Cynthia Russo

Cynthia Russo is the former owner of Pandora’s Box, a nightlife promoter and a chef. This conversation was recorded on January 23, 2020 at 3pm by phone from Brooklyn, NY to Jersey City, NJ.

Gwen Shockey: So, let’s just jump right in! I’ll ask you the first question I usually ask everyone, which is what the first space was that you went to that was occupied mostly by lesbians or queer women and what it felt like to be there?

Cynthia Russo: Well. I don’t know how safe the very first place I went to was but I’m a child of the ‘60s and back then I was in college and I went to my first lesbian bar that was illegal – it was illegal back then – because this was before Stonewall. I would say this was 1968. It was a place called Kooky’s on fourteenth street. Back then you had to knock on a door and it was all mafia-owned. They’d open the curtain after you knocked on the door and then you’d be let in and that was the very first experience that I ever had. I had been to Stonewall a few times because when I was a kid it was legal to drink at eighteen so I could go pretty much anywhere. So, yeah – Kooky’s was the very first place that I ever went and what it felt like to be there… I felt a little out of place! I was kind of in the mod squad era, you know, the shag haircut, the bellbottom jeans and all that stuff and when I went in there it was very heavily role-playing. The feminine women were all dressed up in dresses and very femme and quite a few of the aggressive women wore suits. I didn’t feel I fit in to that particular space. It was just very harsh. Luckily though very shortly after that I started to go to a lot of places that were more mixed with men and women and I felt a little bit more comfortable. They were illegal too. There was a place called The One, Two, Three and there was a place called The Two Penny. They were completely illegal and like I said you had to knock on a door and a curtain would part and there would be some big goon behind the door. I was there during a raid once. There were a lot of drag queens there and the police took a lot of people away in handcuffs but they didn’t take me and then what happened was that time went by and Stonewall happened and by 1971 it was very different going out! We were going out with our heads help up high! It was no longer so mafia-controlled and gay clubs started opening for men and for women. I think that there was a girl named Rusty who opened up something and then the Duchess opened, I don’t remember the date it opened, but things just started opening up and becoming a lot more safe and all-inclusive. So, yeah. That’s really what happened.  

GS: How did you first hear about Kooky’s?

CR: I heard about it on my campus. I went to Long Island University and I heard about it there from a gay guy and so I took the train and went and did that. I hung around a lot of Broadway people and dancers and stuff like that because I was a dance major in college.  

GS: Oh were you? Wow!

CR: Yeah! And a theater major. That’s how I started to hear about these other clubs that were uptown and very upscale. Now we’re moving kind of into the 1970s but there was one place called Salvation which was at 1 Sheridan Square and they were all predominantly gay but very trendy. Judy Garland used to go to them, a lot of rock and rollers used to go to them, artists… so I started hanging out in those circles at that time which was a lot more fun to me in all honesty because I felt more safe. You know what I mean? But once everything started opening up and the Stonewall riots happened I felt fine about venturing into Stonewall and there was a place called Déjà Vu in the ‘70s which was a place that opened up on Washington street and that was for women only and of course Sahara opened. There was a place called the Lib which was uptown and things just started changing after 1971 I would say.

GS: Were you out at your college? How did you come out if you don’t mind me asking?

CR: Yes, I was. I definitely was. We didn’t have a gay organization at that time but you could kind of tell in the student union and of course I was a theater major so there were a lot of gay people of that ilk so it was easier for me I think to find people. I figured I would ride with it and not worry about it and I always did! I didn’t hide it at all! But then again, back in those days, women who were on the aggressive side were more feminine, like, even though I was what you would call an “ag” or a butch we started wearing lipstick and I never dressed like any kind of part I just dressed androgynously. It was much more androgynous for the girls who you might call aggressive.

GS: I see. So, you were just you. You were exploring your identity as you felt it.

CR: Exactly. Yeah. I just dressed how I wanted to dress. Exactly. I was never really femme-y so I wore pants all the time. I was very stylish. I loved fashion. I was very involved in fashion. So, it didn’t really change for me. I’m a lot more aggressive now and a lot more comfortable in my dress than I was many years ago. I pretty much wear boy’s clothes but I’m definitely not a hardcore butch lesbian – you’d probably call me a soft butch or whatever labels they have. In the ‘90s of course it was the “lipstick lesbian” era and we all wore lipstick even though we had our pants on. (Laughing) That’s when I met Wanda [Acosta] in that era in the ‘90s when she started throwing her events in the East Village. I lived in the East Village. Where Wanda started throwing her events was directly across the street from a restaurant I owned. I went away to school and became a chef and then moved to the Village and opened up a gourmet take-out place and restaurant right there on ninth street across from Café Tabac.

