Drunken LA Dispatch: Booby Trap

Ed. note: The following dispatch comes via Kid on the Ball. Thanks, Kid.

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Now I fully understand that large groups of lesbians are scary. I
have appeared in court more times than I’ve gone to a lesbian bar. But
as all the cool kids go chasing down the next fresh scene before the
vodka has dried on the last one, I wonder whether lesbian bars are the
next frontier. There is a toasty I-feel-your-pain camraderie among the
small group of gay men who dare to enter this unmarked, vaginal space. I
even exchanged solemn head-nods with some of these gay male strangers
as though we were the only two black people in the room at a house
party in suburban Connecticut.

According to Kim, the gay boys
come here for “the energy of the party. We all drink champagne
together, and Patrón, and it’s a brouhaha.” But if you ask me, the boys
come here because they know that the ten or twenty other boys who come
here are likely to be of a rarer and more delightful breed than the
crowd you’d find somewhere other than a labial wonderland. The dudes
here are poised, stylish, and totally hot. One of these studs even looked like a good prospect until he introduced me to his VGL
life partner. But whatever. I may have come for the men, but I stayed
for the vibe.

What makes Booby Trap different from so many
other happenings in LA is that Kim and her fellow promoters,
who love the boys, inject a distinct gay male sensibility into much of
what they do. In Kim’s mind, this means “glamor.” (That’s right.
Quote…unquote, bitch.) The fashion is forward, the space is sleazy,
the dancing is dirty, and the music-indie, disco, electro, post-punk
and house-is as good as it gets.

These are no amateur DJs,
mind you. Anon, who originally comes out of San Francisco, has been
around for over a decade. She, Kim and Daisy O spin at famed LA
swank-swamps like The Standard, Bar Lubitsch, Teddy’s and Bar Marmont.
The latter two spots even offered up their spaces for Booby Trap, but
Kim says that she and her partners decided to go for this space. It’s
smaller, rougher and unmarked, and it came with an ultra-hip black
British doorman named Vladi.  

So yes, my friend Dustin and I
were enjoying ourselves at a lesbian bar, and that was a first. But we
left early to stop by The Eagle, our neighborhood leather bar. (There
would be more penises there, we reasoned.) And though my evening was
mind-opening and heart-softening, I won’t deny the fuzzy surge of anger
I felt when we walked inside The Eagle and surveyed the crowd. It was
lesbian night there, too.

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Club Booby Trap (Official Site)

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