other than grass and desire, because we both had clicked into the “whatever” of the moment, and I was glad I had hosed out a couple of hours before, receiving his big fist on his powerful arm driven by his beefy torso and his intense face. He wanted me to cum. Maybe his game was harvesting cumshots from as many guys as possible. Sometimes a hardon is hard to come by during a butt trip, but his drive summoned up all my cooperation, and I came to please him, and myself with him, the two of us connected fist to ass. Tennessee Williams’ Blanche says, “Sometimes there’s God so quickly.” And as fast as I came, he leaned over and kissed me, turned and walked off into the crowd. Two other men, witnesses to the collision, unhooked my ankles, and I had to make the only crucial decision at the Mine Shaft: whether to go upstairs to the bar to reload for a second round, or to head down the stairs to the street hoping that among the butchers in white shouldering bloody carcasses of meat, I could shout, “Taxi.” It was always symbolic to me that sides of meat were hanging from hooks outside many of the warehouses around the Mine Shaft. –Jack Fritscher, 8 March 2002

©2002, 2003 Jack Fritscher

The feature article was written in August, 1977,
and published in Drummer 19, Month 1977