Long Live The Queens
One of the Washington drag scene's most pivotal figures illuminates a long-secret world

By Lonnae O'Neal Parker
Sunday, August 10, 2008

ON THAT LAST DRAG SUNDAY IN SOUTHEAST, Mame Dennis wanted the show to be something everyone would remember.

For more than a dozen years, Mame had presided over the weekly performances at Club 55, as president of the gay theatrical organization, the Academy of Washington Inc. That alter ego was the most vital half of Carl Rizzi's double life. Then there came the first unfathomable whispers that a new baseball stadium might push them out; that the drag queens could lose their corner of the world. Some in the gay community, which had been in the area more than 30 years, held public meetings and protests.

But not Mame. You can't fight city hall, she thought. The aging drag queen had come up at a time when you kept your head down, at least until it was time to go onstage. That's where you took all your joy and pain.

The week before that final September 2006 show, "the damn phone didn't stop ringing," Rizzi says. Some Academy members urged him to look for new space, others were clamoring to perform. Mostly they were just panicked: What were they going to do? Where were they going to go? They looked to Rizzi for answers, and he didn't have them. Still, he had to keep it together, write the program and get his own remarks on paper. Handling the Academy's last show at Club 55 became his obsession. Finally, he made a painful decision.

He'd always arrived by 10 a.m. for the 3 p.m. show to get his gown and makeup on, before making sure everything else was in order. But on that day, he didn't need dress and makeup time. He double-checked the details, and the show went on without a hitch. For the final numbers, the reigning Mr. Club 55 performed "Last Night of the World," and Miss Club 55, Destiny B. Childs, performed Dolly Parton's "Go to Hell," dedicating it to the future stadium. Throughout the night, Mame stayed in the background, letting others take center stage. But then it was time for the last goodbyes.

Standing in front of nearly 90 of Mame's heartbroken people, it was Carl Rizzi, not Mame, who read the valedictory. In a powder-blue blazer, a tie and loafers, with his silver-gray hair combed neatly down, in trousers with pleats that strained against his bulk, without a hint of dazzle, he began his final comments:

"We cannot let tonight pass without saying goodbye to this building at 55 K Street," he read. He recounted Academy history: the awards, the shows, the members who had passed away. His voice broke, and all in the room clapped wildly. It was long moments before Rizzi could continue.

He called the club owner to the stage to present a plaque. Then, everyone in the audience and every performer formed a circle and sang "Auld Lang Syne." As they cried, Rizzi walked the room, consoling, urging strength, letting them know how very much they meant to him and how determined he was that this would not be their end.

But there were some who could not see beyond the blazer and loafers. All night, those closest to Rizzi had worried it had all been too much for him. They whispered and speculated, unable to conceive that on one of the most significant nights of his life, the president for life of the Academy of Washington Inc., perhaps the oldest drag organization on the East Coast, which he helped build and hold together, was dressed as a man. He wore no red nails; no high-combed wig; no beaded, jewel-toned gown to sweep the floor, gently forgiving the most defiant parts of Mame's figure; no extreme false lashes to bring the crowd into the cool blue of her eyes. No illusion at all.

"I couldn't [allow] the best part of me to be closed," Rizzi said. He had to say goodbye as Carl, an aging, heavyset man. Because saying goodbye as Mame, who for more than 40 years had been all the light and sparkle in Carl Rizzi's life, would have felt too much like drying up and dying.

A YEAR AND A HALF LATER, RIZZI IS SITTING BEHIND HIS PERFECTLY ARRANGED DESK at a pest control company in Baileys Crossroads, where he's worked as an office manager, twice a week, for a dozen years. He is neat and nondescript in light washed denims, white tennis shoes and a blue button-down shirt. His short, silver hair lies straight and flat. His cerulean blue eyes betray nothing of the excesses of drag. A nearby invoice is stamped past due; there are detailed pictures of insects on the wall; and a few feet away, a large, hairy tarantula is slowing crawling the length of her cage.

Rizzi doesn't dress up in drag so much anymore, and he relies on other people to do his hair and makeup when he does. "I'm 67. I can't just get in drag in 10 minutes," he says. At least not beautifully. It's an old-school thing, but to Rizzi, if you aren't in a constant search for loveliness, there is really no point. Rizzi says that a couple of his co-workers in the small office don't know he's gay, let alone that for four decades he's been one of the most storied drag queens in Washington. That's fine. He's not trying to upset anyone. He knows how to go along to get along.

