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March 2004 Cover
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NYC sex club prepares for Black Party weekend
New York-- The Black Party, thrown by The Saint at Large, is the
noir-est of the big circuit parties. This year, it's happening Saturday March 20th, 11pm to 3pm, next day, at
Roseland Ballroom (browse to www.saintatlarge.com or call 212-691-6067 for your, yikes, $100 tickets). Last year, organizers got in trouble from the Safe-Sane SM and Lesbigay
Antiviolence crowd for their promo poster depicting a youth sporting black eye and split lip. The poster glamorized violence, declared the
preventionistas-- an objection a bit rich given how the
poster's mere suggestion of off-frame injury compares with the graphic, spare-no-bloodspurt depictions of mayhem gushing regularly from TVs and movie-screens. As if violence were not to
some degree a fact of life, or split lips and black eyes things that go down in boxing rings as well as dark alleys. As if bloodied men do not summon the milk of male tenderness-- think of
Walt Whitman, soul-wracked consoler, in Civil War field hospitals. As if self-designated anti-hate campaigners don't just love sending the people
they hate off, under specially-enhanced
sentences, to prisons-- where beatings, rape, and murder are institutionalized with the (wink-wink!) blessing of the state. All this is by way of saying that the Black Party is pleasantly un-PC, a
lingering echo of The Saint, the legendarily bacchanalian dance club shuttered by New York City authorities in 1988, which epitomized turn-of-the-80s homosexcess. Which means the Black
Party draws a huge crowd to NYC everywhere from East Hither to Outer Thither. Which is why (to get finally to the point) the folks
at El Mirage, the NYC sex club, (253 East Houston
Street; 212-253-7877) have decided during Black Party weekend to stay open a staggering 56 hours "straight" to help take the Black Party's feverish, hallucinatory revelry to an even higher
pitch. Special weekend-only memberships are also available. Doubtless NYPD Vice and the Surgeon General would not approve, but who's asking?
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Queer n There!
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