‘Getting In’ captures nostalgia of ’90s gay nightlife in NYC
Ephemera: A.) A Baton Rouge drag queen with a lazy eye, or, B.) Collectible memorabilia, originally expected for short-term use. If you said A., you’re not the intended audience for David Kennerley‘s new coffee table-type book, “Getting In: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s,” from his own DAKEN Press and just out this month. Kennerley, a … Read More
If you said A., you’re not the intended audience for David Kennerley‘s new coffee table-type book, “Getting In: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s,” from his own DAKEN Press and just out this month.
An introduction by Michael Musto, a chronic chronicler of the late night social world, deftly covers the contradictions inherent in the views of gay men as narcissistic sissies, but also conscientious community activists. The collection of flyers, divided into chapters on the megaclubs, bars, activism and circuit parties, has definite historical value. The New York Public Library carries the archives of ACT UP and would be the right place for Kennerley to donate his collection, should he care to.
For those who lived through the period and were habitués of the scene, the book will induce a range of flashbacks to sweaty dance floors and late night cab rides home. For those younger folks, it will allow for a strange early nostalgia for their own unfolding youth and perhaps encourage them to hold onto what inevitably, seemingly impossibly, vanishes.
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