Legends Of The Dance

Giving Head - Prominent go-go boy Geronimo Frias, seen here at g Lounge, works mainly as a proffesional dancer and model.

Go-go boys are a staple in New York’s gay nightlife, their ubiquity almost negating their ability to arouse. But it wasn’t always that way, for go-go dancers can trace their lineage way back to the early 1960s, when women began dancing at bars like New York’s Peppermint Lounge. Artist Ronnie Cutrone, known to some as the first true go-go boy, said that Trudy Heller’s club was “the haven, the womb of go-go dancing.” The men kept it classy, he says, dancing in white shirts and vests.

Still, these dancers weren’t yet ingrained in the city’s nightlife. The action didn’t really start heating up until Andy Warhol and his Factory hit the scene in the mid-’60s. The Velvet Underground and Nico helped Andy bring go-gos to the forefront, with Mary Woronov, Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick dancing—or maybe writhing—on stage alongside the band. It wasn’t long until Cutrone found himself part of the mix. “Gerard got sick. I had been dancing around town and Andy asked me to dance with Mary,” recalls the 61-year-old. Then Gerard came back and they asked me to stay. That was my first check from Warhol Enterprises.” Soon Cutrone and his peers were part of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia event staged by Warhol and the crew.

But the dancing was never simply about partying. “We were an audience act,” explains Cutrone, who cites those days as some of his happiest. “It was more performative.” Dancing, to Cutrone and his peers, went beyond a simple creative endeavor. With it, they were breaking social barriers. As Cutrone says, “It was a form of coming out. Not about being gay or straight, but coming out of your shell. You have to take risks.” Of course there was more to it than just taking risks. In fact, Cutrone—who was once married to PR maven Kelly Cutrone—danced for almost any reason you can imagine. “I danced for political reasons, I danced for resistance, I danced for joy, to show off. I danced for a lot of reasons,” he says. And that was the beauty of the early go-go scene: the universality of it. “The sexual part was not an issue,” Cutrone asserts.

Nor was the scene about making a buck. Nightlife impresario Johnny Dynell, claims that when asked about getting tipped, Gerard Malanga laughed, “Are you kidding? They were throwing bottles at us!” No, money wasn’t the drive back then. It was about experience. But the end of the ’60s brought a change. “People learned how to dance,” bemoans Cutrone. And, with people dancing on their own, there was little need for the freewheeling antics of performance artists. “The last night we performed with the Velvet Underground, people were dancing and go-go was over.” But the movement wasn’t quite over. It was just dormant.

Go-go dancing remained relatively underground in the 1970s. Yes, there were dancers scattered in select locations, but it wasn’t until the late 1980s that go-go culture again found itself thrust into the nightlife fold. And then, as in the early days, performance remained key to the culture.

Giovanni Ortiz, who danced at Pyramid with legends like RuPaul and Linda Simpson, insists that the late-’80s scene remained about “creative self-expression,” rather than flash. But those forces would soon merge and absolutely explode in the 1990s, when bigger clubs got in on the act.

Jackie 60 remains one of the seminal parties of that era. Started by Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell—with help from choreographer Richard Move and Kitty Boots, a British fashion designer—the weekly event’s elaborate performances brought go-go culture to a whole new level, what Dynell calls “method go-go.” “Jackie was performance based. There was a new theme every week. We planned them out weeks in advance,” he says. And, yes, the Factory remained an inspiration. “One night was ‘The Boys of the Factory’ and we transformed and decorated the entire club like the Factory.” Then there was one of Dynell’s personal favorites: “Great Cruise Parks of the World,” wherein he and his cohorts “explored the concept of a cruise park at night, like in Paris and Greece and Rome. We had props. We took the stages apart to set the scenes.” But those days are long gone. “There’s nothing like it anymore,” Dynell says.

The ’90s nightlife landscape originally revolved around the performance aspect, yes, but money had started to seep its way into the scene. There wasn’t much involved, but it was there. In fact, Ortiz took a break between 1989 and 1993, but returned to raise money for his brother’s hospital bills. And, as dancing become more dollar-oriented, the entire aesthetic shifted, too. “The ’90s were more flesh-oriented and about driving sexual urges,” he laments. And the new millennium only fueled that trend, which, Giovanni insists, “diminished the creative expression.” “Go-go dancing’s now about erections. It’s not about costumes, but about flesh.” The universality of the Factory had been stripped down to the bare, gay essentials.

Dynell credits the past decade’s real-estate boom—and escalating rents—with nightlife’s decline. “The only people who can afford to live in New York now, in Manhattan and even Brooklyn, are not that interesting.” He specifically singles out Hell’s Kitchen: “Go to Hell’s Kitchen—I see these guys with sweaters wrapped around their shoulders. What the hell is that?” By the early 2000s go-go dancers had ceased to be part of a larger performance but neither were they on the fringe. The go-go boy had become a bona fide business just as the city’s gentrification had reached an all-time high.

Yes, the new millennium brought nightlife and its go-go culture a more lucrative business for performers and promoters alike, paving the way for personalities like Jonny McGovern and Daniel Nardicio to unleash a new breed of bouncing beauties. Don’t get twisted, though: there may have been more money involved, but boundaries were still being broken, just in a different way, like fisting parties being put on at The Slide. Still, paychecks had definitely become a major player in the rise of go-go’s most recent generation.

I spoke with a number of boys who danced at the turn of the century and every one of them cited money as one of the most alluring incentives. Jeff Whitty, now best known for his hit play Avenue Q, fell into the business when Nardicio asked him to fill in for a Slide dancer who had fallen ill. He soon found it hard to resist the monetary reward. “I was poor, poor, poor, and dancing was a fantastic job that fit my hours.” And, of course, it wasn’t a total drag. “It happened to be a total ridiculous blast. It definitely beat temping and catering,” he remembers.

It’s tempting to say that the allure of money morphed the artistic heart of go-go culture, and that’s true to some extent. But that doesn’t mean the boys on the box lost their heart all together. Though he, too, cites money as a motivator, Next Magazine’s own columnist Matt Bell describes his past go-go dancing as an act of resistance. No longer necessarily a form of coming out, as Cutrone had described it, go-go culture in the ’90s and beyond represented a big middle finger to the city’s establishment: “The defiance for me came in two forms: Saying ‘fuck you’ to the awful Guiliani-era crackdown on public nudity and dancing in bars.” Whitty, too, saw defiance in his nightlife experience. “I was working during a hideous crackdown by the Bloomberg administration against dancing in bars. We all felt like renegades.” The original spirit lived on, just in a different form.

Despite the underlying resistance and ever-expanding business of go-go dancing, there are still men who dance just for the love of the game. Chase Hostler, a 24-year-old who dances regularly at Hiro and Club 57, originally came to the city to hit up Broadway. But, emboldened by a nascent gay identity, Hostler found himself at The Slide, where Nardicio persuaded him to dance. Though the money definitely helped draw him in, it was and has always been about the performance. “I do have a huge passion for dance. I love to dance. It’s definitely the one thing that makes me happy.” He goes on, “I would be so happy if I could dance at Hiro every Sunday for the rest of my life.” And that’s the rub: While many of us simply see these dancers as a piece of ass, there’s more to their action than just arousal. As Giovanni explained, “People have a misconception that go-go dancers are brainless, but that’s stupid. Not every go-go boy is doing it for money or to be a beauty.”    N