In the summer of 1982, James Petersen, Playboy’s longtime advice columnist, called me with an unusual proposal. Known as “the Playboy Advisor,” Petersen had an assignment to cover the era’s notorious sex clubs in New York City. But he had a problem: He needed to be with a woman to enter.
At many of these clubs, women were welcome to come alone or with female friends, sometimes enticed by free or cheap admission. Men were not. The rule may have been unchallenged sex discrimination, but everyone agreed that without such a roadblock, the clubs would be overrun with horny guys and lose all appeal. Given his position, Jim could have walked in alone, but he liked to practice fly-on-the-wall journalism. He didn’t want to be tainted by managers who might manipulate his experience to get a positive review.
Most of Petersen’s gal pals had turned him down. He had a better angle on me: He knew that I, as a sociologist, find all social scenes interesting and informative. He offered to sweeten the deal with a few dinners at good restaurants before our outings. I told him I had my own issue: I was recovering from surgery and still on crutches. I didn’t want to go into an S&M club and look like the dummy who forgot her safe word. No problem, Jim said. I’d lean on him, then when tired, could sit on the sidelines and just observe while he explored the backroom scenes alone. The crutches would stay at home.
So I told Jim: Sure, I would hobble into New York’s sex clubs with him. Our adventures became a classic Playboy story, “A Walk on the Wild Side,” published in the August 1983 issue. In some ways it chronicled the end of the old sex-club days in New York, when the AIDS epidemic fueled a fear of sex and gentrification put rents out of reach for anything but mainstream businesses. I thought back to the article recently as a new wave of suspicion of sex positivity seems to be emerging, not to mention of the people who engage in, say, BDSM. What I saw those nights remains an instructive lens on what really goes on in those scenes—and what, decades later, many still seem to get wrong about the people who are part of them.
When it came time to execute our mission one summer night, Jim studied the sex club guide in the bygone tabloid Screw, then announced our action plan. Visiting Plato’s Retreat, considered the era’s most infamous sex club, was a must; Jim had visited four years earlier when the club was in its prime and the crowd was young and exuded sexual energy, and sightings of celebrities and porn stars were commonplace. But the half-life of “hip” in New York is famously short: The club had left its stylish Upper West Side location inside the Ansonia Hotel for a dowdy warehouse area on West 34th Street.
Jim wisely assumed the amateurs at Plato’s Retreat would need more time to get their groove on and suggested we start at Show World. According to Screw’s guide, it had the hottest live sex act in town. Professionals got it on there at every time of day or night. At 7:30 Saturday night, we took a cab to 8th Avenue in Times Square. Show World, with its strobing bright lights, was the city’s largest sex emporium, commanding 22,000 square feet in four stories. Intending to check out the peep-show booths afterward, we went upstairs to see the live sex acts.
As we approached the ticket booth, a couple was leaving, and the woman volunteered a warning: “It’s boooring.” This didn’t deter a man with an assignment and expense account: Jim paid the $6 admission for each of us, and we entered a dark theater and took seats in the back. The audience was sparse and mostly male. The stage was simple: A raised platform with a double bed. Two women, after doing a horizontal dance to the disco beat, shifted to mock doggie-style humping. The audience appeared to be half-asleep. At the song’s end, the actors abruptly stood up, put on robes, and exited down our aisle.
When the music resumed, a woman got up on the stage solo and changed the sheet. Her act included a long plastic vibrator. At this sight, some guys sat up straight to pay attention. But they really seemed interested when a young man joined her on the bed, and she began to fellate him until we could all see why he was hired. Soon, they moved to penetration. Their moves were graceful and erotic, but neither seemed turned on. At song’s end, he withdrew. Orgasm didn’t seem to be the goal. Jim returned later that week to interview him and learned he did 10 shows a day; no one could expect him to get off 10 times.
We left to check out the booths, where Jim put tokens in and the shutter slid open to reveal a naked woman, but descended what seemed like a minute later, prompting any motivated peeper to keep pumping tokens in so he could climax. I found this partitioned interaction so depressing that I asked Jim if we could please catch another cab and get to Plato’s Retreat.
