SUPER SEX New York Style by Henry Schipper Plato’ s Retreat. Saturday morning. Two a.m. This is the peak hour. Five hundred people, most of them naked, are jammed together in a dark, moist, throbbing atmosphere the likes of which I’ve never before seen. And I do mean seen. Many people are merely standing, some still fully dressed, but all seem to exude a kind of shadowy steam. The middle air is at once dense and empty, a swirling black hole out of which anything might seemingly materialize. It is an atmosphere that seems to have gathered out of some sort of human dissolve down below, a surrender of personal and social forms, a collective dare to try out the turn-on of chaos. Faces are flushed and bright, Toulouse-Lautrec colors that paint the darkness. The music is blaring its loudest: “ Push push IN push,’ ’ a disco siren exhorts, again and again, with rising intensity. And in the nooks and crannies throughout the place, in the two swimming pools, on the dance floor, and especially in the body-carpeted “ mat room,” couplings, triplings, body pile-ons of all description respond, pumping, bouncing, sucking, and hand-jobbing in time with the disco beat, creating a virtual landscape of climaxes, bodies flaring in all directions like fireworks on a sexual Fourth of July. Again and again, the same shot at different angles, a dynamic redundance in four points of each eye — arms, breast, and head suddenly flung up and out, sustaining an unbearable pulsing arch, collapsing in a palpable cushion of steam. From midnight to three, Fridays and Saturdays, Plato’s Retreat is a sexual twilight zone, a kaleidoscope made up, mind you, not of dionysian cultists, but of folks of all races and classes, Toms, Dicks and Harriets (Ozzie comes too) that bear every resemblance to you and me. Could this place possibly be a harbinger of the kind of nightlife that lies ahead, the next mind-blowing extension beyond disco and the singles scene? Plato’s Retreat, located on 74th Street just west of Broadway, is a sprawling den that heats up the basement of Manhattan’s landmark Ansonia Hotel. Open from 9 pm to 6 am, five nights a week, the place is designed with the overnight, longplaying patron in mind. Besides the dance floor, mat room, and a labyrinth of private, cushioncarpeted cubicles for more reclusiveminded couples and small groups, Plato’s offers a variety of atmospheres and services to keep people engaged and happy over the long haul. Indeed, with two pools, a steam room and Jacuzzi, and a constantly replenished buffet (ribs, chicken, pizza, potato salad, and bagels), the middle-class, health spa-Sunday brunch hedonists who hold the majority of Plato’s must almost feel at home. 6
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