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I first became aware of the presence of leather bars in Greenwich Village and the meatpacking industry while driving a taxicab at night in NYC in 1975 till 1978. I would see the leather clad men walking down the dark streets of the meatpacking ¬Ýat night, on their way to gay fetish bars like The Spike, Badlands, and The Eagle, and I was drawn to this forbidden sexuality. I began to capture the life at night with a Nikon camera loaded with Tri-X film. At first I covered the streets, shooting street people, trans sex workers, the old brick factories with meathooks, and the traffic at night. Walking those empty streets was like being at the end of the world. You were all alone on deserted streets, no cars, no people, just silence and a feeling of lost isolation. So I walked those scary streets and tried to capture that isolation on film. Then in 1980 I discovered the one and only Hellfire Club. It was located in an old decaying, civil war era, under the street vault, and I would go there every¬ÝFriday¬Ýand¬ÝSaturday¬Ýnight, playing in the back-rooms, using the glory-holes, finding all kinds of sex, love and passion, staying till 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning and sleeping late on¬ÝSunday. I began to visit more places, like J's, Badlands on West St, and gay porno houses scattered up and down West st.
In the years between 1970 and 2002 the meat packing district became the central hub for the city’Äôs queer and underground sex and S&M fetish culture and creative art. If you wanted something kinky, you went to the meatpacking district which started on 14th Street and Ninth Ave and stretched out to the abandoned piers and down to Christopher St. If you looked around hard enough, you could fuck, spank, eat, dress, fist, piss, get pissed on, dress up, dress down, change genders, get fucked, drink, smoke, and just plain hang out to your heart’Äôs content in the many crazy places that found a home among the old brick factories of this industrial wasteland. This small district was home to many of the city’Äôs top sex and fetish clubs. Their short walking distance to each other made it possible for each to cross pollinate each other and feed off the energy and diversity that they all brought to the district. The closeness of all those leather, trans, and fetish clubs in one small insular district created a critical mass that made the neighborhood alive with its own energy. And I wanted to capture it on film!
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