Still, the glamorous, like Marisa Berenson and Lauren Hutton, as well as less famous disco-loving women, managed to find their way inside to hustle and bump before the 70's-style smoked mirrors and chrome.īy some accounts, the presence of women did sometimes disturb the peace at the club. ''He thought that having women around really ruined things.'' For more than a dozen years a sign outside read, ''This is a gay male club.'' The door policy was even more stringent at the Annex, which opened a year later. When the Swamp opened in 1977, its owner, Bill Higgins, a former college football player from Chicago, virtually barred women from the club. Such an admission is evidence of how much the flavor of gay night life in the Hamptons has changed. ''But we know we have to get and keep other people to survive.'' ''Our core constituency will always be gay,'' he said. Storbo seems aware that it will be a difficult balancing act to get straight people in without alienating the Swamp's traditional patrons. This trend rolled over gay culture as determinedly as everything else. The Swamp came of age when the Hamptons were being transformed from a haven for artists and the quietly wealthy into a stomping ground for the nouveau riche. ''The story of the place is the story of how people's tastes and values have changed,'' Mr. Steven Gaines, the author of ''Philistines at the Hedgerow,'' a social history of the area, is among those who argue that the Swamp's thorny history could easily stand as an extended metaphor not only for the Hamptons themselves and gay life there, but for modern, monied culture in general. Storbo says there has been a sporadic influx of younger men).
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(On a recent Friday night, the average age of the men dining at The Star Room looked to be about 55, though Mr. With the Hamptons now flush with day trippers and 24-year-olds looking for somewhere fresh to park their parents' Jaguars and sip $10 sour cherry martinis, it may not be easy.
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In short, Swa (pronounced sway) now resembles a lot of the straight nightclubs and lounges that dot the area - Conscience Point, Jet East, Tsunami and the soon-to-open Caba~na.įor many patrons who have been coming to the Hamptons for decades, the lush renovation (it took nine coats of white paint just to cover the timbers that had grown almost black with smoke and grime inside the restaurant) begs the question of whether Swa will stay a gay club. After 11 p.m., the dining tables in the Star Room drop pneumatically to cocktail lounge height, and a charge of $400 kicks in for those who want to hold on to their tables. The owners are bringing in big-name D.J.'s from Miami and Manhattan. Dinner at the restaurant, renamed the Star Room, can easily cost $75 a person (the chef is Kevin Penner from Della Femina), and the disco has a state-of-the-art sound system. In mid-May they reopened it as a determinedly swank spot called Swa, hoping - after 15 years as the only openly gay club on the East End - to attract a mixed crowd. The two men who bought the place and fixed it up, Scott Gray, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker and Scott Storbo, who did public relations for Saatchi & Saatchi, aren't much interested in the Swamp's torrid past, which included revelry that was sometimes drug-fueled. Now, less than six months after it was sold, a new disco has risen from the damp ashes of the Swamp. When Ron Perelman, whose estate is just up the road, expressed interest in buying the club in the mid-90's so he and the combo for which he plays drums could have a place to jam, the publicity burnished the Swamp's proudly seedy reputation. On weekend nights in summer, the parking lot was often awash with cars, entwined bodies and the throb of dance music till 4 a.m. The Annex, a restaurant under the same management, was a few feet away across a courtyard, as big as a barn and nearly as dank.
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Flamboyantly gay, it was dark and doggedly unpretentious. ''It epitomized a sort of innocent decadence that doesn't exist anymore,'' he said.įor almost 25 years the Swamp, tucked behind an arbor on Route 27 in Wainscott, stood as one of the last remaining monuments to the East End bohemianism. Colacello, a onetime Warhol associate and connoisseur of cool, concedes he wound up there by the end of most Saturday nights during the club's prime in the late 1970's and 80's, sweating to the beat with the likes of Bianca Jagger, Terrence McNally and Ross Bleckner. ''The music was awful and the ventilation was even worse.'' ''Frankly, it was a dump,'' said Bob Colacello, the writer. Unlike legendary hot spots like Studio 54 or the Mudd Club in Manhattan, the Swamp, the Hamptons' longest running nightclub, isn't the sort of place that hipsters speak about in reverential tones.
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EVEN in its heyday, the Swamp never inspired much rapture.