Tenth Floor

The Tenth Floor was a members-only gay nightclub in New York City that was open from 1972 to 1973. The club attracted a wealthy white gay male clientele and was based in a former industrial building in two small rooms.

History

Location and description

It opened in December 1972 and was located on the 10th floor of a former industrial building at 151 West 25th Street in Manhattan.[1][2][3] The club had minimal decoration.[4] It was established by David Bruie, Jim Jessup and David Sokoloff.[5][6] In spring and winter and spring Ray Yeats was the DJ.[6] The club had space for about 200 patrons in "two smallish rooms".[7] It was only open on the weekends.[3] The club closed in spring 1973.[7] The Tenth Floor was portrayed as the "Twelfth Floor" in Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance.[8][2]

Favoured records among the Tenth Floor patrons included "Think (About It)" by Lyn Collins and "Make Me Believe in You" by Patti Jo.[9]

Clientele

The club was aimed at white gay men.[5] In his book 33 Revolutions per Minute, Dorian Lynskey described the club as "unashamedly elitist and profoundly caucasian".[10] Dancing was seen as secondary to cruising.[5] The membership basis for entry was inspired by David Mancuso's The Loft nightclub, which enabled events to be held in a private apartment to circumvent the New York City Cabaret Law.[5] Only non-alcoholic drinks were permitted to be served to comply with the law.[11] The founders of the Tenth Floor consulted Mancuso and told him that they wanted to establish "a Loft-style party that would be strictly gay and white".[12] The club catered to a wealthy white gay "elite" where "attitude (and sex) trumped partying" according to cultural historian Alice Echols.[12] The patrons of the Tenth Floor were pioneers of the "Castro clone" style of the early 1970s.[12] Topless dancing at the Tenth Floor and the Flamingo Club may have led to the promotion of "sculpted pectoral muscles" becoming "one of the main attributes of gay male desirability".[13]

In an article on the origins of disco for The Advocate, Robert Hofler wrote that the club was associated with the Fire Island Pines "crowd" and that the club "really got going after 3am".[7] The members of the club referred to themselves as "the 500" in their belief that they were according to dance historian Tim Lawrence, "the 500 most desirable (creative, stylish, attractive, successful, knowing, etc.) gay men in New York".[4][14] Following the closure of the club, a lot of patrons frequented events hosted by George‐Paul Rosell before the opening of the Flamingo club in 1974.[7] In Guy Trebay's 2024 memoir, Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York, he recalls working at the Tenth Floor and described the crowd as "slick and professional gay men who obviously had money", and that they were known as "Pines queens" after their association with Fire Island Pines.[15]

References

  1. ^ Rifkin, Jesse (2023). This Must be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City. Toronto, Ontario: Hanover Square Press. p. 141. ISBN 978-1-335-44932-0.
  2. ^ a b ""I Want to See All My Friends At Once": Arthur Russell and the Queering of Gay Disco". Journal of Popular Music Studies. Wiley. Retrieved 1 June 2026.
  3. ^ a b "Club: Tenth Floor". Disco Disco website. Disco Disco. Archived from the original on 24 November 2007. Retrieved 1 June 2026.
  4. ^ a b "The Forging of a White Gay Aesthetic at the Saint, 1980-84 from Dancecult, 3, 1, 2011, 1-24". Tim Lawrence website. Tim Lawrence. Archived from the original on 4 September 2025. Retrieved 1 June 2026.
  5. ^ a b c d McDougall, Rennie (2026). Nonstop bodies: how dance shaped New York City. New York: Abrams Press. ISBN 978-1-4197-7112-5.
  6. ^ a b Afterwords: Real Sex from Gay Men's Diaries. Los Angeles: Alyson Books. 2001. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-55583-656-6.
  7. ^ a b c d Hofler, Robert (1998-07-21). "The first days of disco: A former New Yorker recalls the true birth of an era". The Advocate. Here Publishing. p. 50. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  8. ^ "Literary Mixtape: 'Dancer from the Dance' – Malone's Imaginary Disco Set". Lambda Literary Awards website. Lambda Literary Awards. Retrieved 1 June 2026.
  9. ^ Savage, Jon (2025). The Secret Public: A Queer History of Pop. London: Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-5713-5839-7.
  10. ^ Lynskey, Dorian (2011). 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs, from Billie Holiday to Green Day. New York City: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-167015-2.
  11. ^ ""Beyond the Hustle: Seventies Social Dancing, Discotheque Culture and the Emergence of the Contemporary Club Dancer" from Ballroom, Boogie, Shimmy Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 199-214". Tim Lawrence website. Tim Lawrence. Archived from the original on 20 September 2025. Retrieved 1 June 2026.
  12. ^ a b c Echols 2010, p. 65.
  13. ^ Echols 2010, p. 166.
  14. ^ Hilderbrand, Lucas (2023). The Bars are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and after. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-1-4780-2495-8.
  15. ^ Holleran, Andrew (July 2024). "Almost Famous". The Gay and Lesbian Review. Retrieved 1 June 2024.
  • Echols, Alice (2010). Hot stuff: disco and the remaking of American culture. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-06675-3.
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