By Sasha Urban

When Frankie MacTavish first started go-go dancing — as a 21-year-old in 1989 — he never expected it would lead to him being a witness in a courtroom. But when the Los Angeles Police Department’s Vice Division raided the fetish club he was performing at in 1993, that’s just what ended up happening. 

The nightclub, first based at Basgo’s Disco in Silverlake, then at the Dragonfly in West Hollywood, had a name most newspapers wouldn’t even print in full: Club FUCK! According to MacTavish, now 54, the name had less to do with sex, and more with, “fuck what the establishment thinks of us.” Held on Sunday nights, the weekly party had everything, from live piercing and body modification acts to legendary performance artists, drag queens and go-go dancers like MacTavish. It was a revolutionary space that accepted freaks and queers wholeheartedly, and mirrored similar queer punk movements happening in New York and London around the same time. 

By the spring of 1993, the club had gained some mainstream popularity, with write-ups in the L.A. Times and Vogue, and was beginning to attract more patrons from outside the fetish scene to which Club FUCK! catered. One of these “outsiders,” put off by the extreme nature of the club, called the police to report what they had seen, according to the ONE Archives, USC’s LGBT library. MacTavish said he jumped down from the box where he was go-go dancing in time to avoid arrest, but many of his friends didn’t. He ended up being called upon as a witness in the courtroom, with the prosecution asking him whether he saw one of his friends putting his fist inside another dancer. 

“And I just said, ‘Could you repeat the question?,’” MacTavish said, “because it was so preposterous that [he] would be fisting [anyone] at the club. That type of thing didn’t happen.”

Frankie MacTavish gogo dancing sometime in the ’90s (Courtesy of Frankie MacTavish)

Following his lawyer’s advice, MacTavish told the truth about the goings-on at Club FUCK!. They were certainly provocative, but always in the name of art and spectacle. Along with the rest of the dancers, he was able to avoid any lewd conduct charges on the grounds that patrons at the bar knew what they were getting themselves into. 

“So it eventually got thrown out, which was great, and we had a big celebration and a party,” MacTavish said. “But yeah, we were all really scared that we were going to have to sit with like, you know, sexual misconduct or, you know, those kind of charges that come and stick with you.” 

Such charges, and often more serious ones, were common at one point in history for queer people who were simply trying to enjoy a night out in Los Angeles. In fact, one of the first documented LGBT protests against police brutality, before the Stonewall Inn in 1969, was at the Black Cat Tavern in 1967, after undercover police officers arrested more than a dozen men for “public lewdness” for  kissing on New Year’s Eve. (Two of those men were forcefully registered as sex offenders.) The Black Cat Tavern eventually became Basgo’s Disco, which is where Club FUCK! was founded. 

After the trial, Club FUCK! was forced to shut down for good, and MacTavish continued dancing at other venues like the popular Club Cherry on Fridays, and fetish club Sin-a-matic on Saturdays, both in West Hollywood. It’s hard to describe the nature of such venues, which were unlike anything the city had seen before. One L.A. Times article from 1991 about the latter club wrote, “In one advertised and heavily attended spectacle, a large crowd watched a drag queen cover a young man’s bare feet with whipped topping and pancake syrup and lick them clean.”

A flyer for a Club FUCK! reunion after the club had been shut down (Courtesy of Frankie MacTavish)

Joseph Brooks, who created all three of those clubs and many more in the ‘80s and ‘90s, said he was less concerned with the law and more interested in bringing Los Angeles a new club scene inspired by the London punk scene. He moved to LA in 1978 from Northern California, first opening a record store and then beginning to host parties around the city. 

Iconic performers came through the ranks of his clubs, including the world-renowned burlesque artist Dita Von Teese and Raja, the winner of the third season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Brooks  said he never had any run-ins personally with police, and he left that responsibility to the bar owners, who were responsible for the liquor license. His job was to make the flyers — and change the culture, as well. 

A flyer from a 1999 Joseph Brooks event (Courtesy of Frankie MacTavish)

“We were completely not interested in reproducing what was going on in other places,” Brooks said. “We were trying to do something that was special and unique and served an audience that was special and unique and on the edge and not mainstream, and I think we did a brilliant job.”

Brooks said at first he wanted a space to play the music he wasn’t hearing at other clubs, like Depeche Mode and The Chemical Brothers. Once the music was playing, the people came. And those people were usually queer and interested in the same things he was, like performance art and body modification, both of which featured heavily at his events. 

