rjjnyc

That's so cool, thank you for the ID. Sorry if I misled anyone, the profile just looked a little like Willi to me and although I can only really conjure up two recollections of late morning vogueing, he was there both times, one time doing these fabulous freeze frame moves to the stabs of "Dub Break" while someone worked the lights in time to give a flash photo effect. Not sure I'd stake my life on it, but think that was the first weekend after I moved here, 1/5/92 (15 years ago...ouch!).

My recollection, FWIW, is that by the time they belatedly decided to make an effort to regulate entrance like this, the writing was on the wall and the original vibe of the club had been lost. Frank Broughton writes about this eloquently in his "Death of the Sound Factory" article on djhistory.com. The first time I got asked was sometime in early 94 when I took two women friends that were visiting from London, it was simply along the lines of "do you know this is a gay club." I had never been asked, or witnessed anyone else being asked, prior to that. Until stories began appearing in the media, there simply weren't a lot of straight people trying to get in, plus there was also the dangerous reputation (there were still occasional fights among the Tracks crowd as of early 92).

Got moved here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlWkZa7d8xI I put a few screen captures of the great Factory footage here: http://www.scientitian.com/weblog I think that's Willi Ninja you can see walking the floor in the last few shots. You can also see people sitting on the huge Levan bass horn at the base of the speaker stack in the background. Sort of lost track of this thread but danceshake is right, the Sound Factory followed the Garage model and was straight on Friday nights and gay on Saturdays. Fridays didn't run so late though, and those parties got nixed sometime mid-1992.

Big downside of having been around: means you're old. To steal one of Dorian Carey's lines "put me down as 20 and say it's a two-for-one sale honey." And I actually wasn't around in 89, didn't get to go until the end of 90 when Frankie Knuckles was alternating weekends with David DePino. I'm not even sure why I started this thread really, although I guess I was harrumphing a bit because I think a documentary about the Sound Factory could be pretty interesting if it covered the full span of the club's life in a thoughtful way. Also this mailer is kind of a blueprint for Pacha as well so it seemed like something that might be of fairly mainstream interest.

I was thinking perhaps it might be Jan not Jun but I don't think so (see below). It's maybe also worth mentioning that the original SF crowd had already undergone at least two big shifts prior to it closing; the influx of more and more Roxy queens in 92/93 (along with a drop in numbers of black & latino gay men and former Garage heads) and then the influx of curious but rather clueless straight people over the course of 94 which, along with Junior's shift to a harder more monotonous sound (or at least longer periods of that kind of sound), changed the vibe of the club dramatically. The tragic reality is also that "the monster" (as people used to call HIV) had cut a terrible swathe through the crowd that populated the club when it first opened in 89.

It was sent to the mailing list, it's postmarked Jun 1996 so the "Seasons Greetings" are a little weird. Wasn't taking a potshot at the later incarnation of the club by posting this, there was just some comment in the video about the original club being gay only because Junior's following was, which strikes me as a silly rewriting of history. It was interesting to learn that Richard Grant stuck to his ethos in a lot of ways, taking care of the clientele with free fruit and water fountains, maintaining the sound system, etc.

Never went to the 46th St. space so never thought about posting this anywhere before, but after seeing a clip from an online documentary about Jonathan Peters era SF and re-reading this mailing, I realized that it is actually an irony-filled historical document (e.g. "New York's premier Gay Alternative Underground Nightclub" "gay men and women come to our club to have fun with other gay men and women") that appeared right on the cusp of the big changes that occurred in NYC clubs in the mid-90s.