(This is not for readers who are easily offended. If the first sentence is not to your liking, do not proceed. Go and burn a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover if that will make you feel better.)

Don’t go to The Cock. There is a crucial difference between what’s casually referred to as a dive bar, and, well, establishments that should not be patronized by the faint of heart. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love me some dives. Tuesday nights you’ll usually find Jorge, my roommate, and me warming seats at The Boiler Room, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump up Second Avenue from The Cock. A dingy but welcoming establishment, The Boiler Room subscribes to every gay bar’s policy of turning the lights down so low one can’t make out the faces of the people at the other end of the bar. Signs posted in the bathroom advise patrons to “Watch Your Property Closely, there are serious thieves & pickpockets in the East Village!” and the bartenders have an open policy of skipping Lady Gaga if anyone plays her on the jukebox, which makes for a more eclectic mix than the typical Chelsea fare of The Fame Monster on repeat. (This does mean there will be an occasional dance revue to “Like a Prayer” or “If I Could Turn Back Time,” but this is infinitely preferable to me than a barful of femmes lip-syncing “Paparazzi.”)

I’ve heard that Eastern Bloc, over on Avenue A, has a bit of a reputation for being sketchy on the level with The Cock, but nothing I’d seen there could compare. The place does have a bit of an intimidating air, the décor being Soviet propaganda posters of muscled übermenschen, video screens above the bar playing tame Seventies porn, and a forest of 8×10 black-and-white glossy shots of men in various states of undress hung from the ceiling. Despite all the in-your-face imagery, Eastern Bloc is a welcoming enclave on an off night for people who just want to have a drink and a good conversation. The bartenders can be a bit brusque, unlike the friendly (if sometimes self-absorbed) staff at The Boiler Room. Eastern Bloc, for all of its brashness, is sort of a second home for this California transplant.

If you’ve ever lived in San Francisco, you quickly notice an important cultural dichotomy: Folsom Street vs. Castro Street. It’s not as if the two districts are or were ever in direct conflict. It’s more like the Cold War, which wasn’t as much a military conflict as a clash of ideas, economies, and cultures. The Castro embodies most of the mainstream stereotypes of gay people: that they are thin, young, and prissy. While that may be true for a certain slice of the population, the Folsom ethos eroticizes that which the Castro demonizes: the hirsute, the well-fed, the fetishist.  Castro is exclusive; Folsom is inclusive. Although these are by no means clear-cut definitions, and there is much cross-pollination, they are two extremes to be reckoned with.

In New York, there isn’t the clear division of SoMa from the Castro (Market Street slices San Francisco diagonally in two), but the DMZ of the culture war in Manhattan might as well run along Houston, which would isolate the “fancy” bars like Therapy (do you really need to be sitting on a Design Within Reach sofa to cruise?) and the entire Chelsea portfolio from the less pretentious Village dives. Eastern Bloc reminds me of a tamer version of the inimitable Folsom stalwart The Powerhouse (not the Power Exchange, which, if you catch my drift, is not a bar at all). The only difference is that Eastern Bloc has no back room, which makes it tamer by default. The Powerhouse’s back room is a fertile environment for many things, but it’s best to go on an off night if you want to avoid some of the methamphetamine-addled exhibitionists that sometimes frequent the place. You might see a group of fiddlers playing Irish folk songs (true story), or run into one’s favorite porn star (true again). That said, don’t go alone. The bartenders are generally affable, but they do have to deal with a pretty rough clientele. Treat them with respect and they will do the same.

I only went to The Cock once. My roommate and I had gotten sick of The Boiler Room at exactly 3 a.m. on April 5th of the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Eleven. We’d already said something snarky about everyone that deserved it, and played two games of pool. The place was about to clear out. Excuse the expression, but “dick ‘o clock” was weighing heavily on everyone’s thoughts. He didn’t say as much, but I could tell that Jorge had reached boredom. The night had started out on an auspicious note. We arrived at Pianos around ten, and endured an awful performance from a seventeen-year-old Pitchfork-created “wunderkind” who dazzled us with his complete lack of talent. The performance space had cleared out after he finished, yelling into the microphone about how he hated New York. The audience was not amused. We had been drinking already, and some friends of ours began to have a dance party with us as Noel (of Hooray for Earth) played 90s house (with Basement Jaxx in heavy rotation). But now, three hours later, we’d stopped inventing funny dances, stopped ridiculing the two Asian girls who had somehow decided that they needed to dance on the Pianos stage, stopped inciting Jorge to do the “washing machine” (á la Selena). We needed some excitement. “Do you want to go somewhere a little more—risqué?” I asked.

I had no idea what to expect as we sauntered along Second Avenue, passing closed bodegas, restaurants, and banks. Urge, the respectable bar next door to our destination, had a suited bouncer outside checking IDs. I was trying to think if I knew anyone that went here, other than Martín, a lanky, attractive photographer acquantinance that my boyfriend and me would see at shows. He had a boyfriend now, so there wasn’t a chance in hell of running into him. We had arrived. The neon sign of a rooster silently watched over its unlit domain, and a black unmarked door loomed front of us. Jorge opened the door.

