The Cock

Overview

Opened December 3, 1998, by straight bar owner Allan Mannarelli and queer promoter Mario Diaz, The Cock is an East Village gay dive bar run as sex-positive counter-programming to Giuliani-era cleanup drives, built on cheap drinks, go-go dancers, a basement backroom, and a seven-nights-a-week rotation of drag, DJ, and performance nights.

The Cock opened on December 3, 1998 at 188 Avenue A (at East 12th Street), leased by Allan Mannarelli (a straight bar owner reportedly also behind the bar Albion in Kips Bay) and programmed by Mario Diaz, a Lower East Side promoter whose party Foxy had been evicted from three prior venues. The bar opened two years after combination antiretroviral therapy became available in 1996, a shift participants in later oral histories link to a renewed appetite for sex-positive nightlife; Diaz set out to consolidate the East Village's underground queer talent into a single venue running seven nights a week. 'We were staging a revolution,' he said. 'We were fighting against Giuliani and his quality of life campaign. Not our quality of life: he was targeting queer and POC venues.' The room was tiny (not much bigger than a two-bedroom apartment, painted pitch black) with a neon rooster sign as its only street-facing marker, a policy against photography, and a basement dark room that made explicit what most bars kept notional. The signature night from the start was Foxy, a Saturday performance competition in which Diaz distributed play money ('Foxy dollars') to the crowd for tipping performers, with the evening's top earner crowned 'the foxiest person alive.' Hosts rotated through drag and cabaret royalty: Justin Vivian Bond (who co-produced an earlier party called Cream with Diaz), Jackie Beat, Linda Simpson, the World Famous BOB, and Cookie, a British queen who became a regular. Scott Ewalt (who designed the neon rooster that became the bar's only external signage) was among the DJs working the room alongside Miss Guy, Lina Bradford, and Sammy Jo, who later anchored Friday's King-Size night with fellow DJs Nashom, Ernie Cote, and Chris Flynn. Performances by Amanda Lepore and Sophia Lamar ran on Tuesdays, with Lina Bradford on the decks. The bar employed artists almost exclusively: Ewalt summarized the owner's thesis as 'I love owning gay bars because gay men make art.' The Cock was repeatedly raided under Giuliani (at times up to twice weekly) and was briefly shuttered in 2000 as a public nuisance. A legal skirmish followed the 2003 statewide smoking ban; the citation was eventually dismissed. Press accounts of the period describe celebrity visitors alongside the regulars; names that recur in those accounts include Christina Aguilera, Boy George, George Michael, Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, and Calvin Klein. In 2005, Mannarelli relocated the venue to 29 Second Avenue; in December 2015, after a failed 2014 attempt to move to Avenue B (blocked by Manhattan Community Board 3) and over the objections of an East Fifth Street Block Association campaign called 'Block the Cock,' it relocated again to 93 Second Avenue in the space formerly occupied by Lit Lounge. The 2010s Cock was held together in large part by Nashom Wooden (performer, bartender, manager) who had entered New York nightlife in the mid-1980s as a Club Kid and created his drag persona Mona Foot at Boy Bar in 1989, later becoming a member of the electronic dance group the Ones. Wooden died on March 23, 2020, age 50, in the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic (among the first visible nightlife figures to be lost) and the bar has named its 'Celebration Room' in his honor. The Cock closed in March 2020 with the shutdown, and reopened at 93 Second Avenue for Pride Week 2021 with vaccination requirements. It continues to operate.