In the mid 70’s, the gay bar scene varied greatly. Club 221 was for transgender hookups, The Anvil got a little down and dirty but still had drag shows and other entertainment. Over on the corner of Houston and Hudson, a short lived shithole opened up in an upstairs loft. It was called “The Toilet”. At the time I was experimenting with drinking piss and they had men’s room cubicles open to the main bar floor. I watched more than I did, but I was hooked. Then I found out about the Mineshaft.
Those of you who want to know all the dish about celebrities who went there are missing the point of the place. If you could wear that gossipy curiosity as clothing, you would have been turned away at the door. There was no faggy queening shit going on there. Nobody railed on in highpitched endless chatter about who went where or what they wore. The Mineshaft was where men got down to some serious pig sex. None of it was for the shrill.
The first time I went, I stripped naked except for mandatory sneakers, and with my yrusty bottle of poppers, the kind no one under 30 has ever known, I made my way directly downstairs to the tub room. Two bathtubs, neither connected to any plumbing, a man in each and one of them was me. My urinal fantasies were being crazily fulfilled as an endless stream of men pissed an endless stream of urine down my throat, in my hair and all over me.
After 2 or three visits, I used the upstairs men’s room to relieve myself and noticed that the two urinals were far too widely spaced on the wall. There was no evidence of plumbing or tile damage to suggest that the middle appliance had been removed. I determined that a middle urinal was missing and I was volunteering for the job. My trial attept that evening was successful enough so the following week I arrived, stripped, knelt into place, feet spread, ass on the tile, sneakers stuffed behind the toilet bowl. Over the course of several hours I drank completely the piss of any man who came in, and most chose me over my porcelain brothers. I was trying to count them, but I lost count after 26. Remember, the bar was selling Budweisers at a buck apiece, so the flow was definitely there. My personal rule, as long as a man was in the room, I kept my head back and my mouth open and stayed poppered up. Every hour or so I took a leg stretch and then went back to my post.
The feeling of well being that washed over me, the sense that I was right where I belonged, serving as a human urinal, has never left me. It wasn’t about sex, even though I have blown at least 3000 cocks in my life. It was about a personal realization that there is something that suits me so well, yet belongs nowhere in society. The Mineshaft let me be that.
If you are disgusted with this account and are saying, “Ewww! Oh my Gawd! I just wanted to know about what famous designers went there, not THAT horrible story!”, then you are a very different gay man than we had then. And they’re all gone now. Now we have loving gay homes raising glorious children in a politically correct society. There was nothing politically correct about the Mineshaft.
