Remembering New York’s ’90s gay scene via its vibrant nightclub flyers

Jour­nal­ist and his­to­ri­an David Ken­ner­ley arrived in New York in the late 1980s, find­ing an apart­ment in Chelsea just as the West Vil­lage queer scene start­ed trav­el­ling north. In his late 20s at the time, Ken­ner­ley was strug­gling with his iden­ti­ty. ​“I wasn’t out. I was con­fused,” he says. ​“My room­mate, who was gay would try to get me to go to the Roxy, a gay club. I was scared. It took him a year of ask­ing before I said, ​‘I’m ready.’” 

Set­ting foot in the cav­ernous night­club, which dou­bled up as a dis­co roller rink, Ken­ner­ley instant­ly felt at home. And on his way out, he glad­ly pock­et­ed a wealth of bright­ly coloured fly­ers that most club patrons care­less­ly dropped on the ground. ​“I thought, wait, are you crazy?! Look at this cool pic­ture of a hot guy or a drag queen,” Ken­ner­ley says, and then adds, ​“A lot of them had $5 off [cov­er charge] so I would save them because back then, $5 was a lot of money.” 

Ken­ner­ley signed up for John Blair’s leg­endary mail­ing list and reg­u­lar­ly dropped into Rain­bows & Tri­an­gles to pick up club invites as they came out, ulti­mate­ly amass­ing an incom­pa­ra­ble archive of an era that he stashed in Gap bags inside his clos­et for decades. ​“I was just com­ing out, so I was like a kid in a can­dy store,” he remem­bers of the time, point­ing to his con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous col­lec­tions of match­books and phone num­bers scrawled on hand­writ­ten notes. 

• Read next: No one cap­tured Green­wich Village’s hey­day like Fred W. McDar­rah

With the pas­sage of time, the night­club fly­ers acquired the pati­na of arte­fact, record­ing a van­ish­ing world that is now in the rear-view mir­ror. At a time when few were pho­tograph­ing the scene, club fly­ers became the culture’s de fac­to visu­al record. With Get­ting In: NYC Club Fly­ers From the Gay ​’90s (Dak­en Press), Ken­ner­ley weaves 230 fly­ers along­side essays and inter­views with nightlife leg­ends includ­ing Lady Bun­ny, Lin­da Simp­son, Lar­ry Tee, Susan Mora­bito, and Michael Mus­to, into a kalei­do­scop­ic tapes­try of fin de siè­cle New York.

Get­ting In chron­i­cles the rise of mega clubs like Lime­light, Pal­la­di­um, Sound Fac­to­ry, and the Tun­nel as Chelsea came into its own with a wealth of small­er neigh­bour­hood spots like Esculei­ta, Splash, and the recent­ly shut­tered Bar­racu­da. The book also show­cas­es cir­cuit par­ties, sex clubs, and back rooms, which large­ly oper­at­ed by word of mouth. 

Ken­ner­ley, who con­tributed wide­ly to the new book, Queer Hap­pened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Land­mark LGBTQ+ Places, will be in con­ver­sa­tion with author Marc Zina­man on June 18 at Hive Mind in Brook­lyn. Tak­en togeth­er, the books lit­er­al­ly and fig­u­ra­tive­ly maps New York’s ground­break­ing queer scene at the height of AIDS. 

• Read next: On the front­lines of AIDS activism in 1990s New York

In a world where few had inter­net access, night­clubs became the life­line of the com­mu­ni­ty. ​“These par­ties were ben­e­fits for organ­i­sa­tions like ACT UP, Gay Men’s Health Cri­sis, and Lifebeat,” Ken­ner­ley says. ​“The LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty was going through trau­ma, and these clubs played a big part in build­ing com­mu­ni­ty by pro­vid­ing a safe space, because you have to band togeth­er to fight.” 

David Ken­ner­ley and Marc Zina­man will be in con­ver­sa­tion for ​‘Cel­e­brat­ing Lost Queer Spaces’ on June 18, 2025, at Hive Mind Book­store in Brook­lyn to dis­cuss their respec­tive books, Get­ting In and Queer Hap­pened Here.

Miss Rosen is a free­lance arts and pho­tog­ra­phy writer, fol­low her on X.

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