Club culture has a way of capturing a flash in time. Take 1930s Shanghai, a golden era defined by abasement and the city’s mantle because the nightlife capital of Asia: replete with smoky jazz speakeasies, gentlemen’s lounges, and a vibrant narcotic scene. Southern California in the Forties was a playground for celebrities like histrion and Humphrey DeForest Bogart, who hobnobbed on glamourous Sunset avenue with mobsters and politicians. After the Berlin Wall fell, an industrial techno scene blossomed from the city’s Mitte district warehouses and government buildings left abandoned by the Soviets—the epic all-night parties representing a raw and new freedom for East German youths WHO birthed a social group that reverberated throughout Europe in later decades. New York’s after-dark scene in the 1980s and 90s was dubbed Clubland, a drug-laden maelstrom of characters like Andy Warhol and RuPaul, hedonistic club youngsters dressed in drag, and kingpin promoter Peter Gatien, t...
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