The Card in the Back Pocket, New York Clubs Bring Back Membership
From a cavernous Queens club to a Brooklyn basement, the city's dance floors are handing out passes again
There are two lines outside Basement. One is long. The other is short enough to be funny. The short one belongs to members, and getting into it has become one of the more quietly competitive games in New York nightlife.
The club on Flushing Avenue in Queens is known for all night DJ lineups, long queues and a strict ban on cameras. According to a recent GQ report on club memberships, anyone who shows up with smart glasses risks being banned for life. Tickets to its big parties sell out fast. Membership guarantees a ticket and the shorter line. It comes by invitation.
How the Door Got a Database
At Basement, membership starts with an invitation. GQ describes an application that asks for a portrait style photo along with the applicant's Instagram and Resident Advisor usernames. Existing members get three referrals, and they only get a referral back if the person they vouched for is approved. If an applicant's file is thin, the member who referred them may be asked to write a short letter of recommendation. Once in, a member pulls up a QR code on a phone and shows it at the door.
One member told GQ the process felt arbitrary. He was approved within hours. Some devoted regulars said they waited weeks only to be turned down. That unpredictability is part of the point. A card that anyone can buy is a discount. A card that someone has to give you is a status.
A card that anyone can buy is a discount. A card that someone has to give you is a status.
None of this is new. GQ reaches back to 1978, when thousands of people applied for Studio 54 membership cards and only a fraction made the cut. Members paid between $75 and $100 for a card with the club's Art Deco logo, which promised admission and a few dollars off the cover. When the club stopped honoring the cards at the door, the city's consumer affairs department shut the program down. Downtown, the Mudd Club handed out laminated IDs for its own "Mudd College of Deviant Behavior."
The Laminated Years
The modern revival has a Brooklyn origin story, at least according to the man who tells it. John Barclay owns two Brooklyn clubs, Bossa Nova Civic Club and Paragon, which opened in 2022. He started a membership program at Bossa around 2014, and once a year new members had their pictures taken in the club's basement by the DJ Aurora Halal and laminated on the spot. "When we started it at Bossa, everybody mocked it," he told GQ.
Barclay does not hand them out on request. "We don't just give it to anybody who asks," he told the magazine. The card today is simpler in design, so it is easier to pass across a bar. On a busy night at Paragon, he estimates, 40 to 50 members are on the floor alongside the paying crowd. He has no plans to go digital. Part of the appeal, as he sees it, is holding a physical token you can show off.
His criteria sound a lot like the Studio 54 era. Fame helps. So does beauty, or working somewhere useful, or being a DJ or an agent. But the members he likes best are the ones who show up, behave, tip the bartender and dance. That is a surprisingly wholesome standard for a late night room.
Pay to Belong
Not every club plays hard to get. Some simply sell the card.
Brooklyn's Good Room lists its 2026 membership card on its Bandcamp page for $10. The listing promises discounted entry at the door to selected parties through the year, free entry to dedicated membership parties, and discounts at its sister bar, Good Bar. No referral, no audition, just a price tag.
Elsewhere, the multi room Brooklyn venue, runs its program like a subscription service. Its membership page offers two tiers, each sold as a seasonal or yearly pass. Freaks with Benefits costs $8 a month billed quarterly, or less on an annual plan, and gets you skip the line entry for yourself and two friends, coat check and a merch discount. Patron Saints runs $45 a month on the seasonal plan and includes unlimited free entry with a guest to Elsewhere shows, subject to capacity, plus guest list drops and private events.
Nowadays, a club in Queens, takes a third route. The club is famous for its Non Stop parties, which GQ notes run from 10 p.m. to 3 p.m. the next day, with free bagels at sunrise. It sells memberships through Patreon, with monthly tiers from $5 to $100. The artist Maxwell Vice, a manager at Nowadays when GQ interviewed them last fall, said the money supports the people who work there. "The Patreon goes directly towards the staff," Vice said. For Nowadays the card is less about exclusivity and more about marking someone as part of the community.
Most clubs draw the line in about the same place. GQ found that memberships are pulled for the obvious reasons. Touching people without consent. Filming the dance floor. Getting too drunk or too high too often. Being unbearable. In practice, Barclay told GQ, nobody asks for the card back. The member is just banned.
That may be the real function of the card in 2026. It is a shortcut at the door, but it is also a promise. The club is betting that the person holding it will make the room better. The member is betting that the club will still be worth the wait next year. In a city where every door has its own logic, from the clipboard at the rope to the QR code in a phone, a small piece of plastic in a back pocket still says something no app can. Somebody here knows you.
