Stadium club dc gay

As midnight approached, a trail of men filtered into the movie theater to watch X-rated gay movies and eye each other in a warren of dimly lit lounges. A few steps up the street, a half-dozen men danced nude for a barroom crowd, while next door a female impersonator known as Ella Fitzgerald sashayed down a staircase in a brunet wig and a glittering blue-and-red gown.

For three decades, gay men seeking sexually oriented entertainment have traveled to a neighborhood of warehouses and industrial plants a mile south of the U. Capitol and unknown to most of Washington. Established before the emergence of AIDS, the block of O Street SE is a kind of hour mini-mall of prurience, where some members of the gay community buy X-rated magazines, videos and sexual paraphernalia, watch nude dancing, visit the city's longest-surviving bathhouse or meet other men, at times for sex.

But with the city planning to build a baseball stadium for the Washington Nationals on land that includes the O Street block, just off South Capitol Street, the strip is being pushed to extinction. The owners of the half-dozen establishments, as well as gay activists, want the city to help them relocate.

They're club forced to close because the city is taking over their land. More than a stadium ago, adult entertainment flourished along Ninth and 14th streets NW, which were crowded with bars and bookstores that peddled pornography, steam baths and hustlers. As redevelopment transformed those areas, a new scene was born on O Street, eventually becoming part of gay Washington and now known nationally as one of the only strips gay male dancers perform nude.

Gay activists and the O Street proprietors acknowledge that finding a new location for the strip will be difficult, if not because of zoning restrictions, then because of real estate pressures and resistance from civic groups. That view is not universal. At an April meeting on the strip at Ziegfeld's, which has featured drag shows since the s, Christopher Dyer, a gay activist and an elected advisory neighborhood commissioner in the Logan Circle area, said that he is sympathetic to the clubs' plight but that gays face more pressing issues, such as securing funding for HIV prevention.

D.C.’s gay clubs are losing turf

Council's 13 members. Beginning in the s, clubs catering to gay men and lesbians started moving into the area, in part because of relatively cheap rents. Club Washington, the gay bathhouse, opened in the early s, taking over a former wholesale grocery warehouse. It was followed by two strip clubs, now Heat and Secrets, as well as Ziegfeld's.

In the late s, the Follies movie theater and Glorious Health and Amusement, an arcade and theater, moved into a building that housed a carpet cleaning company. Frank Kameny, 79, a longtime gay activist, said a perception existed that police would ignore gay-oriented businesses if they opened in areas removed from downtown.

At times, the businesses have found themselves in the limelight. Innine patrons died in a fire at the movie theater, then on L Street SE. Twenty years later, a police lieutenant was arrested for attempting to extort patrons. Mostly, though, the businesses have remained in the shadows, near an asphalt plant and sewage pumping station and across from a Metrobus parking garage.

The isolation has not been without inconveniences. Marty Crowetz, 53, a stadium part-owner of Follies and now a club engineer with the U. Department of Veterans Affairs, said that in the early years, gay bought a snowplow because D. On many nights, he said, he and other gay ex-Marines -- GEMs, they called themselves -- patrolled the neighborhood, sometimes with a German shepherd, to ensure patrons' safety.

But, he said, at a time when homosexuality was taboo in many quarters, the street's remoteness also allowed people to visit without fear of being stigmatized. It was my getaway.