RIP Marc Berkley

From DJ Rick Mitchell:

One of my mentors & friends died last Friday of a heart attack in his sleep (we should be lucky) in the most appropriate places on earth: Fire Island Pines; surrounded by long-term friends.
Heaven welcomed one of its most creative promoters to walk this earth:
Marc Berkley ~ may you rest in eternal peace.
I wanted to write about this, but dear Steve Weinstein, current Editor-in-Chief of Edge did such a thorough & amazing job; I asked him if I could share it w/ you.
Those of us who work in nightlife (for many years) become sort of an odd family.
We fight, yet we love one another & try to help one another w/ their individual projects.
Its not a job for the faint of heart.

Please take some time to learn & understand the creator of HX,The FagTag & breathing life into our world.
_________________________________________________________________

By Steve Weinstein
EDGE Editor-In-Chief
There was a time when, if you were a gay man & you went out to a nightclub to dance, you were probably @ a Marc Berkley event. A shy, insecure guy from Queens had so successfully reinvented himself that, for a bright, shining, moment (closer to the better part of a decade), he reigned as the king of the gay dance parties - as the NYC media dubbed him.

When Berkley arrived on the scene, the city had already emerged successfully from the '70s bankruptcy into the ’80s "Masters of the Universe" glitz of clubs: Area, the Palladium & even a renovated Studio 54.
Above all was the Saint, the gay-only megaclub that had the best sound & light systems, a specially hydraulic dance floor & just about everything else that made the it finest dance space in the world.

Berkley became friends w/ Bruce Mailman & learned the basics of Nightclub 101 @ the foot of the master impresario. Altho his stint @ the Saint was brief, he was able to take those lessons & apply them to other clubs.
In the process, he would bring his own ideas, which flew off in every direction but often-enuff landed to make a splash w/ clubgoers & the media.

Before the Saint, however, he had made his 1st contact w/ a man who would have a deep influence on Berkley’s career, Peter Gatien. The mysterious, one-eyed Canadian club owner hired Berkley to work as a publicist.

It was a heady rise for a kid self-described as fat, unattractive & deeply insecure. Berkley was born in the Bronx but spent most of his youth in Queens, N.Y.. He attended Central Michigan University, where he majored in social work. According to a 2001 profile in New York Magazine, he had planned on teaching emotionally disturbed children.
(MN: He still dealt w/ emotionally disturbed)

"Now," he said, in typically wisecracking Marc Berkley style, "I just throw them parties." In fact, after the Saint closed in 1988, he worked briefly as a child welfare investigator for the City of New York.

Before working for Mailman, he had a round of after-college jobs that included retail @ Bloomingdale’s & managing the Fresh Meadows Movie Theater in Queens. But, like 2 other outsiders from the outer boroughs - Steve Rubell & Ian Schrager, the owners of Studio 54 - Berkley had set his sights on conquering Manhattan. And like them, he did.

He took the back area of the Limelight, which wasn’t being used & transformed it into the Chapel. W/ a separate, gay-only entrance around the corner from the fantastically popular main nightclub, the Chapel became a labyrinth of dancing, hanging out & back rooms. It was like a tacky gay Disneyland & it became hugely popular. The Chapel became a template for the Marc Berkley experience: hot but real-guy go-go dancers (MN: Moi); plenty of dark corners; a masculine but campy vibe; + a "don’t ask don’t tell," laissez faire attitude about "party favors."

Gatien handed off more & more of his main floors to Berkley to promote as gay nights. Club USA in Times Square had Bump, a Sunday night party that was typified by a 3-story slide dubbed the "K Hole"
(MN: if you weren't careful & didn't use the gunny sack, you could suffer serious butt & knee burns ~ I loved it)
For those in the know, that referred to Special K, a drug derived from ketamine, an animal tranquilizer. Special K was the drug of choice @ the time. It was cheap, it was quasi legal, it was easy to get & its woozy, out-of-body feeling set the tone for much of gay nightlife in the mid’-90s.
(MN: Marc loved it ~ to the point it seemed to me that he had a permanent ring of white inside one of his nostrils ~ when I mentioned this to him: he laughed)

Berkley & Gatien developed a strong personal relation & the suspicious club owner was confident enough to give Berkley the jewel in his crown, Saturday nights @ Tunnel. The far-west Chelsea club, built in an abandoned railroad tunnel, was the most avant-garde club in Gatien’s stable. Berkley’s parties were a hit w/ gay and straight revelers & was the 1st big club night after Studio 54 where the 2 groups mingled freely.
(MN: I loved the DJ in the upstairs bathroom)

But merely running club nights wasn’t enough to satisfy the ambitious Ms. B, as he had become known. In 1991, he & Matthew Bank, a businessman, began a black-&-white foldout sheet called Homo Xtra. Altho there had been several gay entertainment magazines, such as Michael’s Thing + After Dark, Homo Xtra, billed as "The Biased Politically Incortrect Party Paper" was entirely dedicated to gay men going to bars, clubs & sexual venues.

The magazine expanded to features on restaurants, entertainment reviews & other facets of the urban experience. It went to a glossy weekly format & relied on advertisers to subsidize its free distribution. It had the market to itself until the advent of Next, a direct competitor, in 1993 - only one of the many "bar rags" that would come into existence around the country using HX as a template.
In the incestuous world of gay New York...

Complete article HERE