“People would freak out,” Brooks said. “Ron Athey would do piercings at the club. People would be like, “What the fuck?” But now you know, you can go to a mall in Idaho and get that, you know? It was just trying to do things fresh and new and keep doing that … keep moving it forward. The music changed, what we did changed, the performances changed. We tried keeping up with the times, and we did.”

Frankie kept his act fresh, too. He said he was always trying to “reinvent the wheel” when it came to his performances, and he started doing drag by the name “Aneeda Fix” just to “mix it up.” 

At one of Brooks’ events in the late ‘90s, Club Makeup, MacTavish hired an ambulance driver for a “publicity stunt.” The emergency vehicle pulled up outside the club, sirens blaring, and MacTavish was carried through the crowd on a stretcher before getting on stage to sing live in drag, covered in syringes and glitter. The whole thing was filmed for E! News. 

Meet Frankie as he discusses what it was like getting ready to go out in the ’90s.
Frankie’s performance at Club Makeup and his entrance at the “Battle for the Tiara” pageant (Courtesy of Frankie MacTavish)

MacTavish said his drag persona, like much of the performance art at the time, was a response to the AIDS crisis that had taken so many of his friends. He performed once in a pageant called “Battle for the Tiara,” where he promoted needle exchanges, a harm reduction-based method of preventing HIV infection from used needles. Brooks said that at Club FUCK!, performance artist Ron Athey would do bloodletting on stage as a response to the anti-gay stigma during the epidemic. For MacTavish, tattoos and piercings also became a way of channeling the pain of the epidemic into something productive.

“The whole techno fetish club movement that we started kind of came from the repression of HIV and AIDS,” MacTavish said. “We would get notices that two people that you knew had died in the same week. And the memorial was on Sunday and you had to choose which person you knew better if you wanted to go to the memorial. And this is happening weekly. … The queer culture was coming up and filtering through all of the AIDS epidemic and finding ways to express ourselves and deal with the grief and the suffering and the loss.”

Downtown Drag

Nowadays, most of those clubs are long gone, with a few exceptions. The legal actions against these clubs have dwindled too, and for the most part kissing in public or go-go dancing at a gay club is no longer dangerous in Los Angeles. 

Micky’s West Hollywood, a much less transgressive mainstay of the gay nightlife scene, was shut down for 30 days in 2015 after an investigation by the Alcohol and Beverage Commission that found “lewd conduct,” due to overexposed go-go dancers and contact between dancers and customers. Other than that, lewd conduct charges have rarely been seen in the contemporary gay nightlife scene, and performers of all kinds can be found in the city’s queer scene.

Ken Dahl is a go-go dancer, drag performer, and otherwise multi-talented nightlife personality who has performed in clubs from Downtown LA to the Valley. He said he knew from a young age that he wanted to be on stage. 

“I remember watching cats as a very small child and watching the dancers leaping and moving, and I would feel my muscles like tensing and wanting to be up there and doing those things,” Ken said. “So I just want to just follow that intuition.”

Ken Dahl go-go dancing in Los Angeles (Courtesy of Ken Dahl)

Dahl said he started first in the rave scene of Oregon, where he was raised, and eventually transitioned into the art of drag. Since moving to LA he has explored everything from pole-dancing to taking tickets at the door of club events. 

At 28 years old, Ken is part of a new generation of performers who can enjoy the freedoms won by the previous ranks of queer artists. Ken is a trans man, whose body is adorned with tattoos and piercings, similar to MacTavish and others in his scene. Ken said he looks up to MacTavish’s generation, who led the way for alternative styles to become a mainstay in LA nightlife. 

“I feel like so much about like the gay nightlife scene that has changed drastically even in the last like 10 years, let alone 30,” Ken said. “I feel like so many more people are allowed to be seen in nightlife these days … I don’t see myself go-going in [West Hollywood] any time soon, but the fact that I’m able to get regular gigs as a go-go at all where they want me as I am. They don’t even care … I feel like that’s such a great step forward.”

See how the downtown nightlife scene has changed — recent bars (blue) and bars that existed before the year 2000 (violet). Source: QueerMaps

Like MacTavish, Ken said he found solace in body modification as a way to take ownership over his body, which he was at odds with when he first discovered he was trans. The words “Psychedelic Urchin” are lettered across his shins. He has a ring pop on his right thigh,  and gauges the size of dollar coins stretched across his ears. They’re more than just decoration. For Ken, they are a symbol of his freedom. As are his various identities in the nightlife world. 

“A lot of my drag and performance art journey itself is running parallel with my medical transition where I’ve been examining my preconceived notions of gender and what it means to be a man or to be a woman,” Ken said. “I feel like the nightclub scene just allows you to exist in a way and just do your thing and figure yourself out.”

