Support Your Local Gay? Bar

There is a cliche that no one can go home again. I've come to realize that this applies to one's home away from home as well. Tonight I went to a drag show at Fort Wayne's premier (of two) gay bar, After Dark. Now through my early twenties, After Dark was a great place to go and mingle. A true center of the gay community in this town, and I still have friends who I met there, just hanging out. Now I never engaged in anything untoward in any back room or in the parking lot, but I liked going somewhere that I felt welcome.

Now I'm 35 and have been in a relationship for a very very long time. The Drag Shows on Thursday nights at After Dark just ain't what they used to be. I used to have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to get to a drag show, and it was worth it, but nowadays, it's just utterly terrible.

I think that in the intervening years, there has been a tectonic shift in the gay community. People no longer feel the oppression of the straight world like they used to. Gays are everywhere, at PTA meetings, country clubs, watching their kids play soccer, or just picking up the latest project materials at Lowe's and Home Depot.

I was with some friends who were in from out of town, and the idea was to see if and or how drag has changed. The short answer is yes, drag shows have changed and not for the better. Now Fort Wayne drag was never auspicious or highbrow, but it was never brutally tortuous as it was tonight.

The "revue" consisted of exactly two performers, one semi-decent and one terrible. My friends and I stayed for four numbers from each performer, but that was all we could take. I was prepared with singles to tip the performers, but I was not about to encourage such bad behavior.

My friends lamented that the last gay bar in their town closed. That got me thinking, what's the rest of the story?

The tragedy seems to be that the gay bar as a business model is built on the perpetually unsustainable social construct of self-segregation. As progress marches on, the clientele for a gay bar typically dries up. People are assimilating into their neighborhoods, having book clubs and wine tasting parties with their suburban neighbors, and trading recipes with the other parents on the sidelines of the soccer field.

So-called "singles" bars are built on the same principle, but there are always more and more people turning 21 and heading to mainstream bars and clubs as the older patrons typically pair up and quit going. And now with a more tolerant and accepting society, gay young people want to spend time in the limelight of the dancefloor at the popular club.

Younger gays seem like they don't want to risk getting cruised and hit on by the much older gay patrons still languishing in the faded glory of the old gay bar.

Part of it may also be the economy, but I think After Dark is taking care of the increasing liquor prices by watering down not just the vodka, but the tonic as well.

So what's to be done with gay bars? I must say that I don't have any answers, but I see some encouraging signs. Babylon, the sister club of After Dark is starting to shake off its image as mostly a gay bar and trying to attract a more mainstream crowd.

And really, isn't that what we've been fighting for over the past 40 some odd years? We want society to accept us, and that in all fairness must be a two-way street. We have to share our spaces with our straight friends, just as they have welcomed us into theirs.

So to the drag queens of After Dark, I say, do what makes you happy. You don't have to panhandle in high heels anymore. This is the twenty-first century. If your dream is to perform, head down to the civic theatre, take voice lessons, whatever. There will probably still be drag queens in twenty years, but there may not be any gay bars in which to sing.

You've got to find your voice, and that's really hard to do when you don't even know how to lip synch to other people's songs.

Charlie's Angels Aware

I loved singing and performing. I always have. I took singing lessons, I was in children's choir at church, performed in school plays and talent shows; I loved being in front of people. I think in some ways I've been very much a drama queen, hell, I've even thought about being a drag queen, but that moment has thankfully passed.

When I was a very young child, I would take the wooden spoon out of the drawer in the kitchen and pretend it was my microphone. The fireplace hearth was my stage. My parents are particularly fond of a song I made up about wanting to get a kiss from a jungle woman. Though I don't remember it myself very well, I guess it's probably a factual account, but I'm just old enough that we didn't have a camcorder yet to verify such an event. I guess in retrospect it would have made a much better story if I actually sang "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix.

In kindergarten, I put together a band called the Hot Buns. I think this was actually a name of a band from an episode of the TV show "Gimmie a Break" so I don't really think I should have been credited for my originality. The punchline was later that year, my buns really were hot after a paddling. The Christian school I went to used a name on the board -> checkmark by name -> aggregation of checkmarks = paddling system of punishment. It was probably not a big deal. I talked a lot. I was very chatty along with my annoying precociousness.

When I grew up a little, my parents put me in Children's Choir at church. It was much better than listening to the pastor's 45 minute prayers or impossibly intellectual sermons, so I was okay with being there. Although I often wanted to stay home so I could watch reruns of Charlie's Angels.

I remember Pat, the lady in charge of the choir was very enthusiastic about teaching us music. But we never learned anything useful. She taught us the words using a gigantic poster sized easel with a mix of words and rebuses. It was all handwritten and must have taken weeks, but at the time, I despised the pictogram learning process, but it helped me learn with both sides of my brain, an incredible gift. For all the benefits of cross-brain learning, we were never taught how to read music. It was all learned by ear. Later I took piano lessons and learned music, but until I was 9 I didn't know middle c from my middle finger.

