Crisco Disco

Overview

After-hours gay discotheque in a converted Meatpacking District warehouse, its DJ booth built as a ten-foot mock Crisco can. A raw counterweight to Studio 54, it drew leather men, twinks, and drag queens to a floor where sex and dancing openly mixed.

Crisco Disco occupied a multi-story converted warehouse at 408 West 15th Street, a building whose bass could reportedly be felt by pressing a hand against the exterior brick, in a stretch of the Meatpacking District that in the late 1970s still smelled of blood and industry. Run by an owner known as Hank (full surname unconfirmed across independent primary sources), the club operated without a formal liquor license: entry required purchasing tickets redeemable for drinks, or, for regulars personally known to Hank, the option to bring their own. The governing logic was after-hours and unofficial, doors opened around 9 p.m. and the floor ran well past dawn. The defining architectural gesture was a DJ booth constructed as a ten-foot mock Crisco shortening can, lit bright in an otherwise blacked-out space; from it, DJ Danny Rodriguez (named in oral-history accounts; no secondary sources yet corroborate) played a warm disco-soul mix at reported 25,000 watts. The name itself was a knowing declaration: Crisco had become, across the gay liberation era, a ubiquitous and cheap lubricant for fisting, so synonymous with sex that discos worldwide borrowed the brand as shorthand. As Drew Sawyer (Columbia University) observed, cans of Crisco were 'so synonymous with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.' The dancefloor was diverse by the standards of its circuit neighbors, accounts from regular patrons describe a crowd running from leather men and gay clones to twinks and crosstown refugees from Studio 54, with a notably significant presence of Black gay men. Bill Brewster's definitive DJ history 'Last Night a DJ Saved My Life' places Crisco Disco alongside the Mineshaft and the Anvil as venues where 'dancing took second place to sex,' situating it within the West Side leather-and-after-hours world rather than the more devotional dance-music temples uptown or downtown. The club appears in Peter Shapiro's 'Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco,' which documents its atmosphere of wanton open sex and drug use, owner Hank was remembered by regulars for keeping an enormous quantity of cocaine available in a VIP room. That libertine atmosphere was inseparable from its era: the late 1970s West Side was a geography of liberated gay male sexuality, and Crisco Disco was one of its nodes alongside the Anvil, the Mineshaft, the trucks and piers nearby. The club's cultural radius extended beyond its regulars. Elton John recounts, in an essay contributed to 'The Queer Bible' and elsewhere attributed to his 2019 autobiography 'Me', that he and drag performer Divine were once turned away at the door on grounds of being too outrageously dressed, the doorman reportedly shouting 'What do you think this is? Fucking Halloween?' before the two decamped for 12 West. In 2015, Michael Musto (Paper Magazine) named Crisco Disco one of the eight 'edgiest [NYC venues] that shall never be recaptured.' Photographer Bill Bernstein documented the dancefloor in 1979, images later exhibited at the Museum of Sex as part of the 'Night Fever: New York Disco 1977–1979' show; one image is held in the permanent collection at ClampArt. The club closed in the early 1980s, one source gives 1984, and context supports a closure broadly consistent with the AIDS epidemic's first wave and the regulatory climate that shuttered the Mineshaft (1985) and the Anvil (1985). The building stood vacant for over thirty years before being repurposed as the Monarch restaurant in late 2013. No archival collection is currently known to hold Crisco Disco materials; oral histories remain the primary documentary record.

Oral histories & archival media

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Cultural role

DJs, promoters & people

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