Rizzi was raised in Milford, N.H. His mother was 20 years younger than his strict Italian father, who worked as a butcher and wouldn't allow his wife to wear pants. Rizzi says he never saw them kiss. His father didn't show Rizzi affection, either. Rizzi spent his childhood at school, church, Boy Scouts and glee club, and as the constant object of his mother's and grandmother's attention. He had few friends and played with paper dolls, sewing outfits for them to wear. He was creative, and as far back as he can remember, was drawn to the lace and frills of girlhood. As a boy, Rizzi couldn't wait for Halloween. He always knew just what he was going to be.

Each spring, Rizzi's aunt organized the American Legion rummage sale, and he was free to rifle through the leftovers in her attic for his Halloween costume. He'd go through one box, then another, trying on all the dresses, stretching his decision over hours and days into the long weeks of summertime. Once he found the right dress, he would look for "hats, gloves, shoes, purse. Oh, yes, I had to have a purse." It was in those rummage sale boxes that he found his first eye shadow, which he stored in a small box on his dresser.

"It didn't take much for a little kid to fantasize with a little, tiny bit of makeup, and a dress and shoes," Rizzi says. He didn't examine his motives at the time and doesn't remember what he was thinking. "All I know is, it was a release."

No one said anything to him about his yearly transformation. Looking back, some in that small town had to have known he was gay, Rizzi thinks, even if he himself didn't. It was post-World War II America. Many townsmen had traveled and fought in Europe. They understood that the world was much bigger than the things they would speak of.

In high school, when Rizzi discovered he was drawn to his male teachers, he thought he was the only one. He didn't think of sex -- he did not even know that men had sex with men. He just felt happier being around them. After high school, he enlisted in the Navy, crying the first time he was away from home. Early in his training, he took a class where the instructor talked about homosexuality. That's when he realized what he was, that there were others, and that he would be kicked out of the Navy if he didn't bury his secret deep.

The next day, the company commander sent for him. Oh, my God, he knows, thought Rizzi, petrified. He sees it on my face. Instead, the commander sent Rizzi to the battalion officer, who needed a typist. Rizzi didn't know it at the time, but the battalion officer was gay. "He never made any overtures," says Rizzi. "He just took me under his wing." It was a caretaking pattern Rizzi was to see repeatedly in the gay community, and one that made a lasting impression. After training, he was assigned to the Pentagon as a mail clerk.

Rizzi was 21 before he had sex, with a former high school art teacher who had kept in touch and invited him to New York. After that, he went back into the closet. He'd left the military and was working as an administrative assistant for the Postal Service when some Navy friends took him to a club called the Hideaway near the FBI building on Ninth and Pennsylvania Avenue NW -- an old gay bar and cruising area. They were all gay, they said, and it was time Carl owned up to the fact that he was, too.

"It was such a relief!" says Rizzi. "Such a validation."

"Have you ever heard the expression flaming queen?" Rizzi asks quietly. "I became a flaming queen. I had kept it inside so long." From then on, they couldn't keep him out of the bars. He was out two or three nights a week, and on Saturdays, when the bars closed at midnight, he and his friends would drive to Baltimore, where the bars closed at 2 in the morning.

He had a good soprano voice, and friends started calling him Auntie Mame, the Rosalind Russell character from the 1958 movie of the same name, who carried a long black cigarette holder and threw lavish Manhattan parties. (Later, when the piano man at his favorite Washington bar would see him, he'd start playing, and Rizzi would sing: "You coax the blues right out of the horn, Mame/You charm the husk right off the corn, Mame.") Drag names are aspirational; they are all about whom you want to internalize and present to the world. "I came out of my shell," says Rizzi. "I was young, I was cute, and I went out and bought a long cigarette holder. I would go out Saturday night, and we thought nothing of putting a little blue eye shadow on and a couple of bangles. I was such a camp." It was 1962. Rizzi was not yet in drag, but he was on his way.

A couple years later, friends took him to a club in North Beach, Md. There were slot machines, and on Sunday afternoons, high above the bar, a drag show with all its beautiful "girls." Rizzi was transfixed. He didn't want to be in the crowd. He wanted to be onstage, in a dress, performing, feeling the love.

