 Cheren was business partner and former lover of Michael Brody, who created the Paradise Garage in 1977 with the financial back-up of Cheren.In the 2006 "The Godfather of Disco," a documentary about Cheren, he himself called the Garage "the ultimate expression of the whole fabric" of gay night life.When Rodger McFarlane began a crisis counseling hotline about AIDS in 1982 as a program of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) organization, he operated it out of a couple of rooms in a building in Chelsea owned by Mel Cheren.