“After we closed up and cleaned up, everyone headed there. “No matter where you were - a concert, a restaurant opening, wherever - you would end up there,” says Atlanta publicist Kim Lichtenstein, who worked in the 1990s as a Tongue & Groove waitress. Employees of other bars and restaurants would close up and congregate at Backstreet for a nightcap. Married couples would bring out-of-town guests to the cabaret. In recent years, as the city’s 24-hour liquor licenses dried up, Backstreet became an early morning destination for everybody, not just gays and lesbians. The cabaret is continuing next door at the Armory. “She sat up front and I walked up to her and said, ’, if you’re really Cathy Rigby, why don’t you do a back flip for us?’ That woman did a back flip out of her chair and onto the stage!” “One night, Cathy Rigby came in to see the show while she was doing a musical at the Fox,” remembered Brown, laughing. It was a terrible time.”īackstreet got a regular boost Thursdays through Sundays in 1990, when veteran drag performer Charlie Brown moved his show to the upstairs space. And we would hold their hands and cry right along with them. Parents of employees who had passed away would come in and just cry. “It was the scariest time I’ve ever seen,” co-owner Henry Vara recalled. But Backstreet remained, while gay bars like the Texas Drilling Co., 1888, Crazy Ray'z, the Pharr Library, the Gallus Lounge, Illusions and Scruples all came and went over the years.Īnd AIDS, of course, took its toll, as employees and regulars succumbed to the disease, most shockingly in its early years. The decades-long party at the nightclub periodically died down as new nightspots temporarily lured regulars away. “As a 16- or 17-year-old, it was what you dreamed a gay bar should be - the boys, the sex, the drugs, the scandals, everything.
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“It was something out of the movies,” Villalobos, now 38, recalled. At night, it was business as usual.)Īround that time, Midtown native Jorge Villalobos would sneak into the club as a teenager.
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“Trapper John M.D.” star Gregory Harrison filmed his TV movie about male strippers, “For Ladies Only,” there in 1981. Atlanta native Gladys Knight popped in one night to catch a performance by disco king Sylvester. The club also attracted the celebrity set, with visits by Liza Minnelli, Peter Allen, Paul Lynde, Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Cher. Angelo Solar in the booth, mustached men in polyester shirts and tight jeans packed the floor each night. The area was dotted with past-their-prime houses and was slowly being transformed by gays and lesbians attracted to its affordable real estate. When Backstreet opened, Midtown was a sort of Haight-Ashbury hippie haven.
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It stayed that way even as platform shoes yielded to parachute pants, as free love collided with safe sex, and marijuana gave way to ecstasy. And from 1975 to this year, Backstreet was a constant hub, through changing times for gays and for the city at large.
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and the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight” and Silver Convention’s “Fly Robin Fly.” Nightclubbers were immediately hypnotized by the new nocturnal playground. When Backstreet first flung open its doors in 1975, the cavernous dance floor’s speakers boomed Van McCoy’s “The Hustle,” K.C.
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Unless it wins a death-row pardon from Mayor Shirley Franklin within 90 days, the Peachtree Street landmark will exist only in the memories of the countless people who partied there. The city’s oldest gay bar and one of its few 24/7 spots - which opened when gays were mostly closeted and grew into a regional institution with a national reputation as “always open and pouring” - was shuttered July 17, after years of neighbors’ complaints and fights with City Hall. Now, on the cusp of its 30th anniversary, Backstreet might have poured its last drink. I was afraid that I might have gone with her daddy at some point!” “Let me tell you, honey, I almost fell down behind the bar! I didn’t want to know anything else. “I was waiting on this 21-year-old girl who just matter-of- factly told me, ‘I just love Backstreet - my parents met here,’ ” Brooker recalled with a shudder, his eyebrows shooting skyward. “After nearly 30 years in Midtown, fans of legendary gay bar Backstreet fear the party could be over” (2004)īartenders are used to hearing confessions, but Backstreet’s Jim Brooker was nearly floored by something a customer recently shared.