His first time in drag was at someone's home, very private. He had gone to Woodward & Lothrop, where he had a charge account. He guessed his size and bought a granny dress. He dared not try it on in the store. He picked up a synthetic wig. At a house with four or five others, he put on his black-and-white checkered dress with the lace collar. The top of his long white gloves met the bottom of his three-quarter length sleeves, and a gold hairpin helped secure his brown wig. His cheeks were rouged; his lips were painted a dark reddish pink; and just a faint bit of his 5 o'clock shadow showed through his foundation. He stuffed baggies with birdseed, for a natural-looking shape, and wore them in a bra. He gazed in the mirror at his transformation. Yes, he thought. Again there was a release, but this time it was so much sweeter. Like becoming the person you'd always longed to be. He didn't think he was pretty, "but I wanted to be," he says.

He found out the only time of year that Washington club owners would allow men to dress in drag was Halloween (called the High Holy Days), so, once again, he started planning his outfit. He heard about a Capitol Hill bridal shop and a woman there who knew the score. She showed him a blue gown. He tried it on in the store, and she told him how good he looked. "I was in heaven." Rizzi says. He put the dress on layaway.

Halloween night, the piano man played, his friends started clapping, and it was Mame Dennis, not Carl Rizzi, who started to sing.

Some men wear women's clothes as part of a sexual fantasy. Rizzi says it's not like that for him. "Oh, my God, no, all bound up in a girdle and pantyhose. It's strictly theatrical." A way to walk through the world and say look at me: I'm beautiful, I'm strong, I'm sexy. I'm somebody.

Power takes many forms. Money is power, but so is cleavage. Each can elicit a strong reaction. It is that reaction to beauty that drag queens covet.

"A lot of boys can be very shy and be nothing, but they can put the dress on, and the wig and the hair, and they can be something. Somebody is going to notice me. I'm not sitting in the background. I'm onstage. I'm getting the applause," says Rizzi. "It's not something I would get as Carl."

All Halloween night, they bar-hopped; then they went to Georgetown for breakfast. Rizzi was triumphant. His back was to the door, so he didn't see the guy who walked up on him suddenly, snatched off his wig and threw it to the floor. Neither Rizzi nor his friends said a word. Rizzi leaned down, picked up his wig and put it back on.

The following Saint Patrick's Day, Rizzi went to a party and met the drag queens who would become among the most important people in his life. There were Phyllis Diller, Lanie Kazan, Patty Duke. One of the most compelling called herself Liz Taylor. In 1961, Taylor had started "The Academy," where gay men who wanted to dress as women, a subculture even frowned upon by the larger gay community, could dress up and socialize at house parties.

Liz was very overpowering, says Rizzi. "Her favorite expression was: 'My dear, you must do this. My dear, you will do that.' "

Everything at Liz's house was formal, Rizzi says. It was all "gowns, gloves, big hair." They dressed up to perform, they dressed up to socialize. Everything revolved around drag, and in the social hierarchy, Liz was at the top. She established behavior and wardrobe protocols, and defiance could get a drag queen ostracized and disinvited to parties. She established "Oscar" awards honoring the most beautiful, the most talented, the most beloved drag queens in her circle -- powerful recognition for people so unseen in their everyday lives, and the closest they'd ever get to the Hollywood ideal. But she closely controlled who would get them. She drank heavily, and drag nights would often end in fights, with Liz snatching the wigs off drag queens who displeased her. "If she looked in the mirror and started talking to herself, started telling herself how beautiful she was, we knew it was time to leave," Rizzi says.

After one party, Rizzi says, a drunken Liz declared that if he wanted an "Oscar," then Rizzi had to arrange for Liz to sleep with his friend Bill. While Rizzi sat in the kitchen crying over his fading hopes for an award, his friends plied Liz with drinks. She passed out, they put her in Bill's bed, and when she woke up, Bill told her, "Liz, last night you gave me the best [sex] I've ever had in my life," Rizzi recalls. "And that's how I got my first Oscar, for Gayest Person," an honor that Rizzi, who always wanted to be the gayest boy at the party, coveted in 1967.

Those early drag days were a whirl. "Patty Duke and Lanie would come to my house to get ready," Rizzi says. "Lanie could sew. We exchanged clothes. One would wear it one week, and one would wear it the other week. Purple feathers one day, pink overlay the next week. All of a sudden, it became this weekly thing."

Mame started performing on stage at the awards shows. Other drag queens would call her to find out what was happening and where everyone was going. She began to organize their social logistics, and Liz asked her to become one of the Academy's executive board members, helping plan events, recruit people and run the organization, which all revolved around dressing in drag.

