A long and hard look back at the birth of The Cock, New York City's sexiest, sweatiest, and sloppiest gay bar.
On December 3, 1998, a new generation of New York City’s most outrageous homosexuals packed themselves into a tiny new venue on Avenue A and East 12th Street in the East Village. It was called, and there was nowhere else like it. A cruising mecca, The Cock was the byproduct of luck, vision, and circumstance. Nineties club-kid culture had run its course; designer drugs, shocking costumes, and the overblown venues that had ruled New York nightlife for a decade lost their shine.
DIAZ: I started a night called Foxy, which to this day was the most spectacular party I’ve ever done. There was an open call for performers to compete and I made play-money with little foxes on it, and every guest got 500 Foxy dollars that they could give to their favorite act. Whoever had the most Foxy dollars at the end of the night would win the title of “Foxiest Person Alive.” I counted those dollars every Saturday night for years.
BOND: When Mario moved in there he was like, “I think I’m going to rename it The Cock,” and I was like, “Oh god, that’s so stupid.” Obviously, there’s a reason why Mario was the promoter and I was the talent. EWALT: It didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of the zeitgeist. There was an excitement about the changing in the millennium, and this idea of, “We have to tear everything apart from the 20th century and put it back together as fast as we can.” That energy was everywhere.
FRYE: There was a need to celebrate sexuality again. And there was also a need to be part of a creative movement again. People were craving something that wasn’t the same old club-kid shit—crazy costumes, house music, coke, and k-holes. EWALT: My overall thesis statement for The Cock was that the owner wanted to give employment to artists. Almost everyone who worked there was either in a band, or making art, or music, or performance. And that’s why so many of the people from the first Cock are now big designers, big photographers, performing at Joe’s Pub. You couldn’t get a job there without having an outside ambition.
DIAZ: There was a nude stage diver, there was a guy who fucked fruit. These two dykes once came out as lunch ladies and one pulled a giant turkey leg out of her vagina, and then they proceeded to eat it together. There was a girl who queefed “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.” It was the most amazing thing. I cried with joy. However, our hands-down biggest Foxy winner was Krylon Superstar. I refer to her as, “Anal arts and crafts.” Their artistry was all ass-related.
OTTENBERG: Foxy starts, and the icon that I now know to be Krylon Superstar roller skates out from the back room and gets onstage. This gorgeous Black twink is wearing a Little Debbie wig and a 1950s scalloped-edge drive-in apron, and a tray with hot dog buns and all the fixings, and she’s singing the Oscar Meyer wiener song.
EWALT: Nashom and I both worked at a place called Boy Bar on St. Mark’s Place. He was one of the most attractive men that went there, and he got reeled into being a drag queen kind of against his will. Initially, they wanted him to be kind of like a clown queen, Aretha Franklin but with white lipstick and a white wig. He did not like that, and he broke out of it real fast and became a sexy mama, and started doing First Choice and Lil’ Kim. He liked sexy, provocative Black women.
KOPKAU: My experience as a customer would be getting really drunk to the point where you wouldn’t be in fear of catching AIDS, basically. And then you would randomly hook up with guys in the back. BOND: During the Giuliani administration you couldn’t dance in places unless they had a cabaret license. If you didn’t have one you could only dance for one minute and 30 seconds. So, BOB would set a timer, and everyone in the club would dance for one minute and 30 seconds. This predates 9/11. Then when Bloomberg came in, he made everybody stop smoking. That changed everything. At the first incarnation of The Cock, you couldn’t see.
DIAZ: I can tell you the celebrities that I know hung out there: Almodóvar, John Waters, Calvin Klein was there all the time. George Michael, Pete Burns, Mark Almond,OTTENBERG: This one night I happened to be in the backroom smoking cigarettes and looking around for some kinda action or show. And then one of the most famous designers of all time, my fashion idol, busted in completely wasted doing full runway and stomps into the even weirder backroom.
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