When he’s not go-go dancing or doing drag, Ken works at the Van Gogh exhibit on Sunset and Cahuenga. While he wants to be a full-time performer, finding stability in nightlife is not easy, and many performers are forced to do other jobs, like sex work, just to pay the bills. But Ken said the benefits, like the community and the thrill of live performance, make it all worth it.  

“This is like my soul career,” Ken said. “It’s something that just fulfills me so deeply that it doesn’t matter what aspect of performance art I’m doing as long as I’m performing. Like, that’s what makes me the most happy, and I just want to be able to do that. Like if I can do that every single night of the week, I will do it every single night of the week, and that is like my ultimate goal.”

School of Drag

When I got to USC in January of 2018, I barely knew anything about Los Angeles. To me, LA was made up of Santa Monica and Hollywood — the two places my mom would take me and my sister whenever we visited as kids. 

But just before I had arrived, I had started to become fascinated by the art of drag, after watching four seasons of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” while studying abroad. As a queer theatre kid, I never felt validated in my desires to express my own femininity and unite with others who were willing to do the same. (I did, however, perform in an all-male parody of “Cell Block Tango” from the musical Chicago as a freshman in high school, which I consider my gateway to the art of drag). 

“Without drag — and the community that has come with it — it’s not an exaggeration to say I don’t know what I would be doing with myself.”

By the time I arrived, there was a growing itch inside of me to explore everything the city and school had to offer, from seeing drag shows downtown (using a friend’s driver’s license) to joining the annual Drag Show at USC. Performing in the USC show as a sophomore led me to explore other opportunities, and along the way I’ve learned more about myself.

These outlets became my lifeline as I made my way through college, the pandemic, and as I’m  building a life after I’ve graduated. I’ve always been drawn to theater and art of all kinds. Being a journalism major was definitely the right choice for me, but without drag — and the community that has come with it — it’s not an exaggeration to say I don’t know what I would be doing with myself.  

This semester, my last, I was lucky enough to direct the 12th Annual USC Drag Show. The job required casting the show, rehearsing with performers, arranging and overseeing nearly every technical aspect of the production (with the help of a wonderful production team, of course), and performing in the show myself. It took up nearly every waking moment of my life, and I tried to make myself as available as possible to every performer, many of whom were attempting drag for the first time. It was important to me that they felt like their desire to try the art form was as legitimate as, say, a student who loves competitive chess, or a D1 athlete. 

Like Frankie and Ken, drag came to me when I needed it most. I may not have body modifications and I may not be performing in underground fetish clubs, but that doesn’t mean I don’t look up to them as trailblazers in the queer movement. Without them and their communities, from the boundary-pushing performance art of the ‘90s to the bright future of nightlife, it’s safe to say I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities. I mean, my school paid me to put on a drag show, how insane is that?

Me performing in the 12th Annual USC Drag Show in 2021 (Photo: Talon Reed Cooper)

I’m lucky to be alive in a time when the AIDS crisis isn’t killing all of my friends, and I’m able to kiss my boyfriend in public without fear of arrest. But when I look at where the LGBTQ community has come from and where it’s going, I think of stories like Frankie’s and Ken’s, which show a path paved in authenticity and love for others. 

When MacTavish was going through his expansive collection of photos, he would often refer to his friends by name, or what he remembered most about them: “We called him the ‘Leather Feather Sweater queen,’” or, “That’s Lauren, the one with the tiny waist.” But every few photos he pointed out someone who had died, either from AIDS, cancer, suicide, or anything else. The photos of shock and glamor, conveying a time that brought so much joy to his life, also held captive the people he had lost along the way. 

These days, MacTavish is a yoga teacher, hairdresser and masseuse. He said he started practicing Buddhism after the loss of his partner, in order to come to terms with the temporality of his body and everything he knew to be real. He seems happy in a way that’s hard to describe, and never misses an opportunity to laugh. 

When the pandemic hit, MacTavish said he gained a new perspective on his time as a go-go dancer. That the clubs he came up in, where it was an “amazing experience of sexuality and expression,” might no longer be possible, and he was unsure what the future held, but grateful for the life he’s been able to live and pass down to future generations.  

“When we couldn’t go out, I was looking back and thinking like, ‘Wow, I don’t know if we’re ever going to be able to socialize normally again because of the pandemic.’” MacTavish said. “And to look back on that [time], it kind of gave me a sense of like, ‘Wow, I did that. You know, like, I really did that.’ That was super fun, and no one can take that away from me.”