Historic Site Name: 8BC

Address: 337 E. 8th Street

8BC, its name taken from its location at 337 E. 8th Street between Avenue B and C, was one of the premier performance spaces in the East Village from 1983 to 1985. Despite a relatively short existence, the club became a haven for a wide range of queer and gender non-conforming artists such as Ethyl Eichenberger, Nan Goldin, John Sex, Taboo!, Charles Busch, Carmelita Tropicana, 3 Teens Kill 4, and Holly Hughes. The club also featured one of Luis Frangella’s largest works, a massive mural on the side and front of the building that was created with the help of fashion designer Keiko Bonk.

8BC opened on Halloween night in 1983 by Cornelius Conboy and his partner, Dennis Gattra, after four years of renovations on what had been an aging, dilapidated farmhouse. The building was one of the only freestanding structures on a block that had long succumbed to urban decay and was referred to, with somewhat wry affection, as “Little Dresden.” The rotted wooden floor wasn’t useful beyond serving as firewood for Conboy and Gattra during the first year of renovations, when the building had no heat, running water, or electricity. Removing the floor resulted in the club itself being below street level, which gave 8BC its signature subterranean feel. As Jordan Levin recalls,

“Walking into 8BC was like descending into an archeological site. You entered at street level into another world; a cave-like room with towering walls of pitted concrete, where the floor dropped away in front of you and you descended rough wood stairs to a dirt pit filled with people, the ceiling vaulting high above. The stage, also at street level, floated on the other side.”

-Jordan Levin, “Inventing Culture While Civilization Teeters.”

A defining feature of 8BC was its enormous stage, which was fifty feet long and eight feet above the floor, helping it dominate the relatively small club to the complete advantage of its performers. One of the performers who found the stage a match for their outsized talent was Ridiculous Theater alumni, Peter Hujar muse, Jackie Curtis collaborator, and iconic gender outlaw Ethyl Eichelberger.

Eichelberger used 8BC to debut some of their most significant plays, including the 1983 premier of Souled Out (also known as Dr. Mary Fautus), supported by a cast that included Tabboo!, Agosto Machado, and Rita Redd. On July 17, 1985, they debuted Leer, with their interpretation reducing the play to three characters, all of which Eichelberger performed. The role was only enhanced by Eichelberger’s magnificent costumes, created by the avant garde couturier (and downtown legend in his own right) Gerard Little/Mr. Fashion.

So deep was Conboy’s respect for Eichelberger that he bestowed upon them the honor of staging the club’s last performance, which happened on October 13, 1985. In the same year, the poet and playwright Charles Tarzian wrote, with prophetic and devastating accuracy, “The club is proud of their relativism and of the implicit urgency of the work they present. Some of the performers at 8BC seem infected by the uncertainty that the threat of nuclear Holocaust creates.” The nuclear weapon that hit the queer community was in the viral form of HIV/AIDS, and Eichelberger would test positive in 1988 and pass in 1990.

The club featured more than just drag, also hosting bands, orchestras, comedy shows, variety shows, and film festivals, in addition to Pig Phest, their annual July 4th party. The 1985 Pig Phest featured a miniature golf course, with each of the clubs and performance spaces in the neighborhood having designed their own hole (Wow Cafe designed theirs to be impossible to complete.) The 1985 Downtown Film Festival was hosted at 8BC and showcased films by Jack Smith, Sur Rodney Sur, Nan Goldin and Lung Leg. The club was a second home for queer (and queer-adjacent) performers whose radical and physical performances were only accentuated by the club’s emphasis on vaudeville and its challenges to conventional divisions between performer and spectator.

Performers such as Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, and Tom Murrin (also known as the Alien Comic) used 8BC to showcase their politically-driven and often bombastic work. Perhaps no other performer made as much visual and psychic impact on their spectators as Finley, who, living up to her book of the same title, gave complete shock treatment to her frequently-berated audience. Using her body as a prop to elicit disgust as opposed to desire, the core of Finley's work was rooted in her refusal to be defined by what she considered to be the omnipresent (and inherently predatory) male gaze.

Finley’s contemporary, Holly Hughes, was very much cut from the same rage-soaked cloth. Hughes’s defining work, The Well of Horniness, was performed at 8BC in addition to multiple downtown spaces in the mid-1980s. Hughes was given the distinction of performing on 8BC’s opening night, staging a mud-wrestling act that peaked when Hughes, completely naked and equally enraged, jumped off the stage and onto a drunken heckler.

Like many of its sister clubs in the East Village, 8BC lacked proper licenses and its foot traffic and noise made it an unavoidable target for police and various agents of “beautification” that began sweeping out most of the vibrant underworld by 1985. Conboy admitted, ''We started 100 percent illegal. For the first year and a half, we got a constant stream of violations. But they'd been giving us time to correct them.'' In fact, they were never corrected and on September 20, 1985,  the club was cited as an illegal cabaret and officially shut down. As Hughes said at the time of 8BC’s closing, “There’s something about my aesthetic that clashes with blonde wood. That sort of burnt-out rec room feeling the clubs have is just more appropriate. 8BC was funky and not precious, the kind of space I don’t think we’ll see again.”

Sources:

Michael Gross, “The Party Seems to be Over for Lower Manhattan Club” New York Times, Oct. 26, 1985.

Cynthia Carr, “Hanging Out on the Lower Worst Side,” New York Times, Oct. 22, 2006.

Joe E. Jeffreys, “Ethyl Eichelberger, 1945-1990,” The Dramatic Review 35.1 (Spring 1991), 10-12.

Charles Tarzian, “8BC-From Farmhouse to Cabaret, The Drama Review 29.1 (Spring 1985), 108-112.

Norma Adler, “Jo Andres' ‘Liquid TV’ at 8BC,” The Drama Review 29.1 (Spring 1985), 36-38.

Uzi Parnes, “Pop Performance in East Village Clubs,” The Drama Review 29.1 (Spring 1985), 5-16.

The New York Downtown Film Festival Wiki

Jordan Levin, “8BC — Inventing Culture While Civilization Teeters”

Multimedia on Youtube:

8BC live Daina and the Tribe featuring Jeremy Steig, 198?

Money (that's what I want) - Mr Bubble live at the 8BC Club c. 1984

FRAUHAUS 8BC Steppin' Stone, 198?

The Ordinaires: Live at 8BC, May 11, 1985