I was recently reading an article by the late Joel Brodsky about the Mineshaft, a seemingly amazing place where a number of our elders had huge loads of fun. Apparently the most famous gay male sex club in the 1970s and early 1980s in the US, the Mineshaft was opened in 1977 and was run by Wally Wallace. It was an after hours SM club located in Manhattan on the lower West Side. It was shut down by AIDS and sex panics in 1985. (J. Brodsky, "The Mineshaft: A Retrospective Ethnography", Journal of Homosexuality, 24, 3, 233-52).

In the vicinity, there was another sex club that had as its characteristic to feature drag and sex performances. This one was named the Anvil. The Anvil was opened in 1974 and was shut down in November, 1985... for similar reasons.

Brodsky has these lines about the Anvil that I found really fascinating and thought I would share with you:

... the Anvil featured a large stage where those not engaging in other sexual or social activity could watch paid performers engage in extraordinary feats, on occasion with members of the audience.
It is likely that the floorshow at the Anvil popularized previously limited sexual practicers such as "fisting," or handballing. During the period of observation informants made recurrent references to a legendaru performance at the Anvil during which an adult female member of a family prominent in national politics allegedly got up from the audience and "fisted" an onstage performer (p. 240).

Some friends sometimes ask me why I am so nostalgic of the 1970s, a period I have never known - well, ok, I have lived in the 1970s for one year! I think that description makes the answer pretty obvious, no?

At any rate, since I am also a gossip girl, I wanted to find out who that sleazy woman was. It is true that I did not find anything really conclusive, but I might have found clues on a fascinating website that I highly recommand for the beauty of the pictures it shows and the huge amount of information it contains. I am just pasting a paragraph it has about the Anvil here:

For awhile in its early days the Anvil acquired a notoriety that drew bored members of the Rich and Famous set looking for a place to do some new slumming - shades of Cabaret! (Truman Capote and Princess Radziwill, Jackie Onassis' sister were reputed early visitors, which sounds about right - they were both sleazebags.) The after-hours atmosphere of the Anvil was rather wound up and frantic from the amount of alcohol and drugs its patrons had already consumed, and they were intent on consuming more. The drag performers often looked like revenants when they walked through the crowd they were so zonked. But their stage performances ran to the other extreme: exaggerated lip synching, bug-eyed grimaces and arms flung out in one histrionic pose after another. If you can visualize a jumped-up version of the last scene of Dialogue of the Carmelites - one done by a flock of marabou who've just mainlined amphetamine, and each in turn ascending the stairs to have a fit instead of kneeling for the guillotine - then you have the picture: serial drag diva hysteria. A few times there was an a nervously giddy, anorexic looking guy in a G-string riding a swing over the bar.

And I let you make your conclusions.