Audrey Joseph is an American record executive, nightclub owner and manager, and LGBT rights activist whose San Francisco rooms—Pleasuredome, Club Universe, the Folsom dance stage, International Ms. Leather—were where leather, disco, and fundraising shared a floor. She is a former president and a sitting member of the San Francisco Entertainment Commission. In 1997 the Pantheon of Leather Awards named her Business Person of the Year. For this site she belongs on the leather-subculture map not as a theorist but as the person who booked the rooms, paid the DJs, and kept a gay tea dance and a fetish contest in the same civic economy.
Brooklyn, Disco, and a Gold 12-Inch
Joseph was born in Brooklyn, New York. Her father, a criminal lawyer and civil rights activist, shaped the political edge of the later club work. The first nightclub job was Dynamite in Brooklyn. She moved to the Electric Circus in Manhattan, then into the record business with Aria Productions and MK Dance Promotions, the company Tom Cossie and Mark Kriener founded. The break came promoting the Big Apple Band, a group that played bar mitzvahs and weddings. The band landed a contract to write a song for a New York City promotional campaign and put “Dance, Dance, Dance” on the B-side. They renamed themselves Chic; the Atlantic Records single became the first gold 12-inch disc. “I was the promotion person, the hanger-on… a couple of the hand claps on there are mine,” she later said. She became National Director of MK Dance Promotions and helped push more than a hundred disco records that went gold. In 1979 she joined Arista Records as Director of dance music.
San Francisco, Megatone, and Early Leather Contests
She left New York for San Francisco in 1982 to help her friend Marty Blecman run Megatone Records after the early death of his partner Patrick Cowley from AIDS. The New York concert, nightclub, and label résumé translated. At Megatone she worked marketing and promotion for Sylvester. She also managed David Harness. She stepped into AIDS activism and hosted many fundraisers, including the first leather subculture contests in San Francisco—an early, practical link between disco-industry skill and the leather community’s need for public space and cash during the plague years.
177 Townsend, Pleasuredome, Club Universe
In 1992 Joseph, with Bill Camillo and Les Dirks, took over the struggling Club Townsend at 177 Townsend / 174 King Street. After Camillo and Dirks died in late 1993 and early 1994, she partnered with Ty Dakota. The popular Sunday-night gay tea dance Pleasuredome was already running. To complement it, Dakota and Joseph founded Club Universe, which became a known dance and entertainment room and hosted Grace Jones, Cyndi Lauper, Chaka Khan, the B-52’s, Blondie, and DJs from around the world. Universe’s reputation was weekly reinvention: a new theme every week. Club Townsend and the linked King Street Garage also housed Wicked, Futura, New Wave City, Club Asia, Club Q, and Electric, plus live sets by Sammy Hagar, Blues Traveler, the Wallflowers, Third Eye Blind, Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, Reverend Horton Heat, Bootsy Collins, and George Clinton with Parliament Funkadelic.
In November 2000, lawyers for the family of Jeffrey Goring, a San Jose man who died in February 2000 after collapsing on the Universe dance floor, said they were filing a wrongful-death suit, alleging staff waited too long to call 911. The club denied it. The case settled out of court. Goring had no drugs in his system; he had collapsed from an asthma attack. All parties were bound to confidentiality. When San Francisco’s real-estate market ate the lease, the building was razed. Joseph then opened Mezzanine at 444 Jessie, which established itself as a premier room for DJ talent.
Folsom, Pride, International Ms. Leather, City Hall
Joseph produced the dance stage at the Folsom Street Fair for many years and handled main-stage production for San Francisco Gay Pride. She has also produced International Ms. Leather. Those credits put her at the three civic rituals where leather, dyke, and circuit crowds actually meet: Folsom’s street, Pride’s main stage, and IMsL’s title weekend.
Mayor Willie L. Brown appointed her to the San Francisco Entertainment Commission. She took office on 1 July 2003. She served as the commission’s first vice president in 2003–2004, president in 2004–2005, vice president again in 2005–2006, and president again after a 2007 election. She started the San Francisco Entertainment Commission Academy, which runs interactive seminars to teach people how the nighttime entertainment economy actually works. The 1997 Pantheon of Leather Business Person of the Year award is the leather world’s own receipt for that career: a Brooklyn disco promoter who moved west, kept Townsend open through partners’ deaths, booked Universe’s theme nights, and then sat on the city body that licenses the next generation of rooms.
Why Leather History Needs the Booker, Not Just the Bar
The New York chapter is easy to flatten into a disco footnote. It is the training. Dynamite in Brooklyn, the Electric Circus, Aria, MK Dance Promotions under Cossie and Kriener, the Big Apple Band’s city-campaign B-side that became Chic’s gold “Dance, Dance, Dance” on Atlantic, a hundred-plus gold disco records, then Arista’s dance-music desk in 1979—that is how she learned to make a room and a record move at the same time. The hand-claps she claimed on the Chic single are a joke with a résumé behind them. When Cowley died and Blecman needed help at Megatone in 1982, she already knew how to market a dance act. Sylvester and David Harness were the San Francisco names; the first leather contests she hosted were the civic ones, fundraisers in a city that was burying its club class.
Townsend at 177 Townsend / 174 King is the address leather tourists should still be able to place even though the building is gone. Pleasuredome on Sunday, Universe’s changing weekly themes, King Street Garage’s Wicked and Club Q and the rock bookings from Hagar to Parliament—those rooms were how a gay tea dance, a fetish crowd, and a visiting star shared infrastructure. Camillo and Dirks died; Dakota came in; the Goring asthma-attack case settled under confidentiality after a 2000 filing that had alleged a slow 911 call. The lease ended, the wrecking ball came, Mezzanine opened at 444 Jessie for DJs. Folsom’s dance stage, Pride’s main stage, and International Ms. Leather are the three production credits that tie the nightclub operator to leather’s public calendar. Brown put her on the Entertainment Commission on 1 July 2003; she cycled vice president and president, including a 2007 return to the chair, and built the Academy so the next operators would know the nighttime rules. Pantheon of Leather’s 1997 Business Person of the Year is the title that says the leather world noticed.
Joseph is still the type of nightlife operator leather cities run on—someone who can talk gold 12-inches, a razed warehouse, a Folsom stage plot, and a commission agenda in the same résumé. The clubs are gone or renamed; the pattern is not. Without people who will hold a lease and a leather contest in the same year, the subculture has nowhere to take its clothes off in public.
