Page 512 - Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer - Vol. 1

492 Jack Fritscher, Ph.D.

Three photographs. Three unencumbered views of Mineshaft bartenders
Eyewitness and the bar near the entry where Wally Wallace, the Autocrat of the
Illustration Mineshaft, ruled who could enter his club. Having once mistakenly
turned away Camille O’Grady, Wally made her the official singer of the
Mineshaft. When the Beautiful People spilled very late out of Studio 54 and tried to crash
the Mineshaft, they had to have a certain je ne sais quoi to get past Wally who said he turned
away Mick Jagger, but admitted, he said, Nureyev, Minnelli, Fassbinder, and Foucault.
Three photographs. “Butt Parade on the Mineshaft Bar as a Runway.”
Eyewitness Top to bottom: Compared to the exclusive fisting palace of the invitation-
Illustration only Catacombs in San Francisco, the Mineshaft in Manhattan was an
open and inclusive parade of real “fundament”-alism. Butts that shim-
mered in contest pageants on the main bar enticed logical conclusion in the dark maze of
Mineshaft rooms where men hung, waiting in slings, like the raw carcasses hung on hooks
outside the door of the Mineshaft at 835 Washington Street where bloody young butchers,
aproned in white, worked nights shouldering huge sides of beef lit by the blinding fluores-
cence of the loading dock.
Three photographs. At the Mineshaft, slings, hoists, and trapezes removed
Eyewitness gravity from sex and added to the circus of sexual acrobats. Bottom: In a
Illustration Skulls of Akron performance art piece, Wally Wallace received the “New
Year’s Baby” doll birthed from inside the butt of the man lying on the
covered pool table. The man handing Wally the doll was one of the most able of masoch-
istic leading men in the Skulls of Akron videos.

Photograph. Every night was Halloween, Santeria, or homo-religious
Eyewitness leather ritual in some corner of the Mineshaft lit with black light that
Illustration showed off Day-Glo body-painting that was popular in the 1960s and
1970s.

Photograph. Mummified and hung on a rough-hewn cross in the Mine-
Eyewitness shaft, a gent discovers the rare human satisfaction that he has finally
Illustration found the place where men will do to him the kinds of things he always
dreamed men would do. In the 1970s, New York sculptor Nancy Gross-
man fashioned life-size wooden heads sinisterly hooded with tight black leather and indus-
trial zippers that sold in galleries for thousands of dollars. The Mineshaft admission for the
real thing in a hood (including one’s own head) was no more than the three-buck cost of a
Mineshaft membership card.

Two photographs. “Blacksmith 1” and “Blacksmith 2” were lensed outside
Eyewitness at night on the roof of the Mineshaft. What at first glance seems like a
Illustration festive barbecue morphs into serious S&M because of the anvil in the
lower left corner as two blacksmiths heat and shape branding irons for
red-hot action.

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 05-05-2017
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