Cowboys

Cowboys figures in two diary entries as a nightlife destination whose appeal lies both in its concentrated male beauty and in the social world gathered around it. Warhol’s visits move between private appreciation of the club’s atmosphere and a larger procession of dinners, companions, and other venues.

A concentrated nightlife setting

In December 1978, Catherine Guinness wanted to go to Cowboys, and Warhol recorded the cab fare as two dollars. He described the club as a black hole filled with boy beauties, all available, and noted that nearly every other person there was somebody. The image makes Cowboys more than a backdrop: it draws together sexual availability and the presence of recognizable people in a single, compact nightlife scene.

That evening, Warhol also noticed Charlie Cowles and Henry Post. Warhol liked Post, whom others apparently considered terrible, finding something nice and intelligent about him. When Warhol asked what he was doing at Cowboys, Post said he was researching a story. The exchange places the club at the intersection of pleasure and observation: people went there to socialize, but it could also serve as a setting for gathering material.

Cowboys in a late-night circuit

In September 1979, Cowboys was one stop in a longer evening. Thomas Ammann picked Warhol up in his limousine, and the two met a party of ten at Nippon. The group included Wilson Kidde, Billy Kimball, John Reinhold, Robert Hayes, Curley, Keller Donovan, Rupert Smith, and Rupert Smith’s new friend. Warhol found the all-male gathering embarrassing; an older couple nearby joked that it looked like a prep school with its headmasters, a comparison encouraged by the contrast between the younger men in ties and jackets and the older-looking Warhol and John Reinhold.

After dinner, the party went to Cowboys and then to Rounds. A man who said he had met Warhol in Tennessee asked to sit with the group to see what New York was really like. The evening continued when Joe MacDonald said Flamingo was reopening. The man gained free entry for the party because Warhol had judged a male beauty contest there. Cowboys thus belonged to a mobile social circuit, where one club led to another and Warhol’s own recognition could shape the group’s access. Flamingo was new and, in Warhol’s account, great; at three in the morning, Ammann dropped him off.