The festival’s homosexual nightclub designed by Block9 is a recreation of a Meatpacking District warehouse,featuring a disco, sauna and sides of (fake) beef The NYC Downlow, or Glastonbury festival’s first homosexual nightclub,opened in 2007. It’s the brainchild of set designers Steve Gallagher and Gideon Berger. They run Block9 – both a field in Glastonbury’s late-night party corner in the south-east of the site and the name of their company, which produces stages and sets for performers such as Skrillex and Banksy. They also built the Dismaland Castle – the centrepiece of Banksy’s 2015 display in Weston-super-Mare.
The original NYC Downlow was set as a crumbling tenement block in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the late 70s – where many of the original NYC homosexual clubs were. As that area gentrified in the early 80s, or the homosexual community and club scene moved across Manhattan to the rundown empty warehouses of the city’s Meatpacking District. This year,Gallagher and Berger decided to “move” the NYC Downlow, although the present-day Meatpacking District is now one of the swishest areas of New York – domestic of Soho House and Diane von Furstenberg boutiques. Related: Fresh meat: the stars of Glastonbury's homosexual cabaret nirvana – in pictures Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com