But the absolute best aspects of Children's Choir were putting on costumes and doing choreography. Once, our church did Angels Aware, a cornball musical about how God was going to come and save the earth. I will forever remember all of the Ten Commandments in order, as long as someone gives me enough time to sing them out in my head. With the sparkly gold Christmas garland halos, the dry ice cloud effects, and the choreography, I was quite literally in a form of prepubescent gay heaven. Too bad my brother and one of my sisters were also there.

It was around the time I was growing out of my family's K-Tel Dumb Ditties album and transitioning to popular music and 60s tunes my sister was into. I was also into Christian pop for a while, but I got over that when I turned 15 or 16.

As I grew up more and more, my taste in music evolved into what can only be described
as the quintessential gay boy trying to fit into the world around him. My favorite song until I was 15 was "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship. It came on the radio once in fifth grade. I was typically staying in from recess and helping the teacher clean the chalkboards with another student named Gabe. I started to dance and lip sync and Gabe just started laughing. I was unapologetic about my enthusiasm. The teacher was out of the room, and I probably wasn't supposed to be listening to a secular radio station anyway, so I just didn't care. Now I've realized that what I really loved was that the sexes of the singing voices were so indeterminate. Grace Slick's voice to an eleven year old may as well have been that of another man. Can you imagine the enthralling power this had on my sexually confused brain?

In high school, I got bolder. I was an avid fan of the B-52s, the notoriously gay party band from the Athens, Georgia music underground that billed itself as the "World's Greatest Party Band." To me, they were. I bought every CD I could get my hands on. Almost every Taco Bell paycheck went to a B-52s CD in one of those clunky, anachronistic CD long boxes.

The B-52s made me lose my young queer mind. I would dance and groove and sing along anywhere I heard their music. At the time I was puzzled why more of their songs didn't make it on the radio, but going back through their albums today, I realize, that they aren't that great. Fred Schneider, the lead singer can't carry a tune. He's got a kind of gravelly voice that makes me think of Suzanne Pleshette or Bea Arthur. Plus, their music was kind of subversive. It was positively dripping with lots of sexual innuendo. They have a song titled "Dirty Back Road." Incidentally, I didn't put that together with gay sex until a few weeks ago when I saw the CD case in my rack. I like to think I was progressive, but I was more naive than even I had imagined.

Sometime when I was about 15, I saw the movie Heathers for the first of what would prove to be an innumerable number of times. The movie was vividly absurdist and surreal, but funny as all hell. At the end, Sly and the Family Stone covered Que Sera Sera, and did an amazing job. It became my all-time favorite song. To this day it retains that title, in spite of 17 years of music inundating me from all conceivable media. The song was so utterly perfect because it sounded like an utter mess. In the slick world of the late 80s and early 90s music, the blues, funk and rhythm fused in my brain to turn me into a musical adult.

About the time I discovered Sly and the Family Stone, I stopped listening to Christian pop. I loathed the concept of it, for one thing. Even now, perhaps especially now I don't think it is in any way beneficial to anyone to package the message of gospel in mass-market crap music.

I went away to college and started listening to college type music. I got into Ben Folds Five, the Indigo Girls, Cake, Guster and Jimmy Buffett, just about everything. I got into dance music a little bit also, being that I did start going to gay bars and getting my dance groove on for real.

Now I feel sometimes that I have lost that musical feeling. In a world dominated by personalized access to music, I feel that we need more people willing to go out there and perform music, rather than just consume it. I think I would like to learn how to play an instrument. I only ever learned how to play the snare drum. The piano didn't really stick for some reason. I think playing music, as well as singing and dancing connect us to something larger than ourselves. I think this larger art is something the world needs more of.

Maybe I can gather up the Kindergarten gang and reform the Hot Buns. The band name carries a lot more irony now than it did in 1983. I imagine that our first number one hit will be a cover of the B-52s classic "Dirty Back Road."

Celebrating Five Decades of Decadent Drag

Fort Wayne's own TULA who really should be written about in all caps, is celebrating 50 years of drag tonight at After Dark in Fort Wayne. The local Whatzup event paper did a story on her and her much less successful alter ego Charles Miller.

I'm including this because I think it's great anytime the local 'press' covers gay events. I recently joined the NLGJA so I'm keeping an eye out for stories like this. Too bad that drag performers are all anyone ever talks about when they cover Fort Wayne, well other than the brilliant Emma Downs who had a 3000 word project covering the growing acceptance of gays in fort wayne. Check the archive of the Journal Gazette to buy the story.

Sill 50 years of drag is quite an accomplishment, especially in this town, so I have to give TULA her props. There are now better drag artists out there, but TULA was out there doing it before most of them were even born. So I say congratulations to TULA.

By the way, if you didn't catch it in the first photo, the article IS next to the rail ad for C2G Coffeehouse, the Christian, pseudo-hipster dive downtown that has bad Christian artists doing their best God rock. I found it deliciously disjointed, so I had to point it out. I want to say that the editors of the Whatzup knew EXACTLY what they were doing.



If you're in town, TULA's anniversary celebration begins at 9 p.m. at After Dark at 1601 South Harrison. Cover charge is $3. Stay away from the pear-flavored vodka. It gave me nightmares, or maybe it was last night's featured drag guest who was a bit lopsided.

UPDATE:
Emma Downs of the Journal-Gazette had an interview with Tula, published on the eve of the party.