In the mid-1970s, when Times Square still meant neon, grindhouse marquees, adult cinemas, and late-night energy that never quite went home, there was a theater that became part of gay New York’s hidden nightlife map:
Big Top Theatre — one of several gay male adult movie theaters in the Times Square grindhouse district, but the only one actually on Broadway, close to West 49th Street.
Up a narrow staircase above the straight-adult Circus Cinema, Big Top invited patrons into a different kind of midnight screening — one that was unapologetically for men who wanted same-sex cinema at a time when LGBTQ visibility in public spaces was still fragile and coded.
“Broadway’s first and only male showcase! We doze but never close!” — that was the era’s boast, part cheeky, part defiant.
It was open 24 hours, served continental breakfast at 1 a.m., and even kept a nightly disco going in the lobby — because in that pre-internet world, theaters like Big Top were more than movie houses. They were anchor points of queer nightlife in a city that was still negotiating where and how gay men could exist publicly.
