Mother

Overview

The two-floor building at 432 West 14th Street that ran as a queer nightlife anchor from 1990 to 2000 — first as Bar Room 432, home to Julie Tolentino's Clit Club, then as Mother after Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell bought the lease in 1996 and housed their Jackie 60 alongside Click + Drag and Martha@Mother.

The building at 432 West 14th Street, a former market structure built in 1887, became a queer nightlife anchor in 1990 when it opened as Bar Room 432, a mostly vacant jazz bar in what was then a working Meatpacking District of slaughterhouses, late-night diners, and leather bars. Performance artist and dancer Julie Tolentino, introduced to the space by a downtown choreographer whose husband co-owned the bar, was the first to establish it as a queer venue, launching Clit Club on July 27, 1990, a sex-positive, harm-reduction-minded Friday-night party for lesbian, queer, androgynous, and trans women run by Tolentino and videomaker Jocelyn Taylor (jaguar mary), with Aldo Hernandez as its first DJ. That same year the gay male party MEAT launched on Saturdays, running through February 1994 with an openly inclusive cast including RuPaul and performance artist Ron Athey. Jackie 60, co-founded by Chi Chi Valenti, Johnny Dynell, fashion designer Kitty Boots, and choreographer Richard Move in November 1990 at Nell's on 14th Street, relocated to Bar Room 432 in March 1991, settling into Tuesday nights, a deliberately uncoveted slot that insulated the party from bridge-and-tunnel crowds and celebrity gawking. In 1996 Valenti and Dynell purchased the lease from Bar Room 432 owner Anthony DePalma and renamed the space Mother, formalizing their stewardship of the address. (Some sources date the acquisition to 1994; the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project places it at 1996, this remains unresolved.) The two-floor room, holding roughly 600 people, was kept deliberately low-budget and high-concept: a main dancefloor and performance stage on the ground floor, a basement with harm-reduction signage and safer-sex provisions, and a strict no-camera policy that preserved the intimacy and safety on which the community depended. Johnny Dynell's DJ sets leaned into house and eclectic dance music, refusing even high-profile requests to tailor his programming. Three new parties launched under the Mother name: Click + Drag, a weekly cyber-fetish-Gothic-genderhacking night produced by Rob Roth, Kitty Boots, Valenti, and writer Abby Ehmann that ran over 200 themed editions through 2000; Martha@Mother, Richard Move's monthly tribute to Martha Graham performed in drag, which also premiered works by emerging choreographers; and ongoing residency of Jackie 60, which had by this point developed Night of 1000 Stevies (an annual Stevie Nicks tribute born in 1991), a poetry series called Verbal Abuse, theatrical Jackie's Playhouse productions, and an early underground website called InterJackie. Jackie 60 explicitly positioned itself as the heir to late-1970s and early-1980s downtown performance culture (the Mudd Club, Club 57, Danceteria) rather than the VIP-velvet-rope era of Studio 54 or the mega-club 1990s. Its stated community was 'dominant women, poets, gay men and lesbians, free-thinking heterosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals, fetish-dressers, bisexuals, and those who love them'; its method was obsessively themed weekly events (Bleak House night, Klingon Women night, Mermaids on Heroin) that demanded three to four days of preparation from the core team. The crowd included Debbie Harry, who worked behind the bar and danced go-go; Marc Jacobs; and Mick Jagger, who was, by multiple accounts, barely noticed. The founders explicitly resisted the idea of a marketing plan or target audience. Mother closed in June 2000, when the building was sold and redeveloped, one of the first casualties of the gentrification that would transform the Meatpacking District into a luxury retail and hospitality corridor. Valenti and Dynell chose to end Jackie 60 on December 28, 1999, the last Tuesday of the century, with approximately 1,000 people in attendance, rather than endure a slow decline under new neighborhood pressures. The space's decade-long run seeded lasting institutions: Night of 1000 Stevies continues annually, The Motherboards online community connected displaced performers nationally, and the Jackie 60 archive became the subject of Rob Roth's audio documentary 'Night Paving: The Aural History of Jackie 60 and Mother' presented at the Museum of Arts and Design. Blondie's 2011 song 'Mother' was inspired by the club.

Oral histories & archival media

Archive plates

Plates fill in as scans clear rights

Sonic profile

Cultural role

DJs, promoters & people

Follow a name to see other rooms they connect to

Parties & residencies

Tags

Related rooms