‘Getting In’ captures nostalgia of ’90s gay nightlife in NYC

Ephemera: A.) A Baton Rouge drag queen with a lazy eye, or, B.) Collectible memorabilia, originally expected for short-term use.

If you said A., you’re not the intended audience for David Kennerley‘s new coffee table-type book, “Getting In: NYC Club Flyers from the Gay 1990s,” from his own DAKEN Press and just out this month.

Kennerley, a longtime contributing writer here at Gay City News, came of age in the 1990s and found a sense of belonging in the big club scene at places like the Tunnel, the Roxy, etc. He held onto, he says, over 1,200 club flyers of the kind handed out as gay men left bars or published in free gay bar magazines like HX and Next. “Getting In” is a collection of about 200 of these flyers that open a nostalgic and historical window of a unique time in NYC gay life when HIV was decimating the community, ACT UP was organizing and protesting, and clubs and bars were the de facto community centers.

An introduction by Michael Musto, a chronic chronicler of the late night social world, deftly covers the contradictions inherent in the views of gay men as narcissistic sissies, but also conscientious community activists. The collection of flyers, divided into chapters on the megaclubs, bars, activism and circuit parties, has definite historical value. The New York Public Library carries the archives of ACT UP and would be the right place for Kennerley to donate his collection, should he care to.

For those who lived through the period and were habitués of the scene, the book will induce a range of flashbacks to sweaty dance floors and late night cab rides home. For those younger folks, it will allow for a strange early nostalgia for their own unfolding youth and perhaps encourage them to hold onto what inevitably, seemingly impossibly, vanishes.