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Across the top width of the wall you had just passed through to enter the dance floor was a huge electric board that looked like a piano keyboard and lit up with various colors that shone on the dance floor. The dance floor itself was a large, white rectangular room with the DJ booth at the top of the wall on the center right as you entered the room. There was an open space leading west from the coat check to a wall with two doorways on either end, which were the entrances to the dance floor. Upon entering the club on the 2nd floor, coat check was on the left, with a row of banquettes running along the south wall parallel to coat check. You entered through the door on the corner of Broadway & West Houston, then up a flight of stairs. I first went to Flamingo as a guest of my roommate in the fall of 1975. adding that there were also set pieces such as a Crucifixion with the models dressed as Roman legionaries, and a Jesus Christ who would, from time to time, turn his eyes heavenward and ascend a cross. “They were the birthplace of Black parties and White parties,” says a writer Stuart Lee. The club was famous for the intensity and its t inventive parties. After passing them at the entrance they were the last women who you would see as in the beginning it was an “all male” club. The Flamingo was in an upstairs loft space, and there were two stunning women who operated the door, both with gardenias behind their ears. Started by Michael Fesco, a former Broadway dancer and a gypsy in the chorus of Irma La Douce, members paid up to six hundred dollars a year “membership” (In 1975 that was a lot of money even by gay standards).
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Since there was a constant fear police raids the club had an unlisted telephone number, but members and those in the loops knew they would find it under Gallery for the Promotion of People, Places, and Events housed at 599 Broadway. It was located on the 2nd floor of a building at the corner of Houston St. The Sanctuary (1969-72) tried to make this claim but it attracted a good number of heterosexuals couples and single women as well and was not “exclusively gay”.įlamingo was promoted as the first discotheque for an exclusively gay male clientele and opened on December 14, 1974. The Flamingo (1974) was NYC’s first exclusively gay disco. Before 12 West (1975), Crisco Disco (opening date unknown), Paradise Garage (1977), or Studio 54 (1977).