Artist and Gay-Burlesque Historian Scott Ewalt Talks Hustlers, Hustlaball, and the Early Days of The Cock

In the heart of New York’s Bowery, a few blocks from sinful early-20th century hotspots like The Slide and Minksy’s Burlesque theater, lives Scott Ewalt, a man who has been a witness, historian, archivist, collector and preservationist of the city’s famously sexual culture.

After moving to New York in the early 1980s, Ewalt quickly fell into the nightlife scene as a bouncer and DJ at raunchy parties like Rock and Roll Fag Bar, Hustler, and others. He later became a fixture at The Cock, the famously filthy East Village gay bar, whose iconic rooster logo he designed. Drawing on his intense fascination with the sexual history of America, from strippers to burlesque stars to hustlers to the porn palaces great and small, Ewalt also began pursuing artistic goals, creating gorgeous paintings, sculpture, and installations that evoke the thrill and decadence of the Times Square porn and burlesque palaces. As we sit in his apartment, I look around the walls covered with framed photos and signage from many of those fallen Times Square venues, which he methodically collected after each one fell in the 1990s: the Eros, the Venus, Billy’s Topless, and others. Though New York’s gay sexual culture has moved away from backroom bars and picking up hustlers on the street to Grindr and Scruff and Rentboy, Ewalt remains committed to bringing his brand of sexual nostalgia to all his creative endeavors, including designing the poster for this year’s Hustlaball on October 12th. I sat down with Ewalt to delve into what drives his passion for all things dirty.

Adam: Have you ever DJ’ed Hustlaball before?

Scott: Only once. I did it with Pierre Fitch. He was very fun. But I was playing retro-disco and he was playing hard-techno house. It was funny. He was really sweet.

How did you wind up doing the poster this year?

I’ve always been friends with Sean Van Sant. I just love his perspective on the whole Rentboy.com thing and the Hustlaball thing. There’s no shame involved and I like that. We did this party at The Cock called Ho-Down for a while, that was something to encourage people to meet the boys in person, I think that’s a very important thing. To kind of, take the rentboys out of the jpeg world and let people know they’re real people.

This year's poster, designed by Ewalt.
This year’s poster, designed by Ewalt.

Did you ever hustle yourself?

No. I never had the confidence. Also when I came to New York it was a very scary time sexually, so I had a lot of admiration for people who had the guts to do it, but I never did it. I never hired one myself, either.

But you surrounded yourself with hustlers and sex workers socially?

Yes. Most of my friends were involved in some sort of sex work. I just admired them. Because they were just normal, nice people. I admired their courage. I admire anyone who’s a performer or who can have their whole act be just themselves. Which is why I like strippers so much. They’re like rock stars without a band.

You’ve lived in New York a long time and from our previous conversations, I know you have long loved and embraced the culture of New York that was openly sexual, that celebrated hustlers and burlesque performers and go-go dancers and porn stars and other sex workers. I’m curious, do you mourn for that era or do you feel like Rentboy is connected in some way?

Well, you can’t really mourn the era because the technology and the politics and real estate have changed so much. Of course it was going to change, so it was either be disappointed or embrace the new guys, you know? And they’re not any different than the old guys. And I do love all those earlier eras, but I think the common link between all of it is that people have the freedom to do these things. The reason I’m attracted to burlesque and strippers and openly sexual culture is that I like the fact that we live in a free country and you can voice your opinion about stuff like that.

Do you have a moment where it all clicked for you? Was there an early formative moment where you saw a hustler on the street or walked by a strip club?

Definitely. When I was a kid I grew up in San Diego and before they renovated the downtown there, it was just non-stop blocks of Asian-themed burlesque houses and tattoo parlors and strippers and sailors. It sounds really corny now, but it really was like that. It was kind of the Southern version of the Barbary Coast. I’ve done a little research and I found out they zoned downtown as a “servicemen’s entertainment center,” which allowed all those businesses to thrive as long as they stayed within a certain zone.

Was your family military?

No. But San Diego has three giant military bases in it. I grew up in a very conservative family, so actually the tantalizing visual aspect of that downtown area was just a carrot on the stick that I couldn’t reach.

Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island.

Exactly.

Did you ever get to go exploring those spaces? Was there anything gay in that world? One of my previous interviews told me San Diego was a city where, because of the military, half the guys had had sex with a guy by the time they were leaving the service.

I think that is very, very likely. There were some gay ones that I heard about. But by the time I was old enough to go to them, they had renovated downtown. So I missed it. But I did come to New York in 1980 or 1981 and stayed in Times Square and the first thing I saw, coming out of the hotel, was the Gaiety theatre. To see the sepias of all those boys in their sequined tuxedos and leather, it was just a giant light bulb to me. I thought, “Wow, there is this inverted version of female stripping.”

