'I wanted to tell everybody I was right outside of [Stonewall], but I didn't because it was being promoted as the gay club and at that time I was 15, 16 and I wasn't going to tell my family nothing about gay,' explains DePino.
"I still run into people today on the train who say, 'Because of you, I lost my job.'" While most New York stories that begin this way don't tend to end well, David DePino sounds warm, even delighted as he shares this information with Billboard.The strangers randomly haranguing DePino on NYC transit are referring to his mid '80s DJ sets at the Chelsea club Tracks, where he oversaw Tuesday dance throwdowns that prevented many a patron from getting to work on time.
From there, his upward trajectory into queer history continued -- despite any particular ambitions on his end. After getting a gig at the Lutheran church-turned-gay discotheque The Sanctuary, he eventually found his way to the game-changing, now-defunct dance club Paradise Garage, working closely with the incalculably influential Larry Levan.
"I went to the Village, went to Midtown, and every handsome gay boy I saw I gave a complementary [entry] card to," DePino recalls of his trial period at Tracks. "I filled it with pretty people, and pretty people attract pretty people. Before long I was getting the Asian crowd, the Hispanic crowd, the Black crowd, the white crowd." The patrons came in two waves: "From six 'til 8 or 11 o'clock, there were all young kids in their suits coming straight from work.
It was from curated club experiences like these that modern dance culture took shape. Rebecca Klassen, assistant curator of material culture at the New York Historical Society, recently interviewed around 50 people in preparation for helming the nightlife portion of the transcendent Stonewall at 50 exhibit. Speaking to a variety of scene veterans , Klassen emphasizes that dance culture as we know it "starts much earlier" than most people realize.
"I got the information you needed to be a lesbian if you were going to get a gold card, so I borrowed a friend's combat boots, wore black jeans, a black tee shirt, no makeup. When I got up to the desk [the guy] was like, 'oh, you're a lesbian, you're okay.' So that's how I got it. It is pretty funny," she admits.
"It changed the makeup of the crowd," DePino says of spinning at the now-shuttered venue Sound Factory in the early '90s. "I knew if I played [MFSB's] 'Love Is the Message' which of the ball kids were going to get into a vogue battle.... So I'd look around for the faces I knew were going to make everybody make a [dance] circle around them, but suddenly they weren't there anymore.
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