- Porn Palace
The young man was beefier than most. With dark hair and a wide smile he leaped up on the stage and began to dance animatedly to the loud rock music. Dressed in shorts and T shirt with holes artistically ripped here and there, he shed the shirt during the first musical number, and lowered his shorts to display a bit of asscrack. The shorts were lost during the second number, and the muscular dancer was soon working up his medium-large dick to a nice degree of hardness. After it was hard enough to throb, he moved out to the audience to work the crowd and make some money. The audience consisted of perhaps a dozen men, mostly older, mostly nicely dressed, mostly well behaved. Half were seated on the side of the stage near the room entry, with the remainder spread around the far seating area beyond the stage. It was a weekday afternoon and the Show Palace was not as crowded as it would get during the evenings, or on weekends.
The beefy young dancer stands in front of a man in the third row, gently swinging his cock from left to right in front of the man's face. The man reaches into his pocket, withdraws a dollar bill and places it into the dancer's sock. The dancer smiles and allows the older man to play with the rubbery, bouncy dick for a couple of minutes. The customer rubs the dancer's hairless stomach with one hand as he slowly jerks the big pink cock. The dancer moves on. Some of the audience will not offer money, will not touch the dancers; they are there for the visual pleasure alone. But most succumb to the appeal of these gregarious, professional entertainers. Most of the dancers are attractive, likeable and provide good value for the money. I am near the rear of the theater, and when the dancer approaches me I praise his chunky body and slip two dollars into his hand. He thanks me and slips them into his sweatsock. I feel his bulging pecs and stick a finger into his navel. He laughs and pretends to be getting hot from my ministrations. As I grab his cock, I think that it feels exactly as I thought it would feel. Rubbery and slick and nice. His balls are shaved, and I play with them with my free hand. After a minute or so, he asks for another "tip." That means that it is necessary to provide another dollar or two for another minute or two, or the dancer will move on. I pay up since I prefer to select one or two favorite performers to tip generously rather than giving a dollar to each of the six or seven boys who will perform. I get into it more that way, and I find that the dancers treat you better, allowing some minor additional privileges. For example, the beefy hunk that I am masturbating now reaches down to grope me. I allow it, and begin to pick up the pace of my stroking.
"Hey, hey, watch it or I'll come all over your shirt !" he warns. He has a big smile as he says this, and I learn on a second visit, that it is one of his standard lines. It is effective and makes me hot enough to come into my handkerchief soon after he leaves me.
The scene I described above is typical of an afternoon spent at the Show Palace theater during it's heyday. The Palace was among the best operated and hottest gay porn theaters that I've been to. There were three different rooms, two showing porn videos, and a larger room where there are several performances each day in addition to videos. Toward the end of its run, shortly before it closed down, the place had gone downhill. Some of the dancers that were working there toward the end hardly danced, but were hardened, in-your-face aggressive, impolite hustlers. Troubled young guys no doubt, struggling to keep their lives together as best they could. During this time I observed some of the performers privately negotiate for extra favors in the dark recesses of the theater. More than once I was asked if I wanted to give head for $20. I was never interested in doing that, but I observed one guy agree, only to have a very brief suck session in a back row. The boy told him that the manager was coming around and they had to stop. The kid skipped with the guy's twenty dollar bill after only allowing a few minutes of the promised blowjob.
