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[PEGGY LEE, "A LOT OF LIVIN' TO DO"] Oh those guys don't know what they're missing

I've got a lot of living to do

CHRIS ROBERTS: It's showtime at the Gay 90s La Femme Show lounge, where a standing room crowd awaits a parade of female impersonators. Camille Collins is the show's campy emcee. And, in her glittering cocktail dress and 6-inch stilettos, she's a towering figure of exaggerated femininity. A raucous bachelorette party in the front row immediately grabs Collins' attention. In fact, on this Friday night, the audience is distinctly female and Collins wastes no time pointing that out.

SPEAKER 1: Thank goodness there are a lot of noisy females in the house tonight as well.

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

Well, how many homosexuals are here?

[APPLAUSE]

CHRIS ROBERTS: At a drag show, the emcee usually finds an unsuspecting someone to pick on throughout the evening. And in the past, the relatively few straight people in the audience were easy targets. But at the Gay 90s, times have changed. As the drag queens take turns bringing divas to life on stage, women file up to the front with dollar bills in their hands, offering them adoringly to the performers in exchange for a hug and an air kiss.

Kathy from Chaska is a second time visitor to the Gay 90s and is nearly giddy with excitement as she heads for the restroom.

KATHY: It's so much fun. I love to dance, watch the shows. It's so much fun. Everyone here is so fun.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Kathy's friend, Jackie from Lakeville, is also a relative newcomer to the 90s.

JACKIE: It's just interesting watching men dress up like women, and they have better bodies than most women I know. I don't know. It's like I'm jealous of their legs. [INAUDIBLE] have great legs. I was like, god.

KATHY: I know.

CHRIS ROBERTS: And Barb from Minnetonka is the 90s veteran in the group.

BARB: It's kind of funny to bring new people in here. When we first walk in and then we see male strippers right off the bat, it's kind of fun to see our new friends see their facial expressions. It's like, oh yeah, I forgot they were there. [LAUGHS]

CHRIS ROBERTS: While she enjoys the drag shows, Jackie isn't entirely comfortable with the ambiance in the rest of the bar.

JACKIE: I know last time I was here, there was like two men, like, taking off each other's shirts and licking each other. And I wouldn't appreciate that from a heterosexual couple. So yeah, that was kind of weird seeing that.

CHRIS ROBERTS: And a man we'll call Steve, visiting the 90s for a second time with a group of friends, sneers as he gazes around the lounge. There's too much extracurricular activity going on, he says.

STEVE: When I go into a bar, I don't expect to see-- at the [? loo, ?] I don't expect to see heterosexuals groping each other the way we do here. I think they're a little too flamboyant in the way they conduct themselves, and I guess that's why I'm here, just to see a circus. It's unfortunate, but they like-- you know, they're entitled to their way of life. And I guess I just don't think that they need to, you know, be so flamboyant in the way that they express themselves.

SPEAKER 2: It's interesting, though. When you look around, have you noticed that there's a lot of straight people here?

STEVE: Yes, I have. Absolutely. It's purely for its entertainment value. It is the circus. The Ringling Brothers are here 52 weeks out of the year.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Regular gay patrons at the 90s feel in the last six months to a year their nightclub has been invaded by marauding straight people from the suburbs. Larry of Saint Paul, who's been coming to the 90s for eight years, barely recognizes it anymore.

LARRY: I feel like I'm kind of an outsider and what used to be my hometown bar.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Larry says he doesn't feel as safe as he used to. He's had near run-ins with straight men who he says are either guarding their women or just don't like the looks of him. Larry's companion, Marilyn, also laments the 90s changing clientele, but thinks the gay community should have seen it coming.

MARILYN: We asked for it. You know, we wanted them to notice us and acknowledge us, and we're getting that. But this maybe is something that we didn't plan on.

CHRIS ROBERTS: There are all kinds of theories about why a bar like the Gay 90s could undergo such a transformation. For Claude Peck, the chain started occurring two years ago. Peck is a copy editor at the Star Tribune and former editor of the Twin Cities Reader and Q Monthly, an alternative gay publication. The last time Peck visited the 90s on a Saturday night, he figured gay patronage was down to about 15%. Peck says word has gotten out among straight people that your buck has a lot of bang at the Gay 90s.