GS: What was the name of the restaurant?

CR: The take-out was called Russo and Rosen and the restaurant was called When the Moon Hits Your Eye. (Laughing) So, I met Wanda in the East Village when she first started doing what she was doing and I started going to her events and then of course we started talking and became friends. I’m very good friends with her sister.

GS: I didn’t realize you were a chef for so long. What was it like to work in that world as a woman and as a lesbian?

CR: It was really hard when I first started. When I first started I worked for a five-star restaurant in SoHo called the SoHo Charcuterie. It was really upscale. I could only get a job as a pastry chef in the beginning but when I went to work for SoHo Charcuterie it was opened by two lesbians so it really opened up. But in the beginning in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when I first started it was very difficult. They wouldn’t consider you to work the line or to be a sous-chef – it was always, “Can you be a pastry chef?” or “Can you work the cold station?” It was just weird. But that feeling got broken too, which is great.

GS: Was it hard to open your own restaurant?

CR: I started bartending while I was chef-ing and I bartended for four and half years at the Cubby Hole, which is not what the Cubby Hole is now. This was the Cubby Hole that came before Henrietta Hudson in the same location on Hudson street. I worked there for four and a half years and then I left there to go and open my restaurant in 1986 so I was probably at Cubby Hole from 1982 to 1986 and then I left to go open my own place and that’s how I really started promoting because being at the Cubby Hole for four and a half years I met SO many women and then after my restaurant closed and everything I had like a four-year stint of promoting – this was in the beginning of the ‘90s, maybe 1991. I’ve been promoting since 1991. I took some time off over the years when my children were little. I didn’t do anything for quite a few years – maybe eight to ten years – because I had to raise my children and it was a busy time. So, I couldn’t really be in nightlife then or be out really late, it was just too much. But, I did start in 1991, took a little break and then went back to it full-steam. So, here I am. It’s been a long time. Yeah.

GS: You’ve had quite a dynamic career. You seem like a very front-facing person who likes being around people a lot! Is that true? (Laughing)

CR: Totally! I could never sit at a desk all day!

GS: When you started your own restaurant did you run it differently than you had experienced working under with male chefs?

CR: Oh yeah! Everyone who worked for me was gay! (Laughing) Every single person. It was great. Payback’s a bitch. (Laughing) It’s not like I discriminated or anything like that, I mean, talent is talent but it kind of just worked out that way. A friend of mine who was a lesbian was the chef. Once I opened the restaurant I didn’t work as the chef anymore. For my gourmet take-out and catering company I did a lot of cooking but once I opened the restaurant I wanted to be in the front of the house, not the back of the house so I could be the personality and run things etcetera. It just turned out that the talent I found was gay but I certainly didn’t discriminate.

GS: What was it like to live in the Village in those early days?

CR: Oh my god! When I first moved there it was right after college basically in the early ‘70s and the East Village was like the Wild West. It was very mom and pop, it was very neighborhood-y, we still had a lot of junkies… I lived on Second Avenue but you couldn’t go past Avenue B because then you were in the hell zone. But it was exciting to watch the evolution of it. It was a great place to be. It was just so artsy and great people and you watched it just grow and grow! People started opening businesses! It was just a great, great time to be there. It was like a renaissance.

GS: I think so many people in my generation have so much weird nostalgia for the time period your generation lived in.

CR: We broke a lot of ground to be honest.

GS: Totally! Were you going to all of these parties then like Sundays at Café Tabac? And you were throwing parties then too, right?

CR: Yes! I started throwing events probably in 1990 like once every couple of months and by 1991 I was starting to really get more prolific. In 1993 I had a place with my partner Minnie Rivera called Pandora’s Box. We didn’t own the space – it was owned by someone else who was a silent person who had the liquor license – but Minnie and I ran it seven days a week. Minnie had the connection and she came to me and was like, “I want to bring you in on this.” It started out with there being four of us and then they all went by the wayside and it ended up being just me and Minnie.

