Gerudo Town is one of the most interesting locations to explore in Breath of the Wild. It’s one of the most fully realised towns in all of Hyrule, with both basic amenities and more advanced locales.
While almost every settlement in this iteration of Hyrule has a general store and an armor shop, Gerudo Town has a bar, a spa, a full market, a jewelers, and, incredibly, a romance school. There are houses, a small palace, back alleys, and stables, but the place that caught my attention was the Gerudo Secret Club.
I feel like any game is incomplete without a “secret” location. It doesn’t take a great deal to get into these places, but it feels so satisfying to crack the code and find what’s revealed within. The Gerudo Secret Club doubly so, as it takes a bit of investigating to even get within the town walls. Once you’ve completed the “Forbidden City Entry” part of the main quest and obtained the correct Gerudo women’s attire to disguise yourself, you can explore the town at your leisure — provided you don’t remove your disguise, of course.
Once you’ve begun to explore the town, you will stumble across an inconspicuous-looking door, round the side of the Fashion Passion clothing stall. Approach the curtained doorway behind the store and the proprietor Saula will advise members to go round the side door. For what, you don’t know yet, but will soon find out.
It takes a little more digging around the town and speaking to its inhabitants to figure out the code to enter the GSC. Once you’ve eavesdropped on the right people in the Noble Canteen, you can take the code to the nondescript door and enter there within.
Down the narrow, tapestried corridor, is a small and barely lit room. A smoke of some kind pervades the air, and the candle lamps flicker and pulse, giving the room a shimmering quality. After the other delights of Gerudo Town, this Secret Club takes you by surprise. Rather than a forbidden bar, like Latte in Majora’s Mask, or even the Bomber’s Club in the same game, this appears to be simply another clothing shop at first glance. But talk with the shopkeeper and you’ll discover something else entirely.
Greeting you with the Gerudo for “good evening,” Greta implies that this is an in-between place, a kind of liminal space outwith the regimented rules of Gerudo Town. This is a place for those who are different, and it’s clear that this is not encouraged by the general populace as it is a secret place, protected by a password. However, maybe it’s not as subversive as it might appear if everyone within the town already knows the password and freely discusses it with other Gerudo, though they keep it from strangers.
When you ask Greta what the place is, she explains that the Gerudo Secret Club, or GSC, is the only place in town to buy men’s clothing, which is illegal in the town but still in high demand. Greta then goes on to say that she’s never seen a man disguised as a woman before, causing Link to visibly start, but she then says that they each have something to hide, now onto some business. From there you have the regular options to buy and sell like any other vendor in the game. Aside from selling from your own inventory, you can buy from Greta both the Desert Voe armor set and the Radiant armor set. While the Desert Voe set is bought using rupees, the glow-in-the-dark Radiant set is bought with Luminous Stones, which is a departure from the usual selling mechanic. Does Greta make a profit on these, or does she just trade enough Luminous Stones to make the next set? Who knows.
There is further jewelry adorning the walls, though none of it is for sale. At the back is a cozy seating area surrounded by decorative jars and candles. Where this sits should be right next to the draped door from behind the Fashion Passion stall, but instead, there’s a blank sandstone wall. What, then, does the doorway on the other side hide? Is it merely a stock room, or is there an even more secret club that not even a password could get you into? The mysteries of Gerudo Town do not give themselves up easily, even after a thorough investigation.
At the end of the counter, towards the entryway, is what looks to be a guest book, a small pen resting on a wooden plinth beside it. While you can’t interact with it, I like to imagine that it’s full of quirky nom de plumes and maybe even drag names of those who come to visit this secret place.
The Gerudo Secret Club, small and unassuming as it may be, brings us right back to the heart of the Gerudo Town and what it stands for. No men may enter its walls, and few men are born into the clan itself. Instead, they value sisterhood above all else; these Amazonian-like warrior women care of honor and family too, but girl power is their modus operandi. Some go abroad to seek male partners, some attend romance classes in hope of a happily ever after, and some have husbands who live outside the town but return for work or support from their community, as is the case of the Gerudo with the sick husband who you supply medicinal items to in a sidequest.
The GSC adds another element to the Gerudo women’s ideas of gender and sexuality. Do some wish to be men, or do they dress in drag for the fun of it? Are there adventurers out there doing the reverse of what Link does, using their male disguise to create anonymity in other Hylian towns? Do they entertain their friends behind closed doors, or practice how to talk to men by taking it in turns to act as one? It makes me think that if I had never even seen a man in real life, and lived in a world without film or television, would I take the opportunity to buy men’s clothes to see what they might be like? Probably.
Maybe the GSC is simply an homage to Sheik. It might be stretching the point a little too far, but this could be Zelda’s legacy if Ocarina of Time is indeed set before Breath of the Wild in the same timeline. Maybe there’s a forgotten heritage of a disguised heroine that has been handed down through the generations, ending up eventually as a secret shop full of contraband clothes.
The Gerudo Secret Club suggests that there’s plenty of non-conformity among the women of Gerudo Town, and I like the idea that many of them are a little radical in one way or another. Even Greta herself, who will ask you if you catch her at the right time, “Have you ever noticed how the darker it is, the more beautiful the light becomes?” There’s beauty in individuality, just like there’s beauty in the stars of the dark Gerudo Desert night. This Club represents that, and although it’s little (and perhaps unexciting to some), I think it’s really special and adds so much to the gem that is Gerudo Town.
