Mar 31, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Employees of the O Street gay nightclub Ziegfeld’s were scheduled to join their customers for a champagne toast this Sunday, April 2, to mark the closing that night of Ziegfeld’s and five other gay entertainment clubs on the same block.

The closings, which the city ordered to make way for a new baseball stadium, represent the end of an era of more than 30 years that included extravaganza-style drag shows, nude male dance performances, towel-clad men in a bathhouse and sauna, and porn stars of all stripes and sizes in person and on the screen and video monitors at an adult gay film theater and a video arcade.

"I know I’m going to cry," said lesbian activist Cheryl Spector, who planned to attend the closing ceremony at Ziegfeld’s.

The owners of Ziegfeld’s and three of the other clubs on O Street, between South Capitol Street and Half Street, say they are looking for a place to move. But they have yet to disclose whether they have found a suitable location and when they plan to reopen.

Spector said she has been a regular at Ziegfeld’s and the club that preceded it in the same building, the Other Side, since 1983.

"It was a life-changing experience for me," Spector said. "It was a place where I saw people like me. It was OK to be myself and to be with these wonderful drag queens."

Tucked away in a warehouse district less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol, the O Street businesses operated out of sight and under the radar screen of most of residents and public officials in the nation’s capital, providing an air of mystery, intrigue and bawdiness to many of those who patronized the clubs, customers of the clubs said this week.

Veteran gay activist Frank Kameny said today’s O Street clubs, and other gay clubs located in the same warehouse area, were forced to move into the area in the early 1970s by then D.C. Policy Chief Jerry Wilson.

Kameny said it was a time when dancing by same-sex couples was considered taboo in the city’s downtown business district and gays still worried about police raids on gay bars.

"He essentially said, ‘Keep out of sight, and we’ll leave you alone,’" said Kameny. "So we moved to the warehouse district in Southeast, and we created our own gay entertainment mecca. And these gay businesses, using creativity and good entrepreneurship, turned a sow’s ear into a silk purse."

Kameny and other gay activists want Mayor Anthony Williams and the D.C. Council to push for changes in the city’s liquor and zoning laws to amend existing rules that prevent the clubs from moving into other warehouse districts in the city.

Where to go?

The law allows them to move into the downtown business district if they obtain a special zoning variance. But club owners said downtown rents are prohibitively high.

Residents of Ward 5, in an emergency meeting in February called by Ward 5 Councilmember and mayoral candidate Vincent Orange, denounced plans by gay businessman Bob Siegel to move one or more of the O Street gay businesses into a warehouse building near Mount Olivet Road and West Virginia Avenue.

"We don’t want a place like that in our neighborhood," a Ward 5 advisory neighborhood commissioner told Siegel.

Gay D.C. Councilmember Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), who serves as chair of a Council committee with jurisdiction over liquor licenses and zoning rules, introduced and later withdrew a bill that would have allowed bars and nightclubs displaced by the new stadium to move into a similar industrial or warehouse zone.

In early March, Graham said he would submit a proposal to the D.C. Zoning Commission seeking to change rules to allow some of the displaced clubs to move into suitable warehouse districts that would not interfere with residential neighborhoods.

The Zoning Commission rather than the Council has sole authority to change zoning rules.

Graham said he has held off introducing the proposed zoning change while he arranged meetings between city officials and the club owners to enable the clubs to find a suitable location.

"I’m pleased to report that these meetings have made important progress," Graham said this week.

Graham said experts on zoning issues advised him to hold off on introducing a proposed zoning change until the clubs find a location they like and the city agrees to the location. At that time, he said, he plans to introduce a proposed zoning change that would ...