Long Live The Queens

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The Show Must Go On

Carl Rizzi (who performs as Mame Dennis) and a community of Washington drag queens struggle to stay in the spotlight after being displaced by Nationals Park.

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Eventually, the Academy settled at Club 55 on K Street SE, a gentlemen's club during the week but home to the Academy every Sunday.

From 1970 until 2006, more than two dozen dance clubs, strip clubs, cabaret theaters, gay movie houses, sex shops, bathhouses and a charity, Food & Friends, which served meals to people with AIDS and other life-threatening diseases, opened and closed in an area that stretched from South Capitol to First streets, and from O to K streets, roughly 1 1/4 miles square. The whole range of the gay community could find itself in those blocks, and those who knew it say there was no place quite like it.

ON A SPRING SUNDAY AFTERNOON, Mame Dennis is in high drag (red nails, black and gold sequined gown, 10-inch hair), save for the flat black shoes her back insists on. It's a loss, because "of course, nothing sets off a dress like a nice pair of high heels," she says.

Since 2006, when Club 55 closed, owners Ron and Deloris Dickson, who had owned gentlemen's clubs in the city since the late 1960s, have struggled with zoning, liquor licensing and location problems, and haven't reopened. "We've tried to get in three places" -- two in Northeast and one on New York Avenue. "It's like we've been black-labeled," says Deloris Dickson. " 'We don't want you,' they'd say, but they don't know me."

The Academy has struggled, too. Months passed with no shows, and members despaired. If you're a man who feels compelled to reinterpret and perform femininity as part of your own identity, time without that outlet can pass slowly and fill with anxiety.

Some Academy members resorted to attending drag shows that had begun to sprout in the suburbs, but most just waited it out. Their appreciation for Broadway show tunes would have been out of place with the younger crowds at the new shows, who clamored for the Fergies and Beyonces. Rizzi worked in his flower garden, where at least he could still find a bit of loveliness among his roses and yellow mums.

Eventually, the Academy moved to the Almas Shriners temple downtown, but after a year, the rent jumped to $1,000 per show. "Us poor drag queens just didn't have that kind of money," says Rizzi. There was more fear that they wouldn't find a place, and months went by without shows. They've been performing at Apex Night Club in Dupont Circle, a long-standing gay club formerly known as Badlands, since February. Every Saturday, Apex hosts its big drag show, which features renowned drag queen Billie Ross, and sometimes Rizzi's drag daughter, Ella Fitzgerald, arguably the most popular queen ever to have worked in Washington. Rizzi hasn't gone to see either perform since the bars in Southeast closed.

"I love Billie Ross," he says, but "I'd feel old and ridiculous" going to Apex on a Saturday. The music features thumping bass lines, and most of the crowd is not much beyond the club's 18-year-old age of admission.

Former Club 55 owners the Dicksons, who are friends of the Academy and dues-paying members of Beekman Place (though they don't perform), sell plates of fried chicken wings and french fries during the Academy programs.

They make it work, Rizzi says, but parking is tricky, the stage is narrow, and there isn't enough room for big ensemble or production numbers. That can seem a small thing, but for people whose self-definition is tied up in weekly performances, stage size matters.

On this Sunday afternoon, Mame is emceeing the Academy's monthly Zodiac Show, where members compete to represent signs of the zodiac, for a crowd of about 60, who paid $10 at the door. They are white, black, a few Latinos, half drag, half not, several lesbians and maybe three straight people (maybe). Mame puts total Academy membership, which had been as much as 200 in the 1980s, at close to 100 now.

The show begins, as the shows always begin, with a salute to the flag and troops. Solemn queens, some wearing tiaras or various Academy medals of honor around their neck, place hands over hearts. Nothing but love for country. "Part of what they are doing is so that we can do what we want to do," Mame says.

The lip-sync performances, full of tremulous arias and fluttery hands, follow. Veronica Blake syncs Helen Reddy's "Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)." Coco McCray channels Heather Headley. "In my mind, I'll always be his lady," she mouths along with the words, leaning dramatically into the upper registers of her notes.

"Yes, girl. That's it. Work it out." The queens murmur their love for the impersonation, their love for lip-syncing, their love for all the showy emotion of the stage. Audience members line up to hand performers dollar bills. Sometimes the tips are larger, but the bills have to spread between the 25 to 30 people who perform each week. Some drop the money into plastic hats at the edges of the stage, bending in a formal curtsy to salute the performers. Parts of the afternoon feature traditions and nuances that it would be hard for straight audiences to appreciate. But the point of gay spaces is that they don't have to.

By 5:50, the third act begins. The show is supposed to end by 6, and as Dixie Carter explains the theme, Mame Dennis hurries her along.

Apex staff "are complaining that we've been here too long," Mame says loudly from the sidelines. It's her job to keep things going.

"Okay, we'll speed it along," says Dixie, annoyed.

"It never made a difference if we ran over in Southeast," Mame mutters. That was when they had large dressing rooms and their very own home base. But she doesn't dwell on it.

If you're a gay man of a certain age, you are probably already achingly familiar with loss.