It was around 9 p.m. Licensed as a private club, not a public business, Plato’s Retreat had Jim buy two “memberships” at the door. His was $70. Mine was $5. One rule on their list that we tacitly agreed to was “clothing optional.” Many people obliged, but I found the jiggling of nude disco-dancing more comical than erotic.
We set out to map the area and walked through the darkened video room. The few couples who were there lying on pillows were eyeing the other couples. That scene was pretty dead, but it was still early. We moved on to the pool and saw three naked women giggling and splashing each other while couples on the sidelines gazed unabashedly at their suitless bodies.
We observed no mate-swapping, but did see two young couples exchanging phone numbers. All the other “members” seemed to be in their 40s or older. It seemed that some people were there to be aroused by watching others being lustful so they could borrow that sexual energy to use with their own partner later at home.
Indeed, the most visible enthusiasm we witnessed was in the buffet room, where pizza slices in the tall stack of grease-stained boxes were so popular that a delivery boy hurried to replenish the supply. (The tuna salad next to some split bagels was wisely passed over.) The inordinate attention to such a sad-looking buffet only highlighted everyone’s boredom or discomfort. Establishments like Plato’s couldn’t get licensed to serve liquor, and if ever there were a place you could use a drink, this was it.
I suggested to Jim that we call it a night and quickly get to a bar to debrief. There, I suggested the line “If you’ve ever wondered what your parents look like making love, go to Plato’s Retreat.” It made it into his article. The supposed vanguard of moral decay around the city was mostly older domesticated folks looking for a little thrill.
Disappointed by the recommendations in Screw, Jim changed tactics. He consulted our old friend, the legendary late Howard Smith, who penned the counterculture “Scenes” column for the Village Voice. Part of Jim’s assignment was to cover the BDSM scene in New York. Not sure if he could make this scene sexy for the vast majority of Playboy readers, Jim also worried about his own reaction, until Howard told him that most places revolved around mistresses and male slaves. (In Jim’s mind, men were the drivers, and women more responsive.) We both admitted nervousness about what we might find on our night out.
Nevertheless, from the cab drop-off at 11th Avenue and 14th Street, we walked around following Howard’s directions for how to find the unmarked door of the Hellfire Club, the infamous star of the kink scene in the Meatpacking District that is now long gone. Now home to Dos Caminos, a chain Mexican restaurant, 675 Hudson St. that night was the entry point to a narrow staircase descending to the dark basement entrance to the Hellfire Club. Referred to as “Little Flatiron,” the 1849 triangle building was a natural fit for storied sex clubs, like the Manhole and the Vault, where gays and straights mingled in the brick-lined vaults that crisscrossed underneath the building and extended under the street.
It was 1 a.m. when we arrived. This time the toll was $15 for Jim, $5 again for me, and we entered after affirming that we were not cops and wouldn’t do drugs.
The walls were painted black with just a few colored bulbs to light our way. We passed unoccupied shackles, then a naked bartender serving drinks (“juice,” or so they claimed) to bare-breasted, leather-outfitted women. Jim laughed as he pointed to the DJ; from the sound system, Elvis crooned “Don’t be cruel.” This outer room throbbed with energy, unlike our earlier venues. Outside the building we saw loitering leather-clad men and women holding their Doberman pinschers on leashes; inside we saw only women in revealing leather outfits holding leashes attached to studded collars worn by their man-slaves. More arresting was the sight of a man wearing a tutu, a ski mask, gold ballet slippers, and pantyhose cut out at the crotch revealing that the gold chain around his neck also encircled his genitals. Jim asked me if I thought the guy got there by riding the bus. We talked with the leathermaker as he crafted a wrist gauntlet for sale; he said that a lot of guys took the tunnel from Jersey and changed clothes in their cars after parking at the dark piers. Hellfire was a place to express your inner self, but these people commuted from the suburbs like anyone else.
We left the safety of the main room to explore the labyrinth of backroom stalls and partitions. A young woman sitting on a white-haired man’s lap was servicing any man who got there first while the old man watched expressionless. (According to a spectator I spoke to—obviously a regular—the couple had been coming for two months.) When I looked away from a man in a corner jerking off only to see another young man push his member into a “glory hole,” I decided it was time for me to sit and rest on one of the benches that lined the main room and let ever-brave Jim go deeper down the rabbit hole for his story.
