Escuelita

Overview

One of the first LGBTQ salsa and Latin dance clubs in the United States, a basement room serving gay and bisexual Latino and Black men and trans women of color across five decades, with drag performance, ballroom culture, and SLA-fought survival against Hell's Kitchen gentrification.

La Escuelita traced its origins to roughly 1970, when three gay Latino New Yorkers (names unrecorded in surviving documentation) opened a social club in the basement of a language school on Broadway near Lincoln Center, unable at that point to obtain a liquor license. The name is literal: 'escuelita' ('little school'), after the language school in whose basement the room sat. Police shuttered that first location within a few years; the founders relocated uptown to the Hotel Lucerne (79th Street and Amsterdam Avenue), where they secured a liquor license and where La Escuelita's now-characteristic drag shows first took hold. After roughly a year at the Lucerne the club shifted to a spot on West 48th Street for about six months, then in the late 1970s settled at 607 Eighth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen (a former bowling alley basement near the Port Authority) where it would anchor the city's Latino LGBTQ nightlife for nearly four decades. A 1996 renovation relocated the building's entrance to 301 West 39th Street, and the room briefly operated as 'La Nueva Escuelita' before reverting to the familiar Escuelita. The physical room was a subterranean pocket with low ceilings, a traditional bar, café tables ringing a dance floor, and raised platforms for go-go dancers. The sound combined salsa, merengue, Latin house, and hip-hop; partner dancing was central to the floor in a way it was not at Anglo-identified clubs. Drag show culture ran in parallel: Lady Catiria (Catiria Reyes, 1959–1999), a Puerto Rican lip-sync artist who performed at Escuelita for nearly two decades beginning in the early 1980s, became the room's defining figure, her Saturday-night sets drew a devoted following and the club later maintained memorial VHS and DVD compilations of her performances alongside her Miss Continental gown and crown. Angel Sheridan, described by Village Voice critic Michael Musto as 'bodacious' and 'vital,' carried the torch in the following generation. From 2010, DJ MikeQ was the resident DJ at Vogue Knights, a weekly ballroom practice space founded at Escuelita by Jack Mizrahi and Luna Kahn; MikeQ djed from a small back room with a barred window he could barely see out of. Vogue Knights later moved to XL Nightclub when Escuelita closed. Escuelita operated outside the circuit of white mainstream gay nightlife in Manhattan. Its clientele was primarily gay, bisexual, and trans Latino and Black; its blend of Latin American nightclub conventions with the social function of the American gay bar made it a distinctive hybrid, a room where partner dancing, drag competition, ballroom practice, and community refuge coexisted under the same low ceiling. It was also a site of near-continuous state scrutiny: police and liquor-authority harassment characterized the club's entire known history. In 2012 the SLA declined to renew its license, citing two minor incidents from the prior year; Savyon Zabar, the club's senior manager at that time, filed papers in New York County Supreme Court alleging the SLA was targeting LGBTQ minorities as part of a gentrification campaign. Justice Geoffrey Wright permitted continued operation in January 2012, but the harassment continued. Zabar's affidavit in that proceeding is quoted as stating: 'I also believe that we are no longer welcome on West 39th Street as minorities scare the mostly white tourists who patronize the newly built and expensive boutique hotels on the block.' La Escuelita closed for good in early 2016; an attempt to reopen in Jackson Heights did not succeed. Zabar was murdered in his Upper West Side apartment in January 2017. Lady Catiria — the only performer to have won both Miss Continental Plus (1993) and Miss Continental (1995) — is the best-documented case of what the room supported: a Latin LGBTQ performance tradition with its own standards and its own archive, separate from the Anglo-identified circuits. Escuelita's 2016 closure left a gap no subsequent venue has filled in comparable terms: the combination of affordable admission, bilingual drag programming, Latin dance-floor conventions (salsa, merengue, partner dancing), and a primarily gay, bisexual, and trans Black and Latino clientele occupied a niche outside the categories the commercial mainstream served. MikeQ, whose Vogue Knights practice nights at Escuelita trained a cohort of voguers central to the subsequent ballroom revival, relocated the format to XL Nightclub following Escuelita's closure. No comprehensive archive of La Escuelita's five decades has been publicly assembled; the record that exists — the LGBTQ Historic Sites Project documentation, Zabar's court filings, VHS and DVD compilations the club itself maintained, and scattered oral histories — constitutes a partial deposit without a central repository.