Boy Bar

Overview

Paul McGregor's intimate St. Marks gay bar where talent booker Matthew Kasten built the Boy Bar Beauties, a polished, showbiz-inflected drag revue that launched Connie Fleming, Mona Foot, Raven O, and dozens of others into East Village legend across a decade (1984–c. 1994).

Boy Bar occupied 15 St. Marks Place in a two-story former garage that Paul McGregor, the hairstylist credited with inventing the 'Shag' cut and the inspiration for Warren Beatty's character in Shampoo, had worked through since 1965. After running the country's reportedly smallest roller disco out of the same footprint in the late 1970s, then operating a short-lived straight bar called McGregor's Garage, McGregor pivoted to a gay clientele around 1984, reasoning (per Lady Bunny's later recollection) that gay men were 'less quarrelsome.' What emerged was a sweatbox of a room: tight, loud, the line between stage and crowd often dissolved. McGregor himself would occasionally perform flute solos, a participatory holdover from the culture he'd built on the block across two decades. The room's lasting identity was shaped by talent booker Matthew Kasten, who introduced a structured drag revue model (the Boy Bar Beauties) that distinguished the bar from its neighbor the Pyramid Club a few blocks east on Avenue A. Where the Pyramid was art-school anarchic, Boy Bar had showbiz polish: themed shows, a strict costume code ('NO WONKY SHOES EVER'), painted backdrops, and choreography. Kasten named performers as much as he booked them: he gave Nashom Wooden the surname 'Foot' when introducing him onstage as Mona, and he was the one who called Connie Fleming 'Connie Girl' offhandedly into the mic, and the name stuck. The Beauties constellation included Connie Fleming, Glamamore (David), Princess Diandra, Perfidia, LuLu, Miss Guy, Miss Shannon, Sweetie, Codie Ravioli, Flotilla DeBarge, Hedda Lettuce, and International Chrysis (Salvador Dalí's protégée) who served as a mentor figure in the room. Lady Bunny, RuPaul, Raven O, Candis Cayne, and Lipsynka also performed there. Recurring nights included Valley of the Dolls, Clash of the Titans, and It's a Mod Mod World; shows are documented through August 7, 1994. Boy Bar also served as an unlikely footnote in literature: David Leavitt set scenes at the venue in his 1986 novel The Lost Language of Cranes, one of the first mainstream American novels to center gay male experience in New York, placing the bar's culture on the literary record while it was still in its founding years. During the Giuliani administration's mid-1990s cabaret-law crackdown, McGregor engineered a 'kill switch' that cut dance music and shifted to lounge lighting the moment police entered, a piece of practical resistance that let the room keep moving through the enforcement era. House photographer Jillian Jonas documented the room extensively in the early 1990s; her collection, now donated to Village Preservation's Historic Image Archive, is among the few deep photographic records of the Beauties in performance. Boy Bar closed around 1994; Coney Island High, the punk venue where Iggy Pop and the Ramones played, occupied 15 St. Marks by 1995. In 2004 the building was substantially altered and converted to residential use. The performers who cut their teeth on the Boy Bar stage went on to define the next decade of New York drag: Mona Foot's Wonder Woman number became a Wigstock institution; Connie Fleming became a Thierry Mugler muse; Miss Guy anchored the East Village scene into the 2000s.

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