Club Chelsea

I'm not a big fan of the corporate disco, but Chi Chi Valenti has a positive take on it all. Every Saturday she puts on a show at Crobar, on 28th St. between 10th and 11th Aves., with various celebutantes go-go dancing and performing in rotation on two different stands.

"It's what people expect of New York," she says. "Sometimes tourists come up and thank me at the end of the night or get obsessed with one particular dancer?it's always a surprise which one. What they don't know is that they missed a time in New York when people got dressed up like that just for themselves and went out all the time."

In the Reed Room at Crobar, Chi Chi was having a tribute to Russ Meyer, with Faster, Pussycat Kill! Kill! and the Ultra Vixens playing behind the bar, while method go-go artists Viva Ruiz and Little Brooklyn danced on platforms, rotating with several other dancers, all of them wearing big hair. Viva wants to ask Tura Satana, star of Faster, Pussycat, to play her mother in her telenovela, called Rosa Negra. "Tura Satana changed my life! That movie started my whole career of being a stripper and a go-go dancer!" raves Viva, formerly of the wildly exhibitionist girl band Thrust.

The crowd was pretty bridge-and-tunnel, some of them were humping each other in a friendly manner, and outside the doorman told a pack of men, "You gotta find some ladies, fast, before you get turned away!" Desperately, a kid from SF asked my friend Melody and I if we'd go in with them, but we were on our way out?way, way out. There were also guys handing out flyers so lavishly produced that I could no doubt publish a small interesting book for the same cost, but the events failed to tempt.

"Danny's back just in time to join Victor in the booth?." As Chi Chi noted, "Chris S. is having a party? Gee, I'd like to meet him."

I don't really like the huge clubs, but Chi Chi points out that during the Giuliani era, all the clubs got to be the size of a dressing room. Now, due to zoning laws, they're starting to open up big clubs in Chelsea. At least three 18-year-olds hit the city every year who are budding young legends, and she has to cast her butterfly net wide. Plus, she gets to hire 300-pound trannies, and they probably don't get too many other bookings.

In the morning, when Chi Chi's done, she likes to go to the Empire Diner, an institution at 22nd St. and 10th Ave. "I know it's not p.c. because it's a little more expensive, but we've been going there for years. People complain because they can get a sandwich in Queens for cheaper!"

Chi Chi's little note?please admit for Johnny Dynell?got us into the Coral Room, also on 28th between 10th and 11th Aves., which famously has a girl swimming around in a large fish tank. The crowd was not so white, and was a more energetic bridge-and-tunnel one than Crobar's. Sunday night, Dynell DJs at a gay party called Stingray Sundays, with boys in the tanks. A guy at the nearby Eagle said, "I am so going there!"

The Eagle's a biggish gay bar on 28th at 11th Ave. where the men are crammed up against each other, more Manhattan and Brooklyn than Jersey. On the way in a flyer guy gently asked us if we were trying to find the Crobar?we were the only ladies to ever go to the Eagle, it seemed. The strange thing about these gay cruising bars, such as the Cock on A and 12th, is that you'd think they wouldn't want to talk to anybody that would distract them from their hunt, but it's not like that at all.

A big sex tourist bear from Munich steered me to a cub named Alan, who works for YSL. "I'll tell you all you need to know?ask me anything!" he started off, and I immediately felt at home, having been socialized by highly opinionated gays. Chelsea's very fucked up, he told me; he especially doesn't like the bars there. He feels there's a white supremacist thing going on, all that physical perfection. In the 80s, he says that Christopher St. got very black, and the whites couldn't take it, so they moved up to 8th Ave. The East Village, he finds, is also too contrived.

A burnt-out hustler with missing teeth was tugging at my coat, trying any old caretaker in a pinch, but Alan quickly told him to back off. Another shirtless guy with a beard walked by and caressed Alan's chest. "You're so hot. You. Are. So. Hot." He noted: If only straights could behave that way without harmful consequences.

A fast acquaintance named Jorge said the Eagle is his favorite bar because it has manly looking guys, with no attitude?"very masculine," he drooled.

They recently seized 12 pounds of crystal meth that was headed for gay Chelsea, so I asked Alan about it. "GHB is from hell," he promptly proclaimed. "Crystal is from purgatory."