GS: Wow how cool! What was the initial concept for the bar?

CR: The initial concept of Pandora’s Box was basically… well, there was really nowhere for minorities to go. I had worked with Shescape a little bit because my lover at the time was a bartender there. The only thing really going on in the ‘80s was Shescape and this was after Sahara, you know? There really just wasn’t a place for African-American women or Hispanic women to go and I don’t mean to be gossipy but Shescape just wasn’t really comfortable in that respect always. Even before Pandora’s I started doing parties for Hispanic women meaning I played their music, which is why people go out in the first place. People go out to hear their music. No one else wanted to play salsa or merengue, and I realized this was where there was a need! So, I focused on that and when Minnie and I had Pandora’s it was really a Hispanic and African-American venue for sure. We had different nights where we played different music. We had to figure out how to appeal to everyone and to give everyone their music. So, like on Thursday nights it would be a little bit of everything, on Friday nights it would be R&B and hip hop, on Saturday nights it was Latin-oriented and on Sundays we would be open for everyone and we’d play bingo or have movie nights. Thursday, Friday and Saturday were our main nights where we focused on music. We used to pack four hundred or so women in that tiny little space.

GS: Wow!

CR: Yeah! Then we got closed down by the community board after about three years. Someone pulled a gun and shot some shots one night and we went to court for like a year. The community board wasn’t happy about our presence there and the community board is very strong in the West Village so we had to leave. I found a spot immediately after over on Eighth street that I called Taboo and I was there for about a year and a half and from there I went to the Octagon, which was over on the west side. It was a huge, beautiful space and I did every Saturday night there. From there I went to a place called the Her She Bar which was phenomenal! We used to get sometimes six-hundred to eight-hundred women on a weekend night. It was crazy. And then I ventured even further and one of my gay male friends found a place in Astoria that we’d completely take over and the name of it was Krash and we opened that up probably in 1995 and we were there for eleven years and it was gay men and women.

GS: Wow! Eleven years is an amazing run!

CR: Yeah! We packed it every single Friday and Saturday night with probably thirteen hundred people. As a matter of fact my partner and I still do a once a year Krash reunion. We just had one a couple of months ago. In between all of the that I did a party called the Buddha Bar, which was predominantly an African-American event. I do things with different people so my partner Lisa S. and I hosted this event for about four years because life got in the way and stuff like that. Now we do a Buddha Bar reunion once a year. (Laughing) Because they were such great events and the people really loved them! So, we try to keep them alive.

GS: Are the women who come to the reunion mostly women who came when you ran it originally?

CR: Oh yeah! We’re watching everybody twenty-four years older! (Laughing) All except for me! (Laughing)

GS: That’s so great! I’ve gone to a couple of Wanda Acosta’s events and it’s fun to meet some of the people who went to Sundays at Café Tabac. It’s cool to see these communities continue to be so tight knit after so many years.

CR: Exactly. Exactly. And now for the past five years I’ve been doing different events with different people and different teams of people. Along with Kate Fowley and Stacy from Stonewall and Nikki Hill I do the official women’s events for New York City Pride on Gay Pride Sunday – we call that Femme Fatale and I do Pier Pressure which is the Saturday night event and there’s a lot of us who run that, there’s like six of us. I do another party with a girl named Laurie she calls herself Las Reinas Entertainment and Lori and I do a lot of things for the Hispanic women and we basically do a once a month, so we have an event coming up on February 22nd, it’s a Latin night, and all the Latinas come out for that.

GS: That’s so great. You know, I’ve heard so much about how racially divided lesbian spaces have tended to be over the decades and it sounds like you’ve experienced that a bit too. What has it been like for you to hold these spaces for women who seemed like they really needed them?

CR: Oh yeah! You know, I feel just so blessed to be kind of the matriarch of all of this and I feel so blessed that as the years go by I have had this following who despite growing older over the years still come out and now I’m getting twenty-somethings out too! So, now I have a whole new group! I feel really, really blessed that the younger girls would consider coming to my events knowing that I’ve been around for so many years and not even worrying about that, just knowing that I’m going to throw an excellent event where everybody’s welcome regardless of your age, your color, your race, whatever! I just feel so blessed that I’ve been able to continue this journey and have people follow me and respect me and appreciate me and show me so much love! I mean, it’s just really a blessing.