The show at the Palace seemed to heat up and cool down in various phases. When it first opened, there was a conservative, almost innocent, teasing atmosphere. One of the first dancers I saw there never even stripped. He was a cute redheaded boy and just did a dance in tights. But it must have become quickly evident to management that a greater degree of flesh would provide a greater degree of money. Soon all the boys were fully stripping, and the Palace was one of the first theaters to have the dancers jerk off on stage. Within a few years, at the hottest, most open time for pornography in New York, almost anything could happen on that stage. There were suck and fuck shows, even in the afternoon. I clearly remember one very handsome young blonde guy put on a sensual show with an equally young dark-haired guy with a little goatee beard that built to their actually doing everything. A little leather covered bench provided a showplace for these two exhibitionistic performers, who acted as though they might actually be lovers in real life. One laid back on the bench as the other kneeled and sucked on his buddy's cock slowly and sensuously. They climbed into a sixty nine posture on the small bench, and the balance aspect was a little distracting. But they managed; nobody fell off the bench. As a member of the small audience that day, I could hardly believe my eyes when the blonde tongue kissed his friend for a minute or more and then bent over to take his stiff cock up the ass. I had heard that actual fucking was done in some of the after hours clubs and bars by paid performers in the wee hours of the morning, but I had never seen it. It gave me a rush to have a front row seat as these two great-looking young guys shared their lust and pleasure in each other with us. They acted as though they were absolutely alone rather than on a stage, as the guy with the little beard lubed up his buddy's asshole with a finger, kissing and caressing him lovingly. The blonde closed his eyes when the finger was replaced by the big dick that he was expecting and probably had felt before. I loved watching this intimate scene. There was a hush in the theater as the small audience was reverently quiet, afraid perhaps to break this beautiful spell. The boys fucked to a fare-thee-well, and the fucker did not pull out to come on his lover's back and ass, as they do in porn films. He came inside him, and it was clear to every throbbing dick in the room that it was genuine. (Remember that this was in the seventies before AIDS.)
During the height of the porn shows at the Palace, I saw some almost unbelievable sights. I watched a slave getting fist-fucked. I didn't like it; pain is not a turn-on for me. But I was strangely fascinated; and looked away, and then glanced quickly back, and then peeked sideways at the mesmerizing scene-the only time I have observed fistfucking in person.
There was a time in the mid seventies when the action at the Palace even shocked some of the performers. I spoke with one dancer out in the lobby area who was from San Francisco.
"No, man, we don't have anything quite like this out in California. This is a fucking wild scene."
During that phase of the Palace, performers were having sex with each other on stage, and then, members of the audience would be welcome to come up to the stage apron and touch, fellate and worship the performers. I remember vividly watching a performer with long, stringy blonde hair tied back in a pony tail, strip bare and proceed to whack off with eyes half closed as though he were in a trance. After a while, a young thin guy from the audience, good looking enough to be a performer himself, walked up to the edge of the stage. The blond walked to the stage apron and allowed the kid from the audience to go down on him. They were joined by a heavy set middle aged man in a suit, who knelt down on the floor, and opened the jeans fly of the guy from the audience who was blowing the dancer. We were thus treated to the sight of a double blowjob, as the older man furiously jerked off on to the floor. The thing that was most exciting about these scenes, was the impromptu nature of them, and the fact that they were so real. Bored guys stripping on a stage for dough quickly loses appeal, But when performers are clearly enjoying what is happening, and when there is an element of surprise, like the guy in the suit joining the sex party, that is a major turn-on for me.
Late in the life of the Palace, during an anything-goes phase, once a week there was a sex with vegetables show. The time was not convenient for my schedule and I never caught it, but I did manage to see another once per week show, billed as The Sharpshooters. This was when four or five or six of the dancers would get up on the stage at the same time, and have a jerk off contest to see who could come first. There was much jolly joking, taunting, and competition among the boys. They would ridicule the size of each other's dicks, and even the amount of come produced.
With the health crisis of the 1980s and the advent of a more conservative attitude in NY, the shows at the Palace gradually became milder. Dancers continued to strip on stage, but when they moved out to work the audience for tips, they were required to wear briefs. Some of the boys got around the rules by wearing see-through shorts or tiny g strings. There was one older guy - older for this business , maybe 30 or 35 years - who I caught two or three times. I loved to watch him strip. He had a muscular, hairy body and a big uncircumcised dick surrounded by lots of hair. I would slip him a five dollar bill and he would stand in front of me and put on the lewdest most delicious display. I loved for him to turn around and spread his hairy cheeks for me, push his cock through his legs and wink his hole at me. When he came out to the audience, we chatted and he told me in an attractive foreign accent that he was married, does not have sex of any kind with men, but found this work easy and pleasant. As I held his ample cock through his thin black shorts that were as thin and transparent as a woman's panties, I wondered about people's definitions of what constitutes sex.
The Palace is closed now, shuttered along with many other sex related businesses in New York. A previous mayor made it a goal of his administration to close down such places. So the recollections here are my contribution in recording the history of the wild and wooly past of New York sex shows for posterity.