Oct 01, 2004  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO JR.  | COMMENTS     

Veteran D.C. gay activist Frank Kameny said he will ask the city government to approve a special nightclub zone for the gay clubs that would be displaced by a new baseball stadium on the Anacostia waterfront in Southeast Washington.

Major League Baseball officials announced on Wednesday that they will move the Montreal Expos to D.C. next year, returning baseball to the nation’s capital 33 years after the Washington Senators left.

The announcement came one week after city officials unveiled plans for the District government to finance a $400 million stadium for a baseball team on the Southeast waterfront, where rows of warehouses and at least six gay bars and gay adult entertainment clubs are located.

The plan calls for having the Expos play at RFK Stadium beginning next spring while the new stadium is constructed, with the expectation that the new stadium would be ready for use at the start of the 2008 baseball season. If the D.C. Council approves the plans, as expected, a spring 2008 completion date for the new stadium would likely require demolition of existing structures on the site to begin early next year.

Drawings of the new stadium released by the city last week show the O Street strip of gay clubs located on the first base line of the proposed stadium — clearly within the demolition zone.

Kameny, who is credited with founding the D.C. gay rights movement more than 40 years ago, said police harassment of gay bars in the early 1970s forced bar owners to seek out the city’s Southeast warehouse district as a location where authorities would leave them alone.

Over the next 30 years, Kameny said, a gay club “zone” evolved on the unit block of O Street, SE, where adult entertainment establishments catering to gay men as well as gay dance bars and a nightclub featuring drag performances lined the entire north side of the street.

“This is an historic gay block,” he said “We are down there because we were exiled by Police Chief Jerry Wilson in or around 1970.”

Kameny said he will urge the city’s gay organizations to join him in petitioning Mayor Anthony Williams and the D.C. Council to approve legislation waving existing zoning rules to enable the gay clubs on and near O Street to move, together, to a location in another part of the city.

“If the city is now going to throw us out, they have an obligation to allow us to go someplace else,” Kameny said.

Where would SE bars go?
Under current zoning rules, the O Street gay clubs would be barred from relocating within 300 feet from one another in virtually all sections of the city. Zoning rules as well as the city’s law governing establishments licensed to serve liquor would prevent the gay clubs from moving within 600 feet of a school, church, or library, and would prohibit them from having an “adverse impact on religious, educational or governmental facilities in the area.”

Existing laws and regulations also give the city’s advisory neighborhood commissions and neighborhood civic groups authority to “protest” any proposed business licenses within their jurisdiction. Although the city, rather than ANCs and civic groups, makes the final decision on licensing issues, ANCs and civic groups can delay the approval process for business, often requiring business owners to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees to wend their way through the approval process.

Bar owners and promoters have complained that intervention of ANCs and civic groups in the approval process often forces smaller business that lack large investment capital to drop out of the process. The ANCs and civic groups usually oppose any businesses that offer nude performances or sexually oriented merchandize.

Sara Bardin, special assistant to the director of the city’s Office of Zoning, said that although the gay clubs are currently located in an industrial-warehouse zone, the law prevents businesses designated as “sexually oriented” from locating in such a zone, even though there are few, if any, residents in industrial or warehouse sections.

She said some of the clubs could have been “grandfathered” into their current locations while others may be permitted in that zone if a “significant” proportion of [the goods or services they offer] are not classified as sexual in nature.

Under the existing zoning law, Bardin said, ...