GS: Yeah! It sounds like you really are a matriarch in that sense and that you’ve held a really important role in community-making over the years. It’s powerful to hear about Cynthia.

CR: Yeah I mean I agree and I just feel so, so blessed. When I first started coming back out I was like: Oh, I don’t know if anybody’s going to come! But it just never stopped and has gotten bigger and bigger! So, I’m still ticking! (Laughing)

GS: I’m curious to hear more about your love for music! It seems like you know a lot about music?

CR: Yeah! For me the music was the whole thing. Unfortunately between you and I, I’m like a house music head. (Laughing) But I don’t really get to hear a lot of what I want to hear because the women aren’t really responsive to that so much, you know? When I had the party out in Krash we were basically Latina and Latino oriented but we played a lot of house music and we had many, many recording artists. I can’t even imagine the amount of recording artists that we used to book for shows. So, yeah! I’m pretty eclectic when it comes to music but for the women’s parties I can’t play that like deep house music that I really love like Frankie Knuckles and the 718 Session music and all that stuff. They want to hear more top forty and more popular music, and that’s fine. I have to give them what they want. The party’s not for me. When I really wanna dance and go out I go to where I can hear my music.

GS: Where do you go?

CR: I go to the 718 Sessions which they have in Brooklyn a lot. They do it maybe once a month. They’re huge. I used to go to Paradise Garage and places like that. Yeah. That’s a whole different thing.

GS: You’ve had such a dynamic history in New York. Did you actually grow up on Long Island?

CR: No, no. I grew up in Poughkeepsie about eighty miles up the Hudson in the Hudson Valley. I had a beautiful childhood. Great family. Big, Italian family. Can’t complain about that. I had a wonderful growing up. I could never complain about it, so, that was a blessing. I left to go to college and after college I didn’t go back home. I moved right into the city.

GS: Was your family accepting of you being gay? 

CR: You know in all honesty my brother passed away when I was nineteen and he was twenty-four. He was in the army during the height of Vietnam and he had a brain aneurism and passed away when I was only nineteen. So, to make a long story short back home I never really hid it. I was always bringing my girlfriends home and all of that stuff and they saw me have long-term relationships. We never really had the conversation. All the conversation really was, was, “We just want you to be happy.”  My parents went through so much losing their son so for them it was just like, she’s alive, she’s healthy, we just want her to be happy. And then of course when we had our kids it was like billboard. (Laughing) Our kids were born in 1996 through artificial insemination and we were kind of pioneers in that. You didn’t see it much.

GS: It’s so common now but what was it like to be lesbian moms at that time and to go through the insemination process?

CR: We just knew what we wanted to do and we just did the research and we found sperm banks and we found a fertility doctor and we really just did it ourselves we didn’t really reach out to ask anyone for any advice we didn’t know anybody to ask so we just did it all through research. We basically found the sperm bank online and from there we found a fertility doctor in the village and we went to visit and she guided us along. She was wonderful! She did our inseminations and then when we weren’t getting pregnant after like four times we sat down with her and we were like what can we do to up our chances this is getting mentally exhausting and it’s just emotionally really difficult. So, she told us we could go on a fertility drug which we did so I would run home and give Jackie shots and you have to follow your ovulation and take your temperature every morning… I mean, it was not easy. Right after the fertility shots we went in for the insemination and that’s when it worked. I think it was our first ultrasound at like two and half months after getting pregnant we saw the two heartbeats. (Laughing)

GS: Wow. That must have been an amazing feeling.

CR: Oh my god yeah. Especially that it was a boy and a girl we felt really blessed. That was incredible.

GS: What was it like to raise two kids as lesbian moms at that time?

CR: You know what? We were so embraced by everyone, by our doctors, pediatricians, our neighbors, of course by our friends who were ecstatic! Our kids went to a fantastic elementary school in the West Village called PS3 right on Christopher and Hudson and it was very diverse and very gay friendly. There were a couple of teachers who were gay, the principal at that time… our kids had two moms and there were no side-glances. I don’t know if people were talking under their breath but I don’t think so.

GS: That’s awesome.

