Nonconformist Fun : If You Have to Ask the Name, You’re Probably Not Ready for This Party

Nothing about this club falls short of hard-core.

Not the name, whose combination of four letters (and an exclamation point) has become an eponym for the club’s imitators and is considered unprintable in most places without the aid of asterisks and ampersands.

Not the music, a high-volume mix of bad-to-the-bone techno, hip-hop and industrial, which drives the dancers to dervish-like frenzies.

And the motif? Leather and chains, tattoos and piercings and a floor show out of the pages of De Sade.

“We formed the club as a means of showing that there are other ways to express yourself besides conforming to society’s trends and ideas of beauty,” says one of the club’s managers, who likes to be known as Endangered Species, after the name of his club promotion company.

Weekly for more than two years, gays and straights and skin and metal have been commingling here.

Once a month, underground bands play, and occasionally there are demonstrations in piercings, mummification and other subcultural rites.

Recently, the club moved out of the small disco it used to invade in Silver Lake and into the more spacious and gothically opulent Dragonfly in Hollywood.

“The move has brought all kinds of new people,” Endangered Species says. “All this has become more accepted by society. It’s become almost something of a--gasp!--trend.”

These club-goers regard trendiness as a mixed blessing--nothing rankles the management and the old-timers more than the sprinkling of stone-washed jeans that have begun popping up amid the chaps, G-strings, dog collars and Betty Page haircuts.

Despite its success and longevity, the club has kept its edge honed.

Above the closely packed dance floor, minimally clad, gyrating go-go dancers of both sexes set a hedonistic tone.

In the new quarters, there are also a back patio and a cushion-lined “harem room” that’s usually cluttered with bodies splayed out at all angles.

But it’s on the small stage that decadence reaches its apogee. As the crowd gathers around, the players brandish cat-o’-nine-tails, clothespins and other accoutrements d’amour of the demimonde.

“I’ve been coming here for two years. I love it!” screams one of the players, a club regular who calls herself Crazy Sharon.

“I mean, I’m a legal secretary during the week. This is the only fun I ever get.”

The Club: Sunday nights at the Dragonfly, 6506 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood; (213) 896-8264. Hours: 10 p.m. to 2 a.m.

To Get In: $6 cover. There’s no velvet rope at the door.