Mainstream Dream – The Gay 90s Thinks Entertainment Is A Drag

To Meghan Trainor, it’s all about that bass.  To Puff Daddy, it’s all about the Benjamins…but to the Gay 90s Nightclub, it’s all about clothes…and it always has been, more or less.

To the Gay 90s main stage, then:  

The music surges, provided by a handful of thick shadows, laying down a rhythm borrowed from the mouth of the Mississippi River, the bongos and the brass fighting for dominance.  The curtain glistens expectantly as the limelight hits it.  The crowd of gathered beta males make alpha sounds when the performer emerges from the parting curtains, assuming her rightful place, assuming her righteous power, power that the betas willingly, wildly surrender.  Her smoke-like robe willowing her wake, she seems more dress than woman.  That will change, though, and soon.  

She twirls, the robe swirls, falls away, as if of its own volition, revealing an evening gown.  A few whirls later, its bottom half is cast to the same wind that claimed the robe.  The back of the remaining onesie is opened, come hither eyes flashing, and the wind claims one more item and the betas…

…the betas lose their damn minds.  

The Gay 90s backstage, now:

The performer secures hip pads above freshly-shaved legs.  A body shaper cinched around a soon-to-be-purple waist, a deep purple grunt escaping the performer’s made-up mien.  Gaff in place, and what goes into the gaff goes into the gaff, turning a baritone into a mezzo-soprano, or so it feels, all of that gaffness leashed by a custom-made panty.  A skirt falls into strategic place, hiding what the gaff can’t. 

One yard north, medical tape forms an equator of squish, turning pectoral muscles into cleavage, cleavage accentuated by a pair of “chicken cutlets.”  The whole fierce disaster is ensnared within a long-sleeved blouse, designed with wider shoulders, longer torso, and a lower waistline.  Topped by a borrowed head of hair, the whole package hovers six inches above the ground thanks to stilettos designed not to cut.  

The performer moves just behind the curtain.  Her music—ore-recorded, meticulously selected—surges, note by note delivering her to her entrance.  The curtain parts as she steps through, and the audience—men and women and everyone in between…

…they lose their damn minds.  

These two happenings, putting clothes on and taking clothes off for the entertainment of an adoring, nearly-rabid crowd, have one thing in common:  they both happened regularly at the Gay 90s. 

Not unlike a drag queen, the Gay 90s has operated under several identities over its lifetime, beginning as Wrigley’s Restaurant in the 1930s, the Casablanca Victory Bar and Café in 1943, the Shanghai House in 1947, and, finally, in 1948, the Gay 90s Theater Café and Cocktail Lounge.  That final(ish) name was meant to evoke the final decade of the 19th Century, gay’s current meaning looming a few decades in the future.  In fact, the Gay 90s was the perfect opposite of gay-in-the-modern sense, offering vaudeville-flavored entertainment featuring the Gay 90s Girls who stripped to the jazzy rhythms provided by a live band.  This name, this identity persisted through the next two decades.  In the 1970s, perhaps foreshadowing its next iteration, the Gay 90s got groovy by featuring “transsexual” strippers, none of whom were named Frank and hailed from Transylvania.  

This may have been a natural osmosis as the Gay 90s might have absorbed some of the mojo of its newest neighbor, the Happy Hour Bar which had become a happy-in-a-confirmed-bachelor-sort-of-way establishment.  History is unclear on who put his chocolate into his neighbor’s peanut butter, but the two aesthetics—that of the Gay 90s and the Happy Hour Bar–eventually, successfully melded.  The wholesome heterosexual strip shows of the Gay 90s endured for a while, the live band being replaced by recorded disco music in 1972…and, not long after that, the recorded disco music replaced the stripping, as well.  

Around this time, drag balls became popular within Minneapolis hotels, and, as bell bottoms gave way to buttoned down collars, drag shows finally debuted at the Gay 90s.  These earliest shows were comparatively modest affairs, tucked into a corner room, the only illumination being the spotlight because none of the audience members wanted to be seen partaking of this “perverted” entertainment. By the end of the Summer of 1975, the Gay 90s had become a dance club…but the drag shows, still conducted with the stealth of a Freemason initiation, persisted.    

This might have been a response to larger cultural trends which took the otherness out of drag:  Dame Edna became a force of good-natured nature, the offbeat, Divine-centric films of John Waters moved onto the zeitgeist’s radar.  With the sudden, enormous success of Culture Club’s Boy George in the upright early 1980s, performers and fans alike slowly, collectively realized that drag could happen out in the open (with an emphasis on “out”).  

If popular culture needed one last nudge to take drag into the mainstream, that nudge arrived as a flying tackle named RuPaul whose hit single “Supermodel” took anyone willing to take the ride into a performer’s mindset. (“Work it on the runway, work it on down…”)

As the Gay 90s reached the 1990s, it opted to accommodate this shift, performing profound renovations on the inside of the building, turning the guilty drag space of decades earlier to the Gay 90s’ very heart…or soul, perhaps.  The artform has become so popular, in fact, that it’s the main reason today’s Gay 90s is considered “the bachelor and bachelorette party capitol of the world.”  

At the Gay 90s, drag has rounded the cultural bend, a far cry from the dark corner it once occupied…an even farther cry from the bawdy strip shows that took place decades ago.  Drag permeates almost everything that happens at “the Twin Cities’ #1 dance club,” whether is regular events or special events.  Perhaps the most important component is the drag’s central message, summarized thusly: “Gay, straight, Beautiful People, everyone is welcome to join!”  

wwwgay90s.com