Item Details

USA, 1954, Disbound

VG-

[DRAG] Original 1954 CLUB 82 Suncapades Programme FEMALE IMPERSONATORS NYC Drag Show

10 1/2” x 14”, folds out to 21” x 14”.  Very good minus condition. Corner crease lines. Very minor overall age toning.

Background:

[From a historical overview]:

Welcome to 82 Club: The Naughty Story of a Legendary New York Drag Institution

If you were an adventurous visitor to New York City in the 1950s or 1960s, you might have found your way to the 82 Club. A basement nightclub at 82 East Fourth Street, it wasn’t much to look at from the outside. Located in what was then a remote edge of the Lower East Side, it was not far off the Bowery, back when the Bowery was more skid row than Standard Hotel.

The 82 Club was a trendy place to be. If you were lucky, celebrities like Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, or Salvador Dalí might be in attendance on any given night. A club photographer would circulate among the tables, snapping keepsake photos for a $1.50 or $2 fee of audience members, who were decked out in suits and cocktail dresses and would get an 8″ by 10″ print to take home at the end of the night. The club was known for its elaborate live shows that ran three times a night into the wee hours of the morning.

What made 82 Club unique was that it was an early bastion of drag and gender impersonation: almost all of the performers in the floor show were men dressed as women, and most of the wait staff were women dressed as dashing young men in tuxedos.

Like many bars and nightclubs of the era, 82 Club was run by organized crime, in this case, members of the Genovese family. (Boss Vito Genovese’s wife, Anna, often worked the door.) Club management ran a tight ship: inside, audiences were treated to an eclectic array of entertainment in a traditional nightclub format. Each show had an opening, middle, and closing production number organized around a theme - ”Holidays from Hell,” for instance—which would stay the same for about a year.

For all of the club’s trappings, it was pointedly not a club for LGBTQ patrons. Many of the performers and wait staff were gay, but the club catered to heterosexual tourists looking for an exotic good time. At a time when cross-dressing was illegal, management didn’t want any trouble on the street outside that could disrupt the experience. “The performers had to walk in as gentlemen, go into the dressing room, and transform into the female persona they were going to present on stage,” says Jeffreys. “And then when they left the club, they had to leave as gentlemen.” The same was true for the women waiters, who were expected to arrive in skirts before changing into their tuxes. The clientele and the staff were also overwhelmingly white; Among the exceptions were African American drag legend Mel Michaels who’d later become famous as Angie Stardust.

After the Stonewall uprising in 1969, the club lingered on in various incarnations, even becoming a punk rock venue in the 1970s, when musicians were drawn by its late hours and liberal liquor policy. The 82 Club finally had its last gasp sometime in the mid-1980s.