We entered a small vestibule that opened into a long hallway. A large man standing to our left began to rattle off a canned speech. “The cover is ten dollars per person. Ten dollars, open bar Rolling Rock and PBR. The drinks are free, but don’t forget to tip your bartenders.” I paid the cover to the portly man to our right sitting on a stool behind a small table. The look in his eyes said that he was beyond reacting to even the most unimaginable depravity. We were still rather drunk and gawked at the hallway, which was papered with an orderly grid of identical portraits run off of a copy machine of Grace Jones looking fierce. We braced ourselves mentally, and opened the door at the end of the hall.

The first thing, I think, was the smell. It wasn’t merely that the place smelled sweaty—locker rooms smell sweaty—it was a sticky, human, organic odor, like how I would imagine it smelled in steerage of a steamship after the weeklong journey from Europe, but with the added bouquet of two strippers in jock straps. The second thing we noticed was that the place was exceedingly dark. This wasn’t regular gay bar dark. This was suffocating brushstrokes of tar that obscured everything but the most obvious detail, namely the large black-on-white signs admonishing in all caps “NO PUBLIC SEX.” Jorge and I were still a few feet from the entrance door, trying to make out anything other than the bar (the only part of the place that was lit at all). Even on a Tuesday night, the place was packed with shadowy forms lurking like the damned in every corner. Like an Gustave Doré engraving, this tableau of hunched forms stretched out far into the unseeable back doorways of this unholy edifice. The men all shuffled aimlessly, seeing no one.

While the crowd at The Boiler Room was a healthy and transient mix of lurkers, flamers, hags and the like, The Cock’s clientele (to be charitable with our terminology) looked like a gang of stowaways emptied from the hold of a container ship hailing from the Emirates. Old men, hustlers, and ne’er-do-wells milled about, looking for God knows what, as we waited at the bar. Despite the fact that we’d drank prodigiously before arriving, we needed something to endure our moment in this, the humid, salty, Second Circle of Hell. I procured two beers from the efficient bartender who, despite being naked to the waist, was all business. I tipped him and handed my beer to Jorge, who continued staring fixedly at the two dancers (it would be improper to call them strippers, as they were barely wearing anything) at the end of the bar. From a cursory glance, it was unclear whether either had showered in the past week. The gloom was so all-consuming that we could barely venture a guess at their ethnicity. After a few sips of our drinks, we decided on African for the first and Dominican for the second. “I just want a man like that,” Jorge said to me. “A muscled Dominican and I’d give up adam4adam for good.” We decided to move a little further back in the room, perhaps out of an unconscious desire to see if the unspeakable acts we’d heard about actually transpired here. Neither of us, however, dared get near the doors to the back room, nor did we even seriously consider using the bathrooms.

We ended up wedged behind a trio of tough-as-nails drag queens looking Mephistophelean in impossibly high heels. They appeared desperate to be on lavish sets where they would concoct elaborate plans to ruin each other. “Honestly, I’d rather have AIDS than bedbugs,” one of them loudly declared. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a glint of crimson and a struggle. At the back wall opposite the bar, a man was viciously and repeatedly bashing another seated man in the face. In the deafening din, which at the moment seemed like a kind of inverted silence, we watched him noiselessly pound the man’s face into an incarnadine mess. Three, four, five hard, vicious punches, then three to the gut. He threw the man against the wall and escaped into the darkness. I looked towards the drag queens, and they all were wearing expressions of shock mitigated via Botox.

Security was there but a moment later, and those of us who had seen looked on with the same expressions as if this were an episode of Law & Order. The jump cut came in the form of the bar’s lights flashing to full brightness. At the flick of the switch, we’d been transported from subterranean Inferno to radiant Paradiso. In lieu of Beatrice, a throng of security guards in blue jeans and sweat shirts ran over to inspect the man, who was mumbling incoherently as the blood dripped down his face. The lights went out again, returning us to the warm, salty ochre of Hell, and he was steered out of the door by the guards.

During the brief moment the lights were at full strength, my roommate and I had looked around at the throngs milling about. Not a single person could be remotely classified as “attractive.” It was doubtful if the lot of them even had papers. The cross-section looked like a convention of scalpers, car wash attendants, and dock workers. This was light-years beyond simply rough trade. We’d hit the grime at the bottom of the ship that underlings were paid to mop out. “What percentage of these people do you think have HIV?” I asked Jorge. He made a face. “Fifty, sixty?” he ventured. I nodded gravely, then pulled out my phone to check the time. It was 3:48 a.m. The natives were getting restless. The Angel of Darkness was rushing at us all at sixty seconds per minute. Everyone knew full well that they would be going home alone soon. There is something about that moment, some echo of the apocalypse, when the lights go on at the end of the night. No music. Just a long, rattling subway ride to the outer boroughs, back to the empty sepulchers of their beds.

At a certain moment, I realized Virgil was never going to arrive. I downed my beer, grabbed Jorge’s arm, and we rushed out, slipping through a throng of grizzled men, down the hallway with the thousand watchful eyes of Grace Jones, into a cab. “6th Avenue and 9th Street, please.” I’ve said it once, but I’ll say it again. Don’t go to The Cock.