I wondered whether I was projecting anything about myself: Did I look like a submissive or a dominant? I was approached by several young men, some quite preppy looking, and kept track with my fingers: An equal number hoped I was a “dom” as hoped I was submissive. One asked if I was into S&M, then before I could answer, he complained that it was hard to find a submissive woman there. Could he spank me? Those wearing costumes signaling their roles minimized unwanted approaches. The pickup lines were all new to me, but in truth, it all seemed to be just another variation of a singles bar. The people seemed pretty nice.
I moved closer to the mistresses who were holding their men on leashes and closed my eyes to just listen. I heard one woman announce to another that she had to face that it was time to get both of her sons to an orthodontist; didn’t the other woman’s daughter have orthodontia? Did she like the doctor? Would she recommend him or any other in Hoboken? I laughed out loud, finally understanding that I could hear the same conversation if I eavesdropped on women playing canasta or mahjong. At that moment, I realized my experiences and insights from our sex tour would be very different from Jim’s. But it was time to go back into the vaults to find him and call it a night. Oh, if only we’d had cellphones in 1982.
One last venue in lower Manhattan and we were done. Jim saw in an ad that the show at Belle de Jour would start at 9 p.m. the next night. We arrived a bit late, so we did a quick tour of the dungeon at street level and then rode a small, rickety elevator up to the loft’s theater, where the show had already begun. The short act in progress was a priest punishing a young woman who had confessed her carnal thoughts. Next, a naked young man was tied to a cross with a rope that looped around his scrotum while a dominatrix snapped at him repeatedly with her whip, berating him verbally, while her three female assistants kicked his legs and feet with their spiked heels. For the finale, Belle asked if anyone in the audience would like her to spank him or would like to come down to the stage and spank one of her girls. When one volunteer appeared to take this too far, Belle stopped the man, berated him, and announced it was time for punch and cookies. Show over.
Once again, there was a modest buffet on a small table that featured a white porcelain punchbowl in the shape of a circle of breasts, each with a bright-red nipple. Getting a cup of punch was the young man who had been tied to the cross. I decided I’d ask if he was a paid participant. Oh no, he laughed, he didn’t get paid. He came as often as he had time, but that was scarce these days as he was a professor of math at a prestigious New York university and about to come up for his tenure review. I couldn’t believe my ears. I had just been denied tenure at another top school and was dealing with all the feminists who, knowing I had surpassed all the requisite accomplishments, were pushing me to sue for sex discrimination. I admitted that I, too, was a professor who recently had gone up for tenure. He asked how many articles I had published. I fled.
Again, I was struck by an inescapable conclusion, perhaps obvious to many by now, but revelatory to me then: Patrons in places like this are nothing out of the ordinary. They’re regular people. But in his perceptive article, Jim identified one way the people we saw were different, a point worth remembering today: “S/M is more involved than regular sex. You don’t just put it in and thrust. You create a script, a fantasy. Then you act it out. It’s more elaborate, more intense and more demanding.” It’s a lesson that remarkably, more than 40 years later, people still seem to struggle to understand, especially when women profess to desire this kind of sex.
When we realized that all the other people had left, Jim and I scooted to the elevator. Also waiting were infamous porn king Ron Jeremy and two women Jim recognized from porn. Probably overloaded, the elevator got stuck between floors. No one heeded the emergency alarm bell. Indeed, we were alone in the building. The women panicked, and one started screaming for help. Jim tried to calm her down, but she carried on screaming. With his burst of adrenaline, Jim forced the doors open and then helped each of us climb out to safety and a quick exit from the building.
I got home after midnight and didn’t hesitate to call and wake Barbara Nellis, my best friend, in Chicago. As longtime book editor at Playboy, Barb got me into the Playboy network. I said, “If I die on some crazy Playboy assignment, promise me you’ll call my mother and tell her I was working for the magazine. Don’t let her think I left this world because I was into some kinky stuff she wouldn’t understand.” Borrowing the on-point tagline from Jerry Seinfeld, I added: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
