M.E.A.T. GAY BAR NYC FULL

“They were just relieved to find a gay club playing disco!” Our music – which could be Madonna or could be some deep Afro or cosmic track – fits on any festival bill too.” CD compilations and a Sunday afternoon show on Rinse FM raised their profile further (“We get all soulful and help people’s hangovers subside”) and Howard notes that it also chimed with the “nu-disco” scene that rose in the mid-00s with the likes of Todd Terje and Prins Thomas. Panzetta, who has been with HMD since that fateful New Year’s Day in 2004, says it became popular “because no one was really doing that on the queer scene: playing disco and having fun, basically. Because being queer doesn’t have to be a sexual thing, you know what I mean?” But with a queer aesthetic and a queer sensibility. Hillard adds: “We made it clear from the off that it was for every tribe, every gender, every sexuality.

“We always said that the best parties we’d been to – and the best throughout queer clubbing history – have been ones with the most mixed-up crowd,” Stanton explains. Hillard dubbed their weekly Sunday night a “queer party for all”, way before clubland and society in general were talking about safe spaces and diversity.

M.E.A.T. GAY BAR NYC FULL

“They had a full Friday night buffet the event was called Chunkies. “It was a proper bears club then,” Hillard remembers – bears being hirsute, full-bodied gay men. Kicked out of a venue in Chinatown “because they wanted to change the name, the music policy … everything but the healthy bar take, basically”, Stanton says, they found a home for their event in Dukes (now Eagle London). “They were all cookie-cutter hard house rip-offs of Trade, or basic funky house,” Stanton grimaces. In 2004, though, HMD’s co-founders Stanton and James Hillard were jobbing around the city’s dance scene alongside future residents Howard and Severino Panzetta, wanting a place to play 70s and 80s disco absent from the queer clubs of the day. Mick Jagger has popped in to dance, Marc Almond has “been a few times” and the US actor and singer Vanessa Williams came last year (“She did selfies with security and everything,” Howard says). The Horse Meat Disco crew have since headlined international music festivals, hosted DJ residencies in NYC, Berlin and Lisbon, played more Pride events than they can name and hosted their heroes, too.

M.e.a.t. gay bar nyc