Clit Club (90's New York City Lesbian Party)

Clit Club — New York City Vintage 1990s Lesbian Party Tee

Founded in 1990 by Julie Tolentino, Clit Club became one of the most influential and gloriously unapologetic lesbian parties in New York City's underground nightlife scene. At a time when most gay clubs still catered primarily to men, Clit Club created a space where queer women could take over the dance floor, the stage, and just about everything else.

And this wasn't your average lesbian bar night.

Clit Club brought together lesbians, bisexual women, transgender people, artists, dancers, drag performers, and assorted downtown misfits for a weekly explosion of music, sexuality, performance art, and queer experimentation. It was part dance party, part political statement, and part very good excuse to stay out until an unreasonable hour.

The party emerged during a particularly important moment in queer New York. The AIDS crisis was devastating the community, ACT UP and Queer Nation were challenging discrimination, and a new generation of artists and activists was rejecting the idea that queer people needed to be respectable to deserve acceptance.

Clit Club embraced that attitude completely. It was sex-positive, provocative, proudly feminist, and deliberately inclusive of people who didn't fit neatly into conventional ideas of gender or sexuality.

Its performances could be outrageous, funny, confrontational, and wonderfully filthy. The party helped create a space for queer women and gender-nonconforming artists to explore desire, identity, and the possibilities of nightlife as an art form.

And the name itself was a statement. CLIT CLUB. Two words that made absolutely no attempt to soften female sexuality for anyone else's comfort. In the early 1990s, putting that on a flyer—or a T-shirt—was practically an act of rebellion.

Clit Club became a defining part of New York's underground lesbian and queer cultural history, remembered for its radical spirit, creative freedom, and refusal to behave itself.