I went to the Gaiety only once, about a year or two before it closed. And it was so amazing. The guys would come out and strip and go backstage and get hard and come out hard. Was it raunchier in the beginning?

It was actually more classic the first time I went there. They had an emcee and it was a more structured show, with costumes and props and a skyline made out of mirrors behind the whole thing. It actually got a little bit less vaudeville-burlesque towards the end. But I think that’s what I loved about it so much, that it was like a variety show with stripping in it.

Though most people think it was just the 70s and 80s, from the earliest years of the twentieth century New York was linked to sex and sexual culture. I’m thinking of clubs like The Slide on the Bowery, and people like Little Egypt and those classic strippers who would perform at the World’s Fair.

I love Little Egypt and Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee. It is strange when you look back on it now that there were strippers who were considered to be national institutions. The one I’m most interested in now, who was as big as all those gals, was Henry E. Dixey, who was the first male stripper who performed over on 13th and Broadway in the 1880s. He really was the first male burlesque star.

Henry Dixey, America's first male burlesque star.
Henry Dixey, America’s first male burlesque star.

How did you learn about him?

I bought a book called Burly-Q which came out in 1931 and they had a chapter on him. There were two seminal male strippers from the Victorian era. First, Henry E. Dixey and then he hired Eugen Sandow as his warm-up act. Sandow was the guy who coined the term “bodybuilding” and he stole the act and came out nude, which was totally unheard of. It was just one of those classic Hollywood movie type things where one guy’s career ended and another’s began, literally on the same night.

That’s amazing.

There were two branches to male stripping: “the perfect gentleman” which was Dixey; and “man as sexual animal,” which was what Sandow was.

What was the perfect gentlemen’s stripping act?

I have pictures of it here. It was kind of the unobtainable gentleman that every woman wanted. The act was based on Pygmalion and Galatea and the burlesque of it was that he was the statue that was being carved. The big reveal with him was a pair of sheer white tights and the fact that you could see his whole body through this body suit.

He was a living statue?

Yeah but he moved. At the time, women were doing the same thing — white body suits and that was as low as you could go. Victorian women would literally faint at the sight of his package.

Because it was so big or because it existed?

Just because it existed. It wasn’t a working class guy in a swimming hole, it was like the man you would see promenading down 5th avenue that you would never imagine seeing in a sexual way.

So in the ’80s you moved to New York, and you started exploring the different scenes — life in Times Square and the East Village and club life. Can you tell me a little bit about your involvement in those worlds during that time?

Well I moved here to go to college and a year and a half into it I started coming into the city to go to Danceteria and Paradise Garage, Peppermint Lounge, and Michael Schmidt [fashion designer and creator of legendary party Squeezebox] actually became one of my very first friends here, and I really wanted to get involved in the whole thing. Because I realized if you were involved then you had this whole entrée into the is other layer. So he said if you want to get involved, get involved. So I got a job as security guy at Boybar. I did the door and security there. That led to working at The Ninth Circle. Which was a —

Sandow
Eugen Sandow, the “living statue.”

Sex club, right?

It wasn’t a sex club. It was a male-prostitute bar off Greenwich Ave. A friend of mine who worked at Boybar, Len Whitney, was kind of my mentor. He said, “You’ve gotta work here because you’ve gotta see this.” So I worked there two days a week and it was a crazy place. You’d have Peter Allen and people like that in there. The hustlers really did look unbelievable because they were doing the same look as Peter Berlin was at the time — peroxided mullets and 4 pairs of scrunch socks with biking shorts and crop tops and sailor hats and really —

Putting it on, boy drag.

Yeah. I think that’s one thing I really appreciated about the male sex workers from the 80s is that the internet and phone lines hadn’t come into maturity yet, you really had to look like a prostitute to get it across to people that that’s what you were.

You couldn’t be just walking down the street in normal clothes.

Yeah. I think the most exaggerated version other than Peter Berlin was Vladimir Correa, whose outfits were just insane. He used to wear those spaghetti strap tank tops that went just above the nipple that were cropped all the way up. 15 pleated gym-jams that were day-glo paint spattered, with yellow tennis shoes and a headband. It was visually assaulting on a street. He looked like sex on wheels. You couldn’t believe this person was barreling down the street looking like this. Him and his boyfriend would hang out literally right on 42nd street and 8th avenue on the corner.

It seems like that would be terrifying to a certain type of john. Someone who was so conspicuous.

Yeah. But I think that those were the guys who really did succeed. Leo Ford and Joey Stefano and all those boys really had an insane visual. Leo Ford was kind of funny because his thing was preppy-hitchhiker prostitute — daisy dukes with a popped-collared Izod shirt. Super tan with super white hair. Really super exaggerated.

Today’s hustlers are indistinguishable from men you see walking down the street in Chelsea on a hot day.

