After years of work, New York's gay hotel/resort/nightclub The Out NYC is almost ready. But before they start letting gay (and, presumably, straight or at least curious) guests grind in their bedrooms, the massive venture is doing something lowkey flamboyant and opening its enormous zombie club, XL. There will be gay.

As Hotel Chatter succinctly puts it, "XL hopes to distinguish itself by filling two holes in the NYC gay nightlife scene: nightclub and cabaret." And from the sounds of it they are on the right track, baby. To start, there hasn't been a new gay spot this large in the city in ages, and the new XL (the old one closed in 2006) seems eager to please both fans of dancing and of cabaret—it is on 42nd Street, after all:

They’ve installed a full lighting system on the club’s vast stage, and will be able to modify the setup so that shows can be staged in different ways. They emphasize the importance of the cabaret several times, and I can tell [Beto] Sutter is genuinely excited about that aspect of the club. Beyond just the gay thing, there are a lot of really great cabaret rooms in New York, but none of them with the stage structure and lighting to do real stage shows. And that’s the twist we put in on it," he tells me. [John] Blair interjects, "We built it as if it were a cabaret and a nightclub too, not just a nightclub [that is also] a cabaret." Sutter is quick to remind me, "The shows at XL really became a staple of XL…so this [design] met both of those qualifications."


We have not seen inside the the new club, but from what Next saw and from the renderings available it sounds pretty enormous. No word yet if Gawker's sources were right about the VIP room in the VIP room "where the wall is a one-way mirror so those on the dance floor can't see in so patrons are allowed to do whatever they want inside—wink, wink, nudge, nudge." But we suspect we'll hear about those kinds of details soon enough.

The club, which because of its proximity to a police station actually has patrons line up inside, kicks off tonight with an open vodka bar from 10—11 p.m., Amanda Lepore and DJ Lady Bunny. You can learn more about upcoming events (they've got stuff planned for the whole weekend) here.