The Hidden Nightlife of Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a city with some of the most modern physical infrastructure in the world. The social infrastructure – not so much. Gay life is much more underground than in North America or Europe: while Parisian gay cafes spill out into well-trafficked streets, Hong Kong’s open onto side stairs and back alleys.

Thankfully, Anthony and Pei’s friend K. took some time to show me the hot spots. It was a Tuesday night, and they weren’t hot, but since he was flying off to Singapore the next day, he said he at least wanted to allow me to return on my own.

And so, after a week of work and drinks with colleagues at the historic Foreign Correspondents Club, I bid them adieu, a bit mysteriously, and set off down a street called Hollywood Road in search of some fun.

I had been told that the boys started gathering at a bar called Volume shortly after 10. In fact, they start gathering there shortly after 11. Volume is a smallish bar, about the size of Barrage in New York, whose address is 80 Hollywood Road but which actually fronts on one of the side “streets” built of stairs that run down the mountainside just off the main road.

After a slow start, it got crowded, and what a crowd. Previous trips to Asia have left me convinced that most Asian countries export the cute ones and keep the ugly ones home. But this crowd was as hot and friendly as any group Pei will introduce you to on an L.A. dance floor. Several guys came up to me to introduce themselves and their friends – and did so just to be friendly, not to hook up. It wasn’t like I was the only American or the only white guy in the place; I’d estimate the crowd was about 25% Caucasian. But I was a new face, and that seemed to count for something.

One of the groups that I met was headed to Propaganda, the venerable gay disco, and invited me to come along. Propaganda had been closed for renovations the last time I was in Hong Kong and I was eager to see it.

You enter it through an unmarked door in a tiny back alley (cover: US$20 including one drink), and it doesn’t immediately look any better from the inside. It consists of two rooms. The larger, about the size of one of the floors at Therapy, is a lounge with some interesting Art Deco detail. The smaller room contains a bar and the dance floor, which is a kidney-shaped wading pool – not filled with water, but tiled as if it could be – in a room that’s only half the size of Cielo. For you non-New Yorkers, that’s *small*. If the dance floor could hold more than 75 people at a time, I’d be amazed.

So I started out not inclined to like it. But the crowd was as hot and friendly as the one at Volume (and included many of the same faces), and the music was just up my alley: happy vocal house with plenty of piano hooks. And it got even better: the DJ (whose name was Ricky, my new friends said), spinning from vinyl no less, did a full uptrip to a happy current circuit set (including that “Keep dreamin’, keep, keep dreamin’” song that was The Song of The Summer on Fire Island this year), and then a downtrip.

It wasn’t a full-on morning set but it was at least a plotted descent to 10,000 feet, similar to Manny’s ending at the Saint’s New Year’s party last year. As I realized what was happening, I was glad I hadn’t hooked up with anyone, because a decent downtrip is much harder to find these days than sex. Aside from a handful of circuit hits I hadn’t recognized much of the music, but toward the end he played remixes of “Where Love Lives” and “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” that I hadn’t heard before, dropping them in just as I was thinking that a few more classics would have made this set perfect for Ascension.

I left at 4:30a, with the party dwindling (it closes at 5) but satisfied that in China, at least, the ancient arts still survive.