Block9 at Glastonbury Ftival marked s tenth anniversary at the Somerset shdig last weekend, which ran om 21st to 25th June on Worthy Farm Pilton. First lnched as part of the now funct Glastonbury late-night field Trash Cy, as the ftival’s first gay venue opened on a budget of jt £2,000, rapidly tablished self as the beatg heart of Glastonbury’s famo ‘nghty rner’.
Contents:
- BLOCK 9 RELEAS DOCUMENTARY ABOUT GLASTONBURY’S FIRST GAY NIGHTCLUB, NYC DOWNLOW
- 24-HOUR GAY CLUBBG ON OFFER AT GLASTONBURY’S BLOCK9 AREA
BLOCK 9 RELEAS DOCUMENTARY ABOUT GLASTONBURY’S FIRST GAY NIGHTCLUB, NYC DOWNLOW
Only three years before da Cunha’s first vis, Gion Berger and his creative partner Stephen Gallagher, otherwise known as set signers Block9, were given £2, 000 by the team behd now funct Glastonbury late-night field Trash Cy to build the ftival’s first gay venue. It was there that Berger would tell Joe Rh, founr of the Mutoid Waste Co, about homo-centric soundsystems om San Fran, New York and Los Angel like Jiffy Lube, Comfort & Joy, Green Gorilla Lounge and The Deep End that he’d seen at Burng Man.
“The fn of gay pri to me is stickg up a soundsystem that’s r than anybody else’s, and they were buildg some pretty imprsive sh whilst dog . “Gay history has been erased om regular history books, ” Berger explas. So, the Downlow is an anthropologil study and celebratn of gay culture and how that manifts self milly.
“We were also lighted to be able to do a gay butcher recment drive to repopulate the st and generally have a lot of fun wh the scenography and the characters wh .
24-HOUR GAY CLUBBG ON OFFER AT GLASTONBURY’S BLOCK9 AREA
An in his own right on the alternative gay scene, he exports a slice of the east London drag circu to Somerset every year to the Downlow by bookg the troupe of performers that lter the venue. The le-up felt particularly stuffed wh LGBTQ+ talent this year – Lil Nas X preced Elton wh a set that was proudly gay, Ra Sawayama gave a theatril and visceral performance which she celebrated Pri, and Jake Shears brought his eternal sparkle. Stng wh hangg meat and surround by performanc by drag queens and ‘gay butchers’, the multi-floored club tak spiratn om Manhattan’s Meatpackg District, which beme a hub for gay parti the early 80s (after the gentrifitn of Manhattan’s Lower East Si).
Known for s dark and sweaty dance floors and ‘homocentric dis, funk, hoe & soul’, NYC Downlow claims to be a ‘unter-cultural, -your face, [and] un-apologetilly LGBTQ-specific’. First lnched as part of the now funct Glastonbury late-night field Trash Cy, as the ftival’s first gay venue opened on a budget of jt £2, 000, rapidly tablished self as the beatg heart of Glastonbury’s famo ‘nghty rner’. There, the space fally proved that don't jt take s cu om classic dis clubs like Sound Factory and Stud 54, but has bee a space as important as them the history of gay venu.
The NYC Downlow is an famo temporary gay club, which kick-started Block9's activi at Glastonbury. Block 9's groundbreakg NYC Downlow, Glastonbury's first gay nightclub, lnched 2007 and shows homocentric dis, funk, hoe and soul. The Downlow was a place that played dot-to-dot wh the narrative terms of the herage of gay culture, mic and clubs.