It all happened so suddenly and with such absoluteness that it was hard for many of us New Yorkers to understand what had just happened.  New York's Meat Packing district and surrounding West Side - a den of notorious vice which rivaled the red light districts of Amsterdam, Berlin and Bangkok and in its heyday in the 1970s was likely the naughtiest place on Earth - had been stolen. Gentrification had insidiously transformed the district into high-end furniture and department stores, restaurants with patio dining and post-modern hotels. The Spike, The Eagle and The Lure were its victims and so was New York's Leather/Fetish community,  if not the entire gay community at large. Not even the tranny hookers - some of the meanest bitches on the planet - were able to survive the brutal attack.

Then they turned Time Square into Disneyland. Fuck!

New York City - a major world player and participant in erotic expression - and traditionally the country's one true hold out against America's Puritanical fanaticism - had been neutered through gentrification, rezoning and city planning. If this powerful left hook hadn't been enough to knock the Leather Community out, the strong right jab of Giuliani’s crack down on "public" behaviors certainly was enough to bring it down for the count.  

NYC's once burgeoning leather scene found itself broken, bewildered, bruised and beaten.

Bewildered and bruised? Certainly.

Beaten and broken? We think not.

This is, after all, New York (fucking) city. You can be sure that something's gonna happen. Perhaps NYC didn't lose something. There's always the chance it is simply the first to move onto something else. What that something may be no one can know for sure. Only time will tell.

M8NY believes there is a new moon rising. A new scene. A new guard. A new New York. It is committed to helping foster and support this scene wherever it may go. M8NY also hopes to document it as well by funneling in pictures and party art, by saving its calendars which may serve as a day to day history. A sort of archive in motion. Which in two years or ten years, will tell the story of what will have been - what will be - New York's Renaissance.

Long live the scene. Long live the city. Long live New York.

-MP
December 28, 2006