AFTER RIZZI'S FATHER DIED, his mother moved in with him. Rizzi had to tell her he was gay. It was 1983, and she said she knew about gay people, because they were on all her soap operas. Rizzi also had to tell her he dressed in women's clothes. He thinks that bothered her at first. Once again, Rizzi compartmentalized, even in his own house. He kept his gowns and awards upstairs, and although his mother attended a number of events with him, he "tried not to rub her face in it." She lived with him until her death in 2000.

At his Arlington home, his mother's crochet doilies cover the tables, and his grandmother's needlepoint hangs on the wall. He opens a large box with Academy history tucked inside. The photos are all of Rizzi in high drag. Black-and-whites of Rizzi on the party circuit in the 1960s. Rizzi outside the Postal Service building, platinum hair piled high, leaning over a railing. Rizzi sporting deep cleavage and a long, black cigarette holder.

He flips through photos. He stops at certain pictures, turning them over in his hands. He cries over friends long gone. People he used to run with. Dead of AIDS, dead of cancer, dead from heart attacks and hypertension, from keeping too much in or letting too much out.

"We have memories just like a real person," says Rizzi. "I am a real person." His voice quivers. Deep breath. Enough of that.

Rizzi says he never went to the sex clubs in Southeast (he cites his strict New England upbringing), but he did enjoy watching the dancers at several of the nude dancing clubs. Sexuality was not as big a part of his life as he got older, he says, but at least in Southeast, there was the aura and possibility of sex, and sometimes that was almost enough.

He is still holding out hope that the Dicksons can find a place to reopen Club 55, so that they will again have a permanent home. He faults the gay community for being caught so flat-footed; they took for granted that they'd always have Southeast, he says. "I guess we never in our wildest imagination thought anyone would tear that down because it was such an undesirable area."

The city benefits from having a ballpark, says Rizzi, "and that's all well and good. But [a long-standing gay community] was all torn down and torn apart and scattered, and we had no place to go and no help."

One April day in 2006, when the famed Ziegfeld's on Half Street SE closed, Ella Fitzgerald called Rizzi, crying. Ella had been a performer and show director at the bar's "Ladies of Illusion" extravaganza for decades. And in the fictive kinship world of drag, she is Mame's most storied daughter. "Mother, it's actually over," Rizzi recalls her saying.

"Well, we must go on," Rizzi told her firmly. "You have to use your talents in other ways," find other venues, create other illusions. "Your public expects it, and I expect it."

Ella, a.k.a. Donnell Robinson, 53, who works as a hairdresser, now performs once or twice a month, usually at one of the suburban drag shows, but earns $24,000 less a year as a performer since Ziegfeld's closed.

He'd first performed in drag as Geraldine, a character from the 1970s "Flip Wilson Show," in an eighth grade talent show in Warrenton, Va., where he lived on his grandparents' farm. His mother worked as a domestic in Fairfax, and his grandparents raised him after he'd been abused by a close relative as a young child. Robinson worked around the farm and helped his grandmother wash and iron. His grandparents showered him with affection; he hid from them the fact that at 13, he was molested by a 16-year-old foster child they'd taken in.

As a young teen, he did a drag show for the family in his grandparents' living room -- lip-syncing Diana Ross's "Touch Me in the Morning" and "Wedding Bell Blues," to their applause. "They were like, 'Wow, so this is what he's been doing,' " Robinson says.

After graduating from high school in 1974, he won an amateur night drag contest on Halloween (Halloween again) at the Pier 9 on Half Street SW, a few blocks from where the ballpark now sits.

A couple of months later, he did an amateur night at the Plus One on Eighth Street SE. They asked him back the next night. His grandfather gave him his Montgomery Ward credit card to charge his outfit.

In 1975, he moved to Arlington, where he's lived ever since, and began performing full time. Mame discovered the younger queen performing at Plus One, when Ella went by the name Fanny Brice (Black), to distinguish her from Mame's good friend and Academy member Fanny Brice (White).

Mame became Ella's "mother," and Robinson changed his name to Ella Fitzgerald (he's got a drag son, who doesn't dress up, named F. Scott Fitzgerald), joined the Academy and began winning awards: Mother of the Year, Miss Cherries Jubilee. Later Ella won the big titles, Best Actress and Miss Universe.

Ella loved her drag mother's authority and professionalism. Mame, "was my mentor. I wanted to be like her. She had that very school teacher, mama thing: This is the rule, this is what you'll do, this is what you won't do," says Robinson.

"What is that old thing: If mama isn't happy then no one's happy," Robinson laughs. That's Mame, he says.

In 1982, Robinson went to beauty school. He worked as a hairdresser full time and began performing full time at Ziegfeld's in 1986, where he earned a salary and tips.

He got so busy that he had to leave the Academy in 1991. "I made a good living for the last 10 years," Robinson said. He bought two cars and any number of beaded gowns. Now, in many ways, Robinson feels like he's starting over, personally and professionally.

