If we get rid of this, we have a straitjacketed culture." We're not all perfectly well-behaved people. Dunbrack said O Street is "part of an adult urban culture.
"Washington, D.C., is one of the few cities where you still see full nudity," he said between sips of vodka and cranberry juice. Roland Dunbrack, 41, a biochemist from Philadelphia, said he looks forward to trips to the District for the chance to spend a night on the strip. On O Street on a recent Saturday night, a crowd filled Secrets, where six nude male dancers gyrated while gay pornography played overhead on more than a half-dozen television screens. Mostly, though, the businesses have remained in the shadows, near an asphalt plant and sewage pumping station and across from a Metrobus parking garage. Twenty years later, a police lieutenant was arrested for attempting to extort patrons.
In 1977, nine patrons died in a fire at the movie theater, then on L Street SE. "It became an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of thing," he said.Īt times, the businesses have found themselves in the limelight. In the late 1970s, the Follies movie theater and Glorious Health and Amusement, an arcade and theater, moved into a building that housed a carpet cleaning company.įrank 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. It was followed by two strip clubs, now Heat and Secrets, as well as Ziegfeld's. Club Washington, the gay bathhouse, opened in the early 1970s, taking over a former wholesale grocery warehouse. Council's 13 members.īeginning in the 1970s, clubs catering to gay men and lesbians started moving into the area, in part because of relatively cheap rents. "I have trouble expending a lot of political will on this," he told a crowd that included seven of the D.C. At an April meeting on the strip at Ziegfeld's, which has featured drag shows since the 1980s, 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.
"But I don't think we should allow the bluenoses and the busybodies and the not-in-my-back-yarders to win without a fight." "I'm aware of the political tone of the city and the amount of opposition there is to these places," said Richard Rosendall of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance. 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. "It was our own piece of Washington," said Larry Stansbury, executive director of Brother, Help Thyself Inc., a gay charity that supplies condoms to several of the businesses. 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 where male dancers perform nude. More than a generation ago, adult entertainment flourished along Ninth and 14th streets NW, which were crowded with bars and bookstores that peddled pornography, steam baths and hustlers. They're being forced to close because the city is taking over their land." "They're not closing because no one is going there. "These are legitimate, legal businesses, and in one of the capital cities in the world, it would be outrageous if we couldn't find a place for them to open once they're forced to close in their current locations," said Peter Rosenstein of the Mayor's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Executive Advisory Committee. The owners of the half-dozen establishments, as well as gay activists, want the city to help them relocate. officials have notified property owners that the city will make offers for their parcels, possibly by next month, and that it intends to force out those who don't move by year's end. Established before the emergence of AIDS, the block of O Street SE is a kind of 24-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.īut 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. Capitol and unknown to most of Washington.
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.S.