We wonder if the late Hugh Hefner the founder and chief executive of PLAYBOY is smiling from his grave right now. It has just been announced that the site of the old Playboy Club in NY is to be turned into a gay hotel, restaurant and night club
The property — featuring a 103-room hotel at 510 W. 42nd St. between 10th and 11th Avenues — shuttered last October after operating for six years, although the Playboy Club flamed out in 2019 after being open for barely a year.
Gay real estate developer and hotelier Ian Reisner said about his plans “It’s a gay hotel where straight friends and family are welcome too. It’s a reorientation, and a kind of play on words,” .There’s also a 14,000-square-foot entertainment complex that would include an “experiential supper club” where the the former Playboy Club used to be, a dance space and a subterranean cellar mixology bar.’
Reisner, has faced controvesy in the past when he faced boycott calls for hosting an event in 2015 for Senator Ted Cruz, who is adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage, apologized to the gay community for showing “poor judgment.” Reisner put the apology on Facebook, where a page calling for a boycott of his properties, the gay-friendly Out NYC hotel and his Fire Island Pines holdings, had gotten more than 8,200 “likes” by Sunday evening. .
The prvieuw year, 23-year-old Sean Verdi died of an apparent drug overdose at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan after being found unconscious in Reisner’s Manhattan apartment. Sean had to be pulled out of the shower before Ian could get out. Only Ian knows what happened in the shower that night
And why would this latest development have interested Hefner? Well, he was such a controversial figure in popular culture, accused of perpetrating and fostering sexual abuse and exploitation stretching back decades, that Playboy has since distanced itself from association with him. But after his death in 2017, word got out that this ultra nacho womanizer some of his exes have said the publication magnate would dabble with men as well as women sexually. In an interview, Crystal Hefner, who was married to the Playboy founder from 2012, told what she saw during those years.
“He’s definitely had men in his bed before for the orgies they would have and sometimes film,” she said. “But you know, I don’t know to what extent interacting with each other or just with other women in the bed.“
It also turns out that Hugh Hefner’s son Marston Hefner is bisexual : something he shares on his OnlyFans. page . Who knew?
