Jun 20, 2003  |  By: BRYAN ANDERTON  | COMMENTS     

Mark Lee knows all about throwing a good party. After all, he’s been doing it for most of his life.

“I was once asked how I got into the event productions business,” says Lee, the owner of ATLAS Events. “I always tell people that I threw my first event at the age of 6, when I organized a neighborhood carnival in my childhood neighborhood. That was a lot of fun. Everyone in the neighborhood came.”

Lee’s events are grander in scope now. He has been an event promoter in Washington for 16 years, and his popular Lizard Lounge party, held every Sunday night at the 1223 Club, just celebrated its fifth anniversary this past Sunday. But there’s more to Lee than event promotion: for the last few years, he’s also become heavily involved in defending D.C. nightlife interests.

Actually, it was political activism that brought Lee to D.C. in the first place. The Indianapolis native moved to Washington to work for the Community for Creative Non-Violence, a local homeless shelter. But a birthday party changed his direction in life.

In 1987, Lee threw a birthday party for a friend at Dakota, a now-defunct bar in Adams Morgan. He describes it as “a big, big success,” and the club asked him to launch a regular Sunday night gay dance party.

Lee worked at the club until it was sold, eventually also introducing a Wednesday night gay event called Ozone.

He founded ATLAS Events in 1990, and has been presenting well-attended parties ever since. Lee has also helped produce events with the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA), as well as the Lesbian & Gay Freedom Festival, now known as Capital Pride.

He launched Lizard Lounge in June 1998. Five years later, the Sunday night party is still going strong. But like a Grammy Award winner, Lee says he couldn’t have done it alone.

“Everyone likes to go to a party,” he says. “And I very much appreciate the fact that I have had the opportunity to throw parties on an ongoing basis, and that the response from the community has allowed me to do something that I have a great amount of fun and enjoyment doing.”

trong>Fighting for nightlife
But there are forces out there trying to quash nightlife, both here and nationally, Lee says. And he’s not about to go down without a fight.

Lee was one of the most vocal opponents of the Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act, which sought to hold club owners and event promoters criminally liable for “knowingly” allowing drug use.

“He definitely has been an outspoken critic of the RAVE Act, and has done a lot more work than a lot of promoters have,” says Bill Piper, associate director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, another vocal opponent of the RAVE Act.

“My experience has been that a lot of promoters have either been too afraid or didn’t want to spend the money … Mark has been fighting it ever since [it was introduced].”

Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.) introduced the bill last year; it passed in April with a different title but the same agenda. It was included as part of the “Amber Alert” bill, a child safety law that had widespread bipartisan support.

Lee says the law will be used to shut down parties and infringe upon free speech. To that end, he points to a May 30 incident at the Eagle Lodge in Billings, Mont., in which a Drug Enforcement Administration agent told the lodge’s managers they could be fined $250,000 if anyone smoked marijuana during a planned benefit to raise money for a campaign to change the state’s medical marijuana law. The lodge ultimately decided to cancel the event.

“It raises serious concerns about the implications of the bill for a wide range of public, social and political organizations and groups around the country,” Lee says.

He is also concerned with many attempts locally to inhibit D.C.’s nightlife, which he sees as counterproductive to the city’s desire to bring in more residents.

“We all have to continue to address these issues, because in fact these issues have a very big impact on the quality of life in Washington,” Lee says.

For the foreseeable future, he is going to keep doing what he ...