The women were doing extremely exaggerated looks too. Now it’s hard to tell them apart from the bridge-and-tunnel Sex and the City girls.

How did you become involved with The Cock?

I went to graduate school in LA in 1993 and I started deejaying with Bryan Rabin And we had a night at the Gaslight called Burlesque on Cahuenga right across the street from The Spotlight. It wasn’t a huge success but it made me realize I could be a DJ and play music other than Madonna and have people come. We booked some really great early neo burlesque performers — Patti Powers, Madison, Ron Athey and The Dueling Bankheads and people liked it and it gave me the confidence to come back here and pursue it even more. When I came back I started doing stuff for Jackie 60 and my big break was that Jackie 60 asked me to DJ the Bettie Pages magazine release party and it was the first time I could play exactly what I liked, and it turned out everyone else really liked it too. Dean Johnson was there that night and he was re-launching Rock and Roll Fag Bar and asked me to be the DJ for that.

Wednesday nights at The World…

Yeah. It used to be a huge thing in the 80s and then he restarted it at the same space as Boybar, which was also Coney Island High. I got to DJ that. Mistress Formika came to see it and wanted me to DJ a party he was starting called Hustler at Cake with his friend David who was with Mario Diaz and he liked what I was doing, and that I was dressing the part and looked like a hooker. I was deejaying with JoJo Americo and we would play Vampira records and “Hot Sexy Dominatrix” by Vaginal Crème Davis. Everyone just liked it and it was a complete break from the non-stop house music that was just going on and on and on.

How did that lead to your being a fixture at The Cock?

So, after Cake, Mario Diaz did Foxy and then Studio Filthy Whore, and he built up his audience so much that he had the confidence to open up a seven night, weeklong thing. And he hired about 65 of us that were living the scene at the time, and got us all to work there, and so it just became this clubhouse for freaks. 17 years later it’s still going.

What was the opening night of The Cock like?

Yeah, I was lucky enough that I got to DJ the opening night. It was a hit from the minute we opened the door. People knew what to expect because Hustler was very, very popular, and then Squeezebox had already been going. People were really dressing the part, and everyone was really into either the new rock or the classic rock or punk music. So it was great. We got to enjoy what we actually enjoyed for a change. It just kept going.

You also designed the famous rooster logo and neon sign that hangs outside the bar. How long did that take you to come up with?

Well, Jackie Beat came up with a couple of names. Her and Mario are thick as thieves, still. One was “The Swallow” and the other was “The Cock.” Mario liked The Cock better. So we literally just sat down with the piece of paper and drew it out. He was like, “I want it a little chubbier, and I want it to look a little more confident, but more mean, and more strutting.” I just kind of drew it out and then two weeks later we had a big giant neon rooster. There’s been 15 of them now. We use them if we change locations or go to other cities. I’ve also exhibited them as sculptures.

I want to talk a little bit about the culture in that time. The thing that’s missing from most New York and LA bars now is that there were backrooms, most bars had backrooms to have a free for all. And the old Cock’s was really amazing. I had my first kiss and handjob in that room. And that to me feels like the last remnant of old New York. Do you think backroom culture could come back? Or is it just impossible with Grindr and Scruff?

I think what you’re getting at is that the tangibility of it is gone, but I think that it is still here. It’s diminished of course, but I think that the nice thing about The Cock is that people do turn off their phones and want to meet people in person. It’s such an outsider bar that some of these people don’t fit into the cookie-cutter thing of an internet profile. People have to boil themselves down to this series of numbers, and if the numbers don’t match with whatever the zeitgeist is, you have to go to The Cock. I love the characters that hang out there. We have a bunch of regulars that are so far off the grid and it really makes me happy. We have a lot of Hasidic Jewish men for example. And just a lot of people who drive in from Staten Island and have a wife and kids or a lot of people cheating on other people. It’s kind of a catchall if you want to do something wrong.

How has it been able to stay in business? I remember being at the old Cock and the police came in and made the lights go on and we sat there for an hour and I wound up dating the person who was sitting next to me. Does that kind of stuff still happen?

Oh yeah. The owner makes it look easy but I think what people don’t understand is that there is a lot of time spent with the 5th precinct and a lot of time spent in court. He really keeps on top of the paperwork and it’s been a real invisible effort for him to keep that place open, because things completely changed this neighborhood since we opened. He’s been able to keep them away.

I just noticed right next door is a children’s boxing studio.

There’s a PetCo on the other side now. The block could almost be inside a mall in Wichita if it wasn’t for The Cock in the middle of it. The thing I thought was funny was when they built that fried chicken place on the corner that had almost the same logo as we did.

When all the places in Times Square started closing, what made you decide to start collecting them?