With the loss of Ziegfeld's, "my whole social life changed," says Robinson. "Dinner, shopping, even investing money back into drag. You have to buy new costumes and have new clothes." And he hasn't bought a new ensemble in two years. "I do shows once or twice a month [now], but that's nothing compared to working every weekend."

At new venues, Robinson has to prove himself all over again, which can be daunting. When you're a middle-age drag queen, it is hard to go from starring in your own show to taking the stage, a few minutes at a time, in somebody else's.

The younger crowds "don't know to appreciate the whole art of the illusion," Robinson says. They like things quick and easy, a little lip-syncing and an up-tempo song, and don't always respect all the careful layering it takes to go from the man you were born as to the woman you were born to be. "They have no idea what it takes to present to them."

But it's not just the loss of income and status. Robinson, whose grandparents are now dead, has two older brothers he talks to occasionally (one only at funerals) and a 42-year-old half sister who he says has grown more accepting of him as she's gotten older. But for more than half of his life, his friends from the Southeast bars have been the most important people in the world to him. "That Ziegfeld's, that whole 25 years, that was my family," Robinson says. He still talks to Mame twice a month and calls faithfully every Mother's Day.

Robinson says he's not bitter. "I'm melancholy. Sad. Disgruntled, " he says. He says a lawyer client at the Dupont Circle hair salon where he works told him in early 2001,

" 'Donnell, that whole side of town where you all are working is changing.' He said, 'You guys will be out in five years.' And he was accurate." Part of him feels like maybe the area was targeted because it was gay. "Then part of me knows that with change coming, we were doomed. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later," he says, "because it always does."

WHEN IT WAS CLEAR THAT A NEW STADIUM WOULD BE BUILT IN THE O STREET LOCATION, activists lobbied for zoning exemptions that would allow the half-dozen clubs seized by the city via eminent domain (as well as others that were displaced by the development that sprang up in the wake of the new stadium) to be allowed to move en masse, creating another gay entertainment district in another area of the city.

Owners of the six clubs in the ballpark's footprint, including Ziegfeld's -- located where third base now sits in the new stadium -- were offered compensation, but litigation over the property value is ongoing. The block bounded by K, L, Half and First streets, which included Club 55, was bought by a developer for $55 million in October 2005.

Today none of the 10 gay clubs closed in the wake of stadium development has reopened.

While the stadium deal was being debated, Jim Graham (D-Ward 1), an openly gay D.C. Council member who chaired the committee charged with alcohol oversight, asked city officials to factor the importance of the clubs to the gay community into their decision. After the deal was approved, he tried to help the clubs find new homes.

Last summer, Graham was able to push through an expanded zoning law, which offered owners location options in other parts of the city. But to get it passed, he had to accept amendments limiting the clubs to two per ward, not within 1,200 feet of one another or within 600 feet of a school, church or library. That regulation, expanding the zone district, will expire this fall.

"It looks like one or two [of the Southeast clubs] will survive," Graham says.

On balance, former D.C. mayor Anthony Williams says he thinks the plans worked out well and the clubs were offered good compensation.

He's sympathetic to the plight of those businesses trying to reopen. "In terms of the community, there was no one more dedicated to equal rights regardless of orientation than I was as mayor. But it's very difficult -- I'm just being honest -- to sit [a gay entertainment district] like that in an American city." Consideration was given to the displacement of the gay community, "but you had to weigh that against the benefits of the park.

"And I thought that the benefit of having the ballpark was greater."

AS FAMILIES FLOCKED TO OPENING NIGHT AT THE NEW NATIONALS PARK, there was another family event on the other side of town. Mame Dennis emceed the Beekman Place Family Day Awards. Everyone had been told to wear gold, and the stage area inside the Apex was bathed in a soft, jewel-toned glow.

Mame talked briefly about the ballpark. "We're here, and we're happy to be here, and we're going to continue our functions and everything we need to do, ballpark or no ballpark," she said to loud applause. It was the only thing she knew for sure: Just keep going, and bring all your joy and pain to the stage.

Just after 6 p.m., the audience of about 70 grew still. "If You Believe," the Lena Horne song from "The Wiz" came on, and Mame made her way to the floor holding a jeweled scepter. As she lip-synced, not in such good time to the music anymore, she descended a few stairs and, with a wave of her scepter, anointed the Best Actor and Best Actress for the year, once again.

Then everyone joined hands and made a circle around the dance floor and stage. They sang "Auld Lang Syne" and swayed as Mame moved among them, to say how much she loved them, how glad she was that they were still there after one more year.

Tears flowed, and a large drop appeared in the corner of Mame's eye. Or maybe it was a rhinestone. Perhaps, when you live in drag, they are one and the same.

The music stopped, the house lights came up, and Academy members quickly started folding chairs. At the head table, they wrapped the candles and crystal balls and the jeweled dragon and the scepters, and put them in boxes. A couple of the queens headed outside for a smoke. A few feet away, Mame Dennis sat at her table, resting her tired feet.

Lonnae O'Neal Parker is a Magazine staff writer. She can be reached at oneall@washpost.com. She will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon.