San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
CLUB QUARANTINE
Bay Area queens and kings take the party online and wait for the nightlife
On its last night open, the Stud closed early.
It was Friday, March 13, and San Francisco’s oldest queer bar was slow. Three or four people had turned out — five or six, if you counted Jasmine Johnson and one other bartender. They blasted disco music anyway. “We kind of all knew what was coming,” Johnson said, “but were holding out hope that maybe it wasn’t.”
After a while, a few more people showed up, all members of the collective that owns the Stud. “We had a really cute night. But it felt like an endofdays party,” Johnson said.
By midnight, the doors were closed. By Monday, Johnson had lost her shifts at the Stud, El Rio and Pilsner Inn; all three have been homes to segments of San Francisco’s LGBTQ community for 40 years or more. Just last week, the Stud’s owners announced they would close their longtime home on Ninth and Harrison for good — though they plan to search for a new space, a new home to open in, once bars and clubs are alllowed to open.
“It’s been weird not having everybody around and being in nightlife,” she said. “Our community is the nightclub, is nightlife, is being out and around people. Not having any of this feels very lonely.”
The Bay Area’s shutdown, now more than two months in, has affected everybody. But there are differing degrees of disruption, and the queer community has been hit hard in its own unique way. Bartenders and promoters and DJs and drag performers and gogo dancers have all lost their jobs. And the broader community has lost refuge — places to feel free, connect, flirt and make art.
For decades and for many, the night has been home. “Nightlife has been the church for queer community forever,” said John Cartwright, a DJ and bartender.
“It used to be illegal for queer people to gather so we gathered at night,” said Mica Sigourney (a.k.a. Vivvyanne ForeverMORE). “So there’s a really strong history of (nightlife) being important.”
There’s also a strong history of resilience. So, as the community goes online in the short term, it’s also figuring out how to support those in nightlife and the spaces hit hardest, to make sure there’s something to go back to.
***
A recent TurboPageant opened with DJ Adam Kraft playing some glitchedout pop music and pumping his fist in the air against a backdrop of living room windows and strobe lights. Comments poured in.
Adam you better bob and weave werk dj get into it
His Instagram handle ran along the bottom of the screen like a cable news ticker. After 20 minutes or so Nicki Jizz and Florida Man popped up onscreen, their talking heads pasted, inelegantly, onto a still shot of two, unmoving, bodies on the Stud’s stage.
“Hello everybody. Welcome to TurboPageant,” Florida Man said. “Hey Nicki, we’re live. Hey Nicki. Hey Nicki. Hey Nicki. Nicki can you hear me. Hey Nicki. Hey Nicki.”
(This goes on for a while.)
“Hi how’s it going, Nicki?”
“Good, how are you, Florida?”
“I’m doing amazing. It feels like it’s been forever, but it’s only been a week.” “What have you been up to in the last week, Nicki?” “Ummm … I’ve been. What have I done? Well I’ve been working on world peace. I’ve almost got that finished. …”
For the next two hours they hosted an anythinggoes drag show — Zoomstyle quartet singalongs, backyard metalband covers, “Go Your Own Way” by Fleetwood Mac (sung in the style of “Glee”) with a virtual volcanic backdrop.
***
Some weeks ago and thousands of miles away, four friends were drinking and laughing together — online together.
Let’s throw a party. Club Quarantine.
“Someone drunkenly made an Instagram and it started,” said Andrés Sierra. Weeks later their nightly Zoom party draws celebrity performers (Charli XCX was one of the first to perform) and more than 1,000 attendees from around the world. Hundreds more watch the recording.
“The nightlife is the safest place,” Sierra said. “It’s the place where we get to express and be ourselves.” Now this space is online. She and her collaborators (Casey MQ, Brad Allen and Mingus New) have more than 50,000 followers on Instagram. “The only thing that’s missing is that you don’t have actual sweaty bodies around you. But everything else translates perfectly.”
One night someone tattooed “Club Q” on their body. On another somebody did a multicam dance on a strip pole. (They ducttaped one camera to the ceiling.) Drag queens turn looks; people make out. They’ve cheered for nurses who log in on break and for people finally well enough to leave the hospital.
YES QUEEN GO OFF.
And afterward, people go to private Zoom rooms for private activities.
