Gays and Gangsters

Providence Club Culture with a Splash

BY SARAH GOLDSTEIN

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High Heels

ON STAGE a dancer in fishnets and stilettos struts with ballerina poise. She teases, tugs at her garter straps, sinks into spread eagle splits, and caresses the faces of her bigger spenders, adoring women who reach up for a touch of her lace, a stroke of her hair. Performing a kind of hip-hop exotic dance, she runs her hands down hips, thighs, sways and slides to the floor, gracefully bringing the crowd to their knees. Fives, tens, and twenties fill the space between her breasts, and her skin glistens pink under the lights of the club. In a sea of more than 500 women, she rides the helm.

"Who is that?" I ask a woman working security, whose job it is to make sure no women rush the stage. The security guard, who says she goes by her Native American name Storm, smiles, "Her? That's my wife." She lifts up her shirt, tattooed below her navel is the dancer's name-MARY BETH -in cursive, all caps. Later, after she is ushered off the stage in true diva form, hydrated and toweled off, Mary Beth shows me her own marking -STORM-emblazoned across her chest.

It is Saturday night at Splash, the largest lesbian dance party in New England, a poster boasts. Held weekly at Club Pulse in South Providence, Splash offers live musical entertainment, a consistently crowded dance floor, and themed parties like 'Back to Babylon,' a mystical, Mesopotamian night replete with belly dancers, and 'Naughty Girls,' the counterpart to Hallmark Valentines. DJ Dena, Splash's resident DJ, spins Ciarra, moving the crowd like they're her wind-up dolls; women shout "shake it like jello, make the girls say hello."

Taking Splash's Pulse

Working at Splash for more than a year, Storm and Mary Beth are two of the women who feel most "at home" here. They met at the club in 2002, and married three months later in a civil union ceremony in Vermont. In queer circles many see their marriage as a positive example of what is possible even under the current administration. Mary Beth explains that other queer couples have expressed admiration or sought their advice. When introducing one another in heterosexual environments they are usually met with surprise, and occasionally revulsion-"your wife?"

Mary Beth laughs but Storm shakes her head. Storm finds that straight men are the most disrespectful. "People don't believe that she's not straight," Storm says. Indeed if one measures sexual orientation by hair length and eyeliner, Mary Beth appears straight, but these kind of determinates hark back to stereotypes of what-is-gay-indeed, they are an indication of the American obsession to define and classify.

As a recent feature in Time Out New York posed, categories such as "genderqueer," "dyke," "boi," and "transwoman," remind that the once straightforward binary of gay and straight is quickly becoming obsolete. It is increasingly difficult to determine who-is-sleeping-with-whom-and-how, which is one of the reasons Storm and Mary Beth so enjoy going to Splash.

While in straight environments lesbian relationships are often perceived as "purely sexual," or "not taken seriously," and at some of the more established lesbian bars one will find a generally older crowd, Splash, they feel, "attracts women of all backgrounds and ages," creating a cross-section with no clearly definable scene or style. Perhaps Splash's remarkable sexual diversity is an upshot of having only three or four lesbian nightspots in Providence, but it is undeniably also a result of the comfortable atmosphere that founder and manager Pam Padula has created, and her conscientious effort to appeal to all kinds of people and desires.

When invited to host a ladies night on Pulse's vacant Saturday slot, longtime gay-oriented business entrepreneur Padula jumped at the chance. She began Splash, then known as Mermaids, with former partner Lori Green. A welcoming, mixed atmosphere was Padula's objective when starting the ladies dance party three years ago and it has been a success from the start. Splash opened at a time "when the whole lesbian community was in limbo," Padula recalls. The oldest venue, a lesbian bar called Deville's, had been closed due to the I-195 highway relocation program, and so the Saturday dance party became both a happening nightspot and a space in which a community of women could be together at a time when such venues were scarce.

One of her objectives in starting the ladies night, says Padula, "was creating community space-I mean there's a lot more of a common bond than just our sexuality. There's a lot of bisexual women too who we welcome, there's transgendered women. It's a woman's space." And so Padula created a home and found five hundred supportive houseguests. She shakes her head remembering the opening weeks. "When we started-forget about it. There were just hundreds and hundreds-I mean for women this was it; we were the only game in town."

An Exclusive Club

Splash, Pulse's only gay night of the week, is markedly different from the club's straight nights. This difference, however, is a consequence of more than just the missing gender. While catering to women of all backgrounds, Splash remains a predominately white scene, whereas on Friday and Sunday nights Pulse attracts a mostly black and latino crowd.

On Friday and Sunday, when Pulse caters to a young, straight Black and Latino crowd, security guards frisk clients for weapons and drugs as they enter the club. This is a policy which, according to general manager Nancy Melucci, "is obnoxious and intrusive, but it's safety for our clients inside. They want to feel protected." At Splash on Saturdays the club operates with four security personnel and no police, on a Sunday night it is manned by 12 to 15 security guards and three cops. Referring to the black and latino nights, Melucci says, "Of the people who come, 80 percent are good clients-20 percent are thugs and thieves. We have that battle every Sunday."