They held lavish parties -- music and wine, high heels and lipstick -- at various members' homes, rechristened for the occasions: Blair House, Butterfield 8, Camelot, Hollywood House. For the hosts, that was the path to the growing list of titles. Tickets for the big award shows -- Miss Gaye Universe, the Oscars and Miss America, mostly held at the Cairo Hotel, which allowed drag -- were $10, some of which Liz pocketed. "There were token blacks, but Liz would not let them have any awards," Rizzi says.

Later, Mame broke with the Academy over Liz's refusal to give a dozen of Mame's close friends titles. Another drag queen had formed a drag performance organization, the Awards Club of Washington, and persuaded Mame to join her. Anybody who bought a ticket to their awards show could vote. Mame brought dozens of members to the new organization, and they voted her Best Actress.

At the urging of her friend Fanny Brice, the "house mother" of "Henry Street," Mame formed her own "house" -- a group of people banded together under a name and leader -- in 1970, and set it up like a family with drag daughters she could organize and mentor. Her house,

"Beekman Place," was named for the Manhattan apartment where Rosalind Russell's Mame Dennis lived in the movie "Auntie Mame." Washington's Mame prided herself on watching her daughters win awards and grow into the women they wanted to be. They, in turn, rewarded her with fealty and love.

"I definitely turned out to be a leader," Rizzi muses. It was yet another way that Mame transformed Carl. "It was very different from being in the closet and sitting at home." In 1973, Bill Oates, a businessman and Mame's dear friend, helped broker an agreement whereby Mame returned to the Academy as president for life, bringing her entire 40-person house into a newly incorporated, dues-paying, nonprofit entity, the Academy of Washington Inc. Fanny Brice was vice president and brought her Henry Street house as well.

Liz Taylor, who wanted the Academy to grow larger and still considered those who left to be her people, was made chairman of the board, and she and Mame made relative peace. (Liz moved to Florida in the mid-1980s and died a decade later.) Under Mame's leadership, more awards were created, including some for the growing ranks of non-drag Academy members -- gay men who appreciated drag and performed, but who didn't dress up as women themselves. She opened the Academy to blacks and women.

The executive board selected the big title winners. The Academy's most coveted titles, Best Actress and Actor, had to star in a 90-minute theater production with sets, costumes and a full cast of characters, of which the Academy had no shortage. In 1975, Mame won Best Actress. She can still recall her walk to the stage, escorted by her lover, that year's winner of the Academy's Best Actor, who went by the name Bobby Vinton. The audience clapped wildly, and the overture from the Broadway musical "Applause" played on tape.

"What is it Andy Warhol said? Everyone gets 15 minutes of fame?" Mame says. "I've had many, many 15 minutes."

The Academy continued to expand its awards list -- it no longer calls them Oscars since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threatened to sue in 2002 -- and routinely hands out dozens of other acknowledgments during the year: the Cybill Shepherd Multi-Talented Award, for that versatile Academy member who can sew, do hair, put on makeup and perform; Miss Cherries Preserves, for someone who's been dressing in drag 10 years or more; Mother and Father of the Year, for those who have done a great job of mentoring their "children." The awards were usually followed by tears and emotional acceptance speeches. All the validation the rest of the world denied them, the drag queens lavished on themselves.

In his day job, Rizzi had become secretary to the director of the Office of Mail Classification at the Postal Service. He was punctual, didn't gossip, and for years he didn't let friends call him at work. "I knew what I was, but I still had this other world I had to live in, and the two didn't mix." He was convinced his colleagues knew nothing about his other life. He had been so careful. But he was wrong. In 1974, he says, postal inspectors escorted him into a room. Someone had sent them a picture of Rizzi in drag. For hours, they drilled him, Rizzi says. " 'We know you're a homosexual. Who else do you know in the Postal Service that's a homosexual? Tell us!' " Rizzi recalls them yelling at him. "I don't know where I got the courage, but I told them: 'That's a terrible picture. I have better ones at home if you'd like.' " When he returned to the office, his boss demanded to know where he'd been. Rizzi stepped into his office, closed the door and began crying. He told his boss what had happened.

" 'Carl, I know you're gay,' " Rizzi recalls the boss saying. " 'It doesn't affect your work.' " He says his boss called the postal inspectors office, and Rizzi never heard another word about it. He worked there until his 1992 retirement.

In the early 1970s, the Academy moved to a blighted, sparsely populated area in Southeast, where a string of gay clubs had begun opening. The location made for cheap rents, few noise complaints from neighbors and, not incidentally, virtual anonymity. It became the gay community's own corner of Washington.

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.