***
Almost as soon as the Bay Area began to shelter in place, drag queens started streaming shows from their bathtubs and beds — wherever they could find space. Green screens sold out on Amazon, so they bought green sheets instead.
“We’re just learning so much about what it means to be a digital performer now,” Nicki Jizz said. “It’s a little bit crazy and weird. … Everyone started doing drag somewhere in their bedroom. A lot of people are bedroom performers and bedroom queens and kings.”
When the bars closed, drag performers, DJs and event promoters were suddenly out of jobs. “It took me a day to realize how much it was going to affect everything,” Nicki Jizz said. “I lost my day job, I lost my night job.”
“I knew immediately I’d be ineligible for things like unemployment or any sort of — if there were grants and subsidies that happened,” Florida Man said. “My initial reaction at the time was I don’t qualify because I never qualify. Those programs are in place for people who aren’t like me.”
The online gigs can be lucrative. When anybody in the world can watch and tip through a cell phone, there’s a potential to make 10 times as much as they might have onstage. But sometimes they don’t make anything at all. “The economy of it is still really erratic,” Florida Man said. “We’re all noticing tips going down the deeper and deeper we get into COVID.”
And even if the internet can offer them a makeshift stage, it’s nothing like the real thing.
“I miss people throwing money at me. Real dollars.” Nicki Jizz said. “I miss money getting thrown at my face so much.”
***
When Lila Thirkield opened the Lexington Club on Jan. 31, 1997, she wasn’t thinking about money. “It was, ‘Hopefully we’ll make money and we’ll still survive.’ But first and foremost I want a lesbian bar.’ ” She rented a tuxedo for opening night and there was a line out the door. The Lex, as it came to be known, closed 18 years later. There was a line out the door then, too. Virgil’s Sea Room, her latest bar, opened with the same intention — but when it closed a few weeks ago, there was no line.
Both bars, she said, “were all about building and creating space” for her community. But queer nightlife has a much broader reach. “We look to each other and other people look to the queer community for fashion, for music, for how to have a good time,” Thirkield said. “Bachelorette parties go to gay bars because we know how to create and have fun creating in a way that I think people really feel.
“That’s for us first. But then I think that seeps out into the rest of the world.”
These are the spaces that are the most vulnerable, too, even in the best of times. Long before the pandemic, San Francisco lost the Lex. And Esta Noche, its last Latin gay bar. And Divas, the only bar in the city for trans women. “The places on the fringes really suffer the most,” Thirkfield said.
These communities don’t disappear, but something real is lost when you don’t have a physical space. Thirkield doesn’t go out as much now, but when she goes to a place like the Stud, she’s reminded of “that overwhelming feeling of this hotbed of community and places where things happen ... it’s just so beautiful and saturated and brilliant — and you can’t achieve that online.”
***
Phillip Hammack could see the dominoes fall before they fell. He remembers waking up a week before the shelterinplace order and worrying about what might come next; his friends worked in queer nightlife. These spaces were formative. “It was really central to learning to love and respect myself as a gay person.” Then the order came. “It really hit me,” he said.
“This is going to be for a while.”
He and others rallied to create the San Francisco Queer Nightlife Fund. They asked for donations and started a new online party — Club QuaranTea — modeled after midday dance parties. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence donated $10,000. Each party highlights a different part of the broader community.
So far, in their first round, the group has raised $160,000 for 176 recipients. The grants range from $500 to $2,750. They’ve already started fundraising for the next round.
“It’s really possible that all of our cherished institutions and culture could really go away,” Hammack said. “That’s why this is so important. We know that the culture and the industry are going to take years to come back from this. We’re in it for the long haul.”
***
Two months after the Stud closed and closed early, Jasmine Johnson tends to her plants. She goes on walks. She just made biscuits and gravy from scratch. She manages an online donation account for El Rio and is about to start one for the Pilsner Inn.
Sigourney (a.k.a. Vivvyanne ForeverMORE) streams a weekly variety show for the bar. Drag performers vamp and bartenders read aloud the Stud’s hate mail. The collective may be without a physical space for the moment, but they sell Tshirts online and their Patreon account includes early access to a new podcast about the Stud’s history.
These are all things they could have done before, Sigourney said, only the coop was spread thin. Now, it’s what they can do to keep the Stud, and what it represents, alive.
“I’m optimistic we’ll be able to hold on,” Johnson said. “Fingers crossed. It might just look different.”