![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Peter Dawe bought the building and Daniel J. The price per ticket back then? 5 cents for matinees, 10 cents for evening shows! Aside from movies, the Bijou Theatre was alive with music and dance. It was common for the Bijou to offer three or four Vaudeville shows every day. Southey to design a movie house with a two-story ballroom above. Silent films were growing in popularity and Lillian Ashmun commissioned architect Ernest G. “Next time,” he said gruffly, “exit through the back door.” How clandestine! It was the first thing anybody had said to me at the Bijou Film Forum, and I loved it.About THE bijou The Bijou Theatre has a long and colorful history dating back to 1909. The hidden, subterranean movie house near the corner of East 4th Street and Third Avenue is a throwback to the Bijou of yore, a piece of New York’s past that the property developers have forgotten to scrub clean and an important reminder during Pride Week that not all gay culture can readily blend into the mainstream - that, for many people, subversion is part of the story too, and something worth acknowledging with more than a token visit to the Stonewall Inn.Īs I pushed through the turnstile to exit the theater, the man at the box office banged on his glass window. You won’t even find it on Yelp, as mentions of it are pretty much confined to cruising sites - a rather amazing feat in the media-saturated East Village. There’s no mention of the current-day Bijou on its sister theaters’ Websites, and it doesn’t have a site of its own. (Today it’s the site of an apartment building where one-bedrooms go for around $4,000 a month.) The latter was shut down in 1989, with the city’s health commissioner accusing Nicolaou of “ essentially operating an AIDS breeding ground with profit being the driving force.” He briefly revived it as an offshoot of Cinema Village. These days, the theater is owned by Nicolas Nicolaou, who also owns Cinema Village on East 12th Street, the Alpine Cinema in Bay Ridge and Cinemart Cinemas in Forest Hills. He was briefly an owner of the renowned Bleecker Street Cinema and also of another Bijou Cinema, on Third Avenue. Since its halcyon days, in other words, the black door has hidden queers and iconoclasts, letting them do whatever they want, street-level society be damned. Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones even took a turn at the theater in 1990, launching a music club that seems to have lasted a red hot second. (Courtesy of Queer Music Heritage)īy the 1970s, the subterranean rooms were absorbing glam rock and avant garde punk, including sounds by The Stilettos, featuring an up-and-coming Debbie Harry. In the 1950s and 60s, when drag was still considered dangerously subversive (and illegal), queens performed a famous revue here in the mafia-run Club 82, “New York’s After-Dark Rendezvous.” Elizabeth Taylor was known to drop by, along with other forward-thinking celebrities, and it’s said that Errol Flynn once played the piano with his penis.Ĭlub 82 revue. It is an incredible space, but then the Bijou Film Forum, like the Adonis, has its own remarkable history. The soundtrack was the man’s belt buckle, clattering to the floor. ![]() Latifah contemplate suicide on the ledge of a hotel. One man began to trail me, so I slipped into the cinema and sat down to watch Ms. They silently invited me in by flashing their cocks. As I did a lap through the corridor that hugs the cinema in a U-shape, they stepped to the doorways of dark, cell-like booths outfitted with wooden benches. “I guess it doesn’t get much use,” Wranger says, to which his friend replies: “Guess again.”)īack at the Bijou, I clocked the age and builds of the other men: older, mostly 50s, some with bellies, others wearing clothes and baseball caps that made them seem closeted, possibly married. (“The ladies room’s right here,” says one character to Wranger. There was also a group of all-male theaters occupying converted movie palaces - places like the 1,433-seat Adonis Theatre, which the legendary porn director Jack Deveau had immortalized in A Night at the Adonis (1978), starring Jack Wranger and Mandingo. “There was literally women walking around in lingerie and fur coats,” he recalled, “and kung fu stores, and exploitation movies, and deflated blow up dolls that were kind of collapsing in all the windows.” Ewalt had lived near Times Square in the wild, pre-Giuliani days of the late 1980s. I first became intrigued by New York’s gay porn theaters after visiting the museum-like Bowery loft of artist and DJ Scott Ewalt. The Adonis Theatre, an icon of the pre-Giuliani Times Square days, is memorialized in the art of Scott Ewalt.Īccording to photographer Stephen Barker, who documented New York sex clubs during the early ’90s, the Bijou opened around that time. ![]()
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