CR: Yeah. It was just fine! We didn’t have any problems whatsoever. I’m just so grateful. I always wanted children and it was always a plan of mine and I just can’t imagine my life without my kids. I always encourage the young women who come to me with this thought and wanting to be a mom and I just encourage them all that there is a way to do it. Don’t wait and wait for the right partner or the right time… I mean that’s wonderful but you can also just do it, you can absolutely do it and hopefully with the blessing of your family if you don’t have a partner. At least you have to have family. But don’t give that up just because of your sexuality. You don’t have to. Regretting that at the age of fifty, like, “Uh! I really wanted to have a child and I didn’t!” is probably a very bitter place to be and a very sad place to be. You know? I’ve referred a lot of girls to my sperm bank and my OBGYN who is still practicing and many of them have had kids! I mean god, now it’s so prevalent! It’s great! (Laughing)

CR: Jackie and I split up however we are a family. We elevated, not eliminated, our relationship with one-another and raised our kids together for all these years and we’re the best of friends! It’s really a wonderful gift! I’m not the biological mom – I’m much older than Jackie, twelve years older – but even when we split we made a commitment to one-another that we would raise our children and we did and they graduated from college two years ago this May! They’re great and it’s wonderful! (Laughing) You don’t find that too often.

GS: That’s beautiful. I love hearing stories like that. It gives me a lot of hope for the power of love and the power of non-traditional commitment.

CR: Yeah! I mean not everybody can do that but we managed and we’re grateful for it. Our children didn’t ask to be here and they certainly didn’t ask to be in a broken home. They were only three when we went our separate ways but they were young enough to not really notice, they just knew they had my house and Jackie’s house and they went back and forth! (Laughing) They had lots of toys in both places!

GS: Sounds like a great life to grow up in!

CR: Exactly. So I ended up in Jersey City and have been here since.

GS: Wow yeah! That’s so amazing. And aside from raising a beautiful family you’ve been a leading force in lesbian nightlife in New York City over almost five decades? How have you seen it change over the years?

CR:  Well I’ve certainly seen it change in being more inclusive and there being a lot more freedom to be who you are. I was there when it was illegal! So, that in itself has been amazing. Seeing gay marriage? That blew me away! Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would live to see that. Now, watching the entire transgender movement, which worries me a little bit for a lot of the young kids I want them to really think about it and not jump right onto the bandwagon. It’s a major life decision. And it’s irreversible in a lot of ways. But do I advocate for it if you’ve gotten your therapy and you really searched your soul and you’ve taken the time to psychologically work towards this and figure it all out and really be sure? Oh yeah! I’m so happy for all the people who have gone through it who felt really compromised beforehand but I do think it has to be something that is really well thought-out. But I really am just so grateful to have lived through all of these eras and to watch it go from A to wherever we are now… G. (Laughing) So, yeah. It’s been phenomenal! It really has been. Major breakthroughs, major strides, major achievements, major acceptance – it’s beautiful! It really is. 

GS: It really is. I’m curious, so Pandora’s Box was a seven-day-a-week situation right? And that was the only bar you ran full-time with everything else being parties?

CR: Exactly. That was the only one I was at every day.

GS: Ok and do you think there’s a benefit to having a place that’s open seven-days-a-week versus parties that run monthly or annually?

CR: Oh definitely there’s a need for that. There’s definitely a need for a place to go seven-days-a-week to meet up after work, some people like to go out early and come home early, oh yeah! Definitely. Really all we have is the Cubbyhole and Hen’s [Henrietta Hudson] and Stonewall! Stonewall is for everyone and that’s a landmark now so of course. But there aren’t many! The boys have a lot more but I guess that’s enough! You know, I guess that’s enough! I would never want to do that again. It was very taxing. It’s a big endeavor and big job but is there a need for it? Most definitely.

GS: From what I hear it’s just so hard to keep a seven-day-a-week space for women open, how did you make that happen with Pandora’s Box? Was there just a really loyal clientele?

CR: Definitely there were. People would come after work, maybe stay till ten o’clock and then there’d be the late-night people. Of course there were nights that there would be maybe only twenty people in there for the whole night in the dead of winter or stuff like that but the nights that we were packed made up for it economically. It kind of balances out. I don’t know what Hen’s is like during the week – sometimes I’ll stop in after work if I’m meeting someone for a drink or something like that – but look at the Cubbyhole! I mean, it’s a matchbox! You can’t move in there! It could be a Tuesday night after work in the middle of February and its packed! Women love to be on top of each other! (Laughing) If it’s too big they hate it!

GS: Well, thank you so much Cynthia. This has been just amazing!