The big moment was — I lived in Times Square at the time and they were taking the marquee sign from the Adonis theater on 50th Street and cutting it into sections in order to get it into a dumpster and I asked them if I could have the sign and they said absolutely. I asked how big it was and they said it was four feet high and 16 feet long which was probably the size of my apartment at the time. So it just created this desperate hole in my mind, that all that stuff was free if you could just figure out a way to get it. The second sign was kind of on top was this one that was right above the Gaiety theater which was called the Whirly Burly Girlie Review. I tried to get that. All these signs are twice or three times as big as you think they’re going to be. The sign was actually two stories high and thirteen feet across.

It didn’t looks so big from below.

Right. It was five stories up. It looked smaller than it was. The first one I actually got my hands on was, after a storm, the Babydoll Lounge in Tribeca, their shingle sign blew off and I noticed it was gone and they replaced. I went in and offered them money for the sign, and they thought I was completely nuts. I walked out with it. That was the first sign in my collection. After that I made it a full time hobby to contact any burlesque signage and offer them money and let them know it was going to a place that appreciated it. Then the bigger the collection got, I could say, “I already have Billy’s Topless, I have the Babydoll, I have the Venus, the Eros,” and so it kind of snowballed and the people would be more willing to add to my collection.

Do you have a prized possession?

There are probably ten prized possessions. The Tura Satana light box and the Eros neon are probably my very favorite things I own. I love the sister one of the Venus. And I love that all-male theater sign, which is literally the oldest sign ever advertising male movies on the outside of a building.

As I mentioned before, you’re not just a historian and DJ but you’re also an artist. I’m wondering if you can tell me a little bit about your most recent show and what you’re working on now? There was what I called the devil burlesque show…

I did this installation show called Back in the Night, which was a take-off on the phrase “back in the day” and a song by prepunk band Dr. Feelgood. It was my impression of Times Square. I wanted to document all these businesses but I didn’t want it to be like Edward Hopper or a 70s photorealistic thing, where it had this instant nostalgia thing. I wanted it to be more uplifting than that. Kind of the only logical inhabitants of these landscapes were male strippers as devils, because as gay people we were raised, especially my generation, to think that we’re anti-god. At a certain point in your childhood, you realize, “Okay I am the Disney villain and everything — I’m not supposed to like what I like.” So you kind of grow up with this inverted perspective. So I just thought the most inverted way to represent gay strippers, is as little happy devils. I love mythology, because it’s pagan and un-Christian, and since it’s un-Christian, it’s not as judgmental towards gay people, so it’s a pagan hell paradise.

What’s next for you?

I’m working on four really large pieces right now. They’re a little bit toned down sexually compared to the last show, but they’re of the four strip clubs that I grew up fascinated by that kind of formed my aesthetic.

When you deejayed the Hustlaball last, did you see a connection between the performances that were going on and the stuff you saw when you first came to New York?

I guess the interesting thing about the performances you saw in Times Square, was that they didn’t expect anyone would actually see them. So there was this kind of lack of self-consciousness. Whereas everything is so well documented now that the boys at the Hustlaball who perform have their act more together.

People in the audience are taking photographs and shooting video.

And there’s a premise to what a sexual performance should be. Whereas I think the people at the Gaiety theater and the Show Palace and all those male burlesque theaters of Times Square, they didn’t really have a template to work from. It was “I’m from MN and I need money so I’m gonna get out there and do a cowboy act.” No matter what, though, I’m a total performance junkie and it’s because I don’t have the confidence to do it myself. I put performers on a pedestal. They just wake up and say. “I’m gonna do an act with a snake and how am I gonna do it and who’s gonna pay me?”

Adam Baran is a filmmaker, blogger, former online editor of Butt Magazine and co-curator of Queer/Art/Film. His short film JACKPOT, about a porn-hunting gay teen, won Best Short Film at the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, and was recently featured on The Huffington Post, Queerty, and Towleroad, among others. He is a features programmer at Outfest Los Angeles LGBT Film Festival and NewFest in New York. In his spare time, he complains about things to his friends. “Fisting for Compliments”, his weekly musings about the intersection of sex, art, porn, and history, will appear every Monday on TheSword. You can contact him at Adam@TheSword.com and follow him on Twitter at @ABaran999. Check out his previous columns in the Fisting For Compliments Archive.

4 thoughts on “Artist and Gay-Burlesque Historian Scott Ewalt Talks Hustlers, Hustlaball, and the Early Days of The Cock”

  1. Scott was in the center of everything … great interview! Reminds me of the time I rescued two illustrated 7 foot plexiglass signs from a Baltimore porn store dumpster. They advertised video ‘buddy booths’ and read ‘See Your Buddy in Action!” Great outsider art with primitive bargain-basement Tom of Finlandesque images. I’m glad someone is preserving this lost culture!

  2. Fascinating interview, and how exciting to devote time and talent to something one finds so intriguing! How I would enjoy sitting down with him and sharing my interest in this culture. Please, more of him anytime!!

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