Life and works

Jim Fouratt was an early member of the Gay Liberation Front

Gay Liberation Front

Gay Liberation Front was the name of a number of Gay Liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots, in which police clashed with gay demonstrators.-The Gay Liberation Front:...

  and a participant in the Stonewall riots

Stonewall riots

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City...

. Fouratt lived with Carl Miller, Allen Young

Allen Young (writer)

Allen Young is an American journalist, author and editor who is also a social, political and environmental activist.-Early life:Allen Young, born in Liberty, N.Y., on June 30, 1941, to Rae Young and Louis Young. His parents, both secular Jews, spent their youth in New York City, then relocated to...

, Giles Kotcher, Bob Bland and Punit Auerbacher in the Seventeenth Street commune. He became the manager for the club Hurrah

Hurrah (nightclub)

Hurrah was a nightclub located at 32 West 62nd Street in New York City from 1976 until 1980. Under the management of Jim Fouratt it became known as the first rock disco in New York, and pioneered the use of music videos in nightclubs, placing video monitors around the club, over a year before the...

 in 1978 and brought in DJs to create the first "Rock Disco," with music videos playing as well as live music acts. In 1980 he opened Danceteria

Danceteria

Danceteria was a well-known four-floor nightclub located in New York City which operated from 1980 until 1986 and in the Hamptons until 1995. Throughout its history, the club had seven different locations, three in NYC and four in the Hamptons...

 with Rudolf Pieper. He has also been a writer for Billboard magazine

Billboard (magazine)

Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...

, where he has been an outspoken critic of rappers such as Eminem

Eminem

Marshall Bruce Mathers III , better known by his stage name Eminem or his alter ego Slim Shady, is an American rapper, record producer, songwriter and actor. Eminem's popularity brought his group project, D12, to mainstream recognition...

. In the late 1990's, Fouratt attempted to launch Beauty Records, a recording imprint funded by Mercury Records' Danny Goldberg, but that project was short-circuited when Mercury's parent corporation, Polygram, was bought out by Seagrams, and Fouratt's acts were let go.

External links

Jack Nichols article