Jun 18, 2004  |  By: ADRIAN BRUNE  | COMMENTS     

At face value, the e-mail that appeared last April in the Yahoo in-boxes of a handful of D.C. gay nightlife aficionados seemed innocuous enough. Save the date of April 11, it said, for a new gay night in the District — one for both sexes and all walks of life.

It gave away nothing more, but its instigators had planned it that way — a tactical move to keep their plan of action under the radar screen and adverse forces at bay.

Days before the event, another e-mail arrived, this one listing a time and a location: 9 p.m. at McFadden’s, “a big hetero Foggy Bottom drinking hole just waiting to be rustled up a little.”

The dispatch also detailed the mission, should they choose to accept: The grand queer guerrilla takeover of the unassuming straight bar in the District of Columbia.

And so, armed with their driver’s licenses and $5 for the cover charge, a group of nearly 70 gay men and lesbians turned up at McFadden’s that night to claim it as their own, surprising unsuspecting bouncers and bartenders alike.

Two hours into the capture, they filled both large sides of the club, effectively wresting the drinking establishment from its usual inhabitants and successfully commissioning operation Guerilla Queer Bar, the monthly occupation of a straight bar in the nation’s capital for one night. The organizers say they purposefully misspell the word “guerrilla” — usually used to connote covert military tactics by small rebel groups — in their name.

“We wanted to use the element of surprise, to pass along the information without a whole lot of attention,” said Karl Jones, one of Guerilla Queer Bar’s provocateurs. “We don’t want to be out and about as usual because it is, after all, a takeover.”

Since its inception in early spring, Jones and his friend, Amy Mulry, the two rebels behind Guerilla Queer Bar, have successfully orchestrated two well-attended invasions, most recently seizing the roof deck of Adams Morgan hotspot, the Reef.

But once inside, the mission evolves from one of militancy to one of mingling; that is, unavoidable interaction between gay people and straight people, as well as gay men and lesbians — the occupation’s intent.

Capitol Hill ‘raid’ planned
The next Guerilla Queer Bar takeover takes place on Friday, June 25. But true to strategy, Jones and Mulry won’t release the name of the venue until mid-week, although they have hinted at a Capitol Hill raid. And it could be a very large one, with the Yahoo list serve they use to alert the corps now up to 265 people, and new members joining daily.

The employees and bartenders of McFadden’s say they didn’t willingly cede the bar to the guerillas, nor did they openly acknowledge them, though they knew of the occupation.

“They were just like other paying customers,” said Tamson Sloan, a McFadden’s manager.

And that reaction has not deterred the movement’s leaders.

“Our event is a beautiful comedy of errors. It is so much fun to look out at a sea of people that usually don’t interact, and see them forge relationships in a shared space,” Jones said. “At least once a month I read in the Blade’s ‘Bitch Session’ that gays and lesbians have nothing in common; the same goes for gay and straight people. We’ve proved them wrong.”

“Every time we hold a new one, we have more interest,” Mulry added. “At Reef one of the waitresses even announced to every patron that it’s ‘Queer Night.’”

Though Jones and Mulry would like to claim Guerilla Queer Bar as their own insurgence — or, as they see it, an effort at uniting the two supposedly disparate bodies of gay citizens and straight citizens — they can’t.

Credit for the Washington social experiment goes to Georgetown Law student Boaz Green, who started the bar night a little more than a year ago at Saint Ex, a neighborhood bar near the gay up-and-coming U Street corridor.

In so doing, he revised a similar monthly experiment tried 10 years ago by Jarrett Barrios, now an openly gay state legislator in Massachusetts leading the fight for gay marraige, and Doug Hattaway, who was the spokesperson for Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.

“I had been a little disappointed by the D.C. scene; it felt very homogeneous and segregated in many ways — age, gender, race, etc. I thought GQB would be a good way to shake things up a little,” Green said via e-mail from New York, where he is living for the summer.

“GQB can ...