Back in the day blowjobs (and safe sex)
Author: Jonty Skrufff
Friday, October 13, 2006
Studio 54 legend Nicky Siano chatted to Skrufff this week about his upcoming party at London’s Kings Cross venue the Key and revealed the infamous New York pleasure palace was rarely more decadent than clubs of today. “Only when you went downstairs and someone sucked your dick,” he laughed.
The seminal New York DJ virtually single-handedly invented beat mixing (at a time when variable speed turntables didn’t yet exist), though dropped out of clubland in the late 70s as his drug habits spiraled out of control. Nowadays totally clean, he’s sanguine about his problems, pointing out “that period wasn't too long in comparison to some things, from the time I turned 21 until I turned 28...so seven years,” he said, and offered up some poignant advice for warning signs to watch out for.
“If you have to use something everyday, if you feel like you use something against your will, if you don't want to get high today and end up high, if you can’t go on vacation without drugs, or a contact, if you spend your last money on drugs rather then pay your phone bill - then check into rehab,” he urged.
“Or better yet...go to Narcotics Anonymous, that's where I got clean, and it works,” he insisted.
Following the death of his close friend David Rodriguez from AIDS in 1984, Nicky quit DJing altogether soon after and became a tireless campaigner against the disease, writing a book No Time To Wait, which became a key guide for people living with HIV infection.
Still an active campaigner, Nicky recalled the dreadful impact the disease had on New York clubs when it first emerged in the early 80s.
“People went to clubs to escape, and unfortunately for some club owners that meant escaping reality, so they encouraged risky behaviour, and made room for it,” he suggested, “A club like the Saint for example, probably spread more AIDS then any one club in history.”
The Saint opened in 1980 in the old Fillmore East building with a superb light system and Graebar sound system, rapidly becoming the number one club on New York’s then thriving gay scene, though some estimates suggest up to half the club’s members later died of AIDS. Club owner Bruce Mailman, who previously owned the equally notorious gay sex club New St. Mark's Bathhouse, on St Marks Place, also died of AIDS in 1994, some six years after if finally shut down for good.
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