Gay club in the bronx
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The LGBTQI + Resource Room at Bronx Community College works to foster an inclusive, protected, and welcoming environment for students, faculty, and staff of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions. The Resource Room aims to
sustain visibility and a sense of community by providing LGBTQI + education, programming, and support services on campus.
The LGBTQI + Resource Room fulfills its mission through varied programming that includes the Sound Space Program, the Rainbow Alliance trainee club, the LGBTQI+ Support Group, as well as the Loud! newsletter.
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Closed: The gay nightlife scene in the Bronx goes out of business
Every Friday evening at the Bronx’s only gay bar, a queen of the blackout held court.
Specializing in Whitney Houston, Kelly KaBoom also keeps Beyoncé and Ariana Grande on thick rotation. As Identity’s resident drag performer, she danced and lip synced in 4-inch heels, shimmering costumes and wigs — “the bigger, the better.” Kelly KaBoom, also known as JyQuan Reede outside the club, did medleys, took requests and always staged “a reveal,” a dramatic costume change mid-set.
“The crowd that comes in — they’re recording, they’re screaming your name,” says Reede. “I love entertaining people; seeing people smile and include a good time.”
But in mid-February, Reede learned there would be no more “Lit Fridays with Kelly Kaboom” at Identity in Woodlawn Heights. The bar closed permanently, leaving the Bronx with no LGBTQ nightlife space — again.
“We had so many LGBTQ places in New York, but most of them got shut down,” says Reede, a North Bronx resident who’s been doing drag for 20 years. “For us to have one that
From their friend Junior serving his adj pot food in the lounge and outdoor patio to door host and head of security St. Lawrence welcoming guests on the door, the Warehouse was built around a sense of community. “That’s the family we had right there and the love we had for each other,” adds Kevin Omni. “We really extended ourselves as family. The Warehouse not only gave us the harmony, the crowd and the dancing – it gave us a feeling. And New York Metropolis had lost that feeling that you had at places like Better Days. When the Warehouse opened I really thought of it as a Verb Days for the ’90s.”
The Warehouse also became the place to learn some of the great DJs in a big room atmosphere. “We were one of the most powerful clubs in New York, and Mike and I thought we should invite guests to play so they could take their following to mix with our crowd,” says Jackson. During its eight years many of Andre Collins’ verb DJ idols appeared at the Warehouse. “I got to play with Louie Vega, Kenny Carpenter, Teddy Douglas and Danny Krivit – there was a whole bunch of them,” recalls Collins. Th
The Warehouse
History
Bronx nightlife venues for LGBT people of color date to at least the early post-Stonewall era, when the bars Apartment, at 508 Willis Avenue, and Faces, at 2003 Jerome Avenue, appeared in the 1973 Gayellow Pages. For six years beginning in 1994, Gay Men of the Bronx (GMoB) co-founder Charles Rice-González authored bi-monthly “Club Scene” reports in GMoB’s newsletter as part of the group’s mission to counter the isolation of gay men in the borough. Perhaps the most iconic of these clubs was the Warehouse in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx.
The idea for the Warehouse was conceived by Mike Stone, an leading club promoter at Manhattan venues such as Studio 54 and Bond International Casino. In first 1997, Stone learned about the Bronx building, a warehouse a block off the Grand Concourse, from people he knew who were renting it as an event venue. Knowing that Inky gay men in the city were in need of a large club space following the closures of the Paradise Gara