Even with higher security costs and the battle for good behavior, it is Sunday, not Saturday, that is the most lucrative night of the week. Sunday is a Black-promoted, Black-targeted hip-hop night with DJ Chubby Chub, and the club would sell to capacity if management allowed it. Melucci opts to restrict covers, however, running under capacity on black and latino nights due to what she considers a "higher propensity for violence." Melucci shrugs at the profit they are missing by underselling their size, "No one's gonna die on my watch. That's dirty, dirty money."

While the club loses financially by refusing to make this sacrifice in safety, they still cash in on the high check averages from Sunday night's alcohol consumption. Although ladies' night has the bigger (unrestricted) head count, Melucci says alcohol sales on Sundays exceed Saturday's larger crowd. She estimates that hard liquor accounts for 30 percent of the drinks bought on Saturday compared to a 70 percent gross on Sundays. "Lesbians drink beer' Blacks and Latinos spend more on higher-end, quality liquor." Melucci is unsure of the reason for this difference in liquor preference, although she cites it as the club's greatest increase in earning. Pulse now aggressively targets what Melucci and others in the business refer to as "urban money"-the black hip hop and latino reggaeton (a Latin brand of dancehall music) and hip-hop scenes-who buy their liquor in greater quantities and at higher prices.

The rare hostility encountered at Splash is, according to the club's promoters, most often a result of its being cushioned between these nights catering to straight Blacks and Latinos. Padula says that "young, urban guys will show up, see the parking lot is full, not realizing that Saturday's a lesbian party, they think it's their night." The worst incident yet was a verbal altercation between a group of men and a woman in the parking lot, which quickly escalated into a full-on brawl. Padula remembers it as "a gay guy and two lesbians against three or four straight men." As a precaution against this kind of "hate crime," as Padula calls it, she plans to hire a detail car to keep an eye out. "We've also upped our security. I have a nice big-Junior-you know, a nice big black man."

Junior in fact, is not black but latino, and can be found at the door Friday through Sunday, working the straight hip hop as well as the lesbian dance parties. His job on Saturdays seems of dual function, both as gatekeeper and buffer. Melucci says his presence on Saturday is "so the Friday and Sunday markets do not infiltrate the Saturday promotion." The desire to keep the markets separate stems from a concern for safety, but this intentional separation ultimately determines who can mingle with whom. And with a security guard working to prevent "infiltration" it is difficult not to perpetuate the fears that often already keep different kinds of crowds apart. Melucci insists that unlike clubs such as Diesel or Ultra in commercially desirable downtown Providence which cater to "white hip hop-a discriminating niche, we [Pulse] play black hip hop." But while this may be true on a Sunday night when it is hard to find more than 10 white people in the crowd, on ladies Saturdays the color of the record spins back to the paler end.

Whether it is latino men protecting white lesbians from other latino men, or a white lesbian running the black and latino scene, the expressed territoriality separating the straight and lesbian night is clearly not just gender, but race as well. The question, then, is where to go for lesbian women who do not feel that Splash provides the racial diversity they seek, but want to be in an environment of women. Platforms-a club with a specifically hip-hop, Black and Latina lesbian night-is one answer. Musing on the loss of some of her clients to Platforms, Padula says, "I think they really drifted for the musical reasons rather than for wanting an exclusively African American club. It just turned into that because the whole lifestyle, the whole urban consciousness." Padula understands the cultural importance of a club like Platforms. She says, "I'd like to have everybody under our roof, but I can identify with the need to empower oneself as an individual-if that's what these women feel they want and need. I mean talk about discrimination-to not only be a woman but to be a black woman, not only to be a black woman but to be a lesbian black woman?"

As club-goers diverge along race, sexuality, and gender lines into subcultures where a niche becomes 'niche-within-a-niche,' they reform the terms of categorization originally used to exclude these groups from clubs and other institutions (including that of marriage). While this splintering can also generate separatism and isolation of certain groups, it seems desirable and necessary to create atmospheres that make one feel so at "at home" or "safe" at clubs such as Splash or Platforms.

2 Live Crew's "Pop that Pussy" plays on both Saturday and Sunday nights. The lyrics are dirty no matter how you spin it, and the crowd bumps and grinds just the same, but the difference in those 24-hours may as well be that between a Bud and bottle of Courvoisier. "That's capitalism in general," Melucci says of Pulse's decision to specifically target the lucrative young urban market rather than spending more than one night a week as a lesbian venue. As mostly white women contrast with mostly Black and Latino heterosexuals, the club literally becomes a 'club,' and who gets the last dance is ultimately a question not of diversity, but of profit, even if that profit needs to be searched at the door.

Sarah Goldstein B'05 says ladies is pimps too

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