CLAUDE PECK: They have male dancers, and they have a very elaborate drag show upstairs. They have strong drinks, and they have dancing till 3:00 in the morning. And all of this with no cover charge, which in downtown is getting to be rarer. So I think that just, over time, this has become a destination for bachelorette parties, for couples looking for some kind of a different kick. And, from the perspective of longtime gay patrons, the thing that's annoying about it is that you don't want to feel like you are a tourist attraction.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Q Monthly writer and local gay activist, Ken Darling, has more choice words for the 90s heterosexual weekend crowd.

KEN DARLING: The new patrons, the predominantly straight new patrons at the '90s see it as a freak show. It's a place to go on Saturday night to slum with the fags and then brag about it over the water cooler on Monday at their, you know, mid-level suburban jobs hanging out with Jo and Jenny.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Once a fairly regular customer, Darling now calls the Gay 90s a mega mall of drunken violence, where gay patrons are much more likely to be hurt. The influx of straight customers so changed the atmosphere at the 90s that Russ King left its employ. King used to emcee the drag show upstairs as Miss Richfield, an outrageous suburban housewife.

King, whose day job is communications director at the Minnesota AIDS Project, says, as more straight people came to the shows, the demeanor of the audience changed. He now only performs as Miss Richfield in a theater setting.

RUSS KING: And I don't feel that chasm in the audience. I think people all sit together, they all laugh together, and they all enjoy it. But at the 90s and other places like that, that are so gay identified, I think sometimes people don't integrate. They just come to watch. It's like oil and water. It just does not mix.

CHRIS ROBERTS: There's also no question that heightened exposure of gay culture in the media has helped make the Gay 90s a hotspot for straight people. Think of RuPaul. Ellen, the movie's Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Crying Game, In and Out, Birdcage, and the documentary, Paris is Burning. Again, Ken Darling.

KEN DARLING: Now, suddenly, we've become this item of curiosity, particularly drag queens. We've become this kind of freakish, suddenly accessible, naughty thing to expose oneself to among a group of people that have traditionally never had anything to do with us and never would want to have anything to do with us. Now, suddenly, oh, gosh I wonder what it would be like to hang out at a drag bar? Buffy and Jimmy are asking themselves up in Fridley, and all they have to do is hop in their Camaro, and they're down here in 15 minutes. And there's the gay freak show. And our friend, Mr. Bloom at the Gay 90s is merely capitalizing on it.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The Mr. Bloom Darling refers to is Mike Bloom, owner of the Gay 90s for the last 21 years. Bloom flatly rejects charges that he is selling out gay culture to make a dollar. He characterizes complaints about the changing demographic at the 90s as emanating from a small minority of disgruntled gay activists.

MIKE BLOOM: I believe what we're going through is a growing pain since gay people are finally being accepted into today's society. You know, most people like that. And there is a few people that don't want to be accepted. Something they've worked for their whole life, but now that it's finally here, they really do not want to be accepted by so-called people that don't believe in the same thing they believe in.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Some gay critics of the 90s contend the complex generates more police calls on any given night than any other establishment in downtown Minneapolis. One officer in the Downtown precinct agreed the 90s can be a trouble spot, especially on the weekends, with the size of the place and the mix of people inside. Mike Bloom says, on a weekend night with its three discos and eight bars, the place can accommodate 5,000 people at one time, with an overflow crowd spilling into the parking lot next door. He says that's where problems were occurring.

SPEAKER 3: It was getting kind of bad on the outside of the 90s, but we actually doubled security and doubled the police force outside.

CHRIS ROBERTS: The situation at the 90s is making people ask, if gay patrons don't like what's happening with the clientele, why don't they go somewhere else? According to Ken Darling, that brings up another issue the gay community faces, which is a lack of places to go in the Twin Cities. He says the 90s controls several liquor licenses downtown.

KEN DARLING: And I think that, if the 90s went away, it would frankly be a great entrepreneurial boom of new gay nightlife places downtown that a lot of people would enjoy.

CHRIS ROBERTS: For his part, 90s owner, Mike Bloom, says his bar will always cater to gay people, but he can't control the number of straight customers because it's against the law to check people's sexual orientation at the door. In fact, the Gay 90s is already the subject of two civil lawsuits filed by straight people who feel they were deliberately excluded. Bloom predicts the time is coming when bars will no longer have specific identities.

MIKE BLOOM: Two years from now, there's not going to be such a thing as a gay bar, a black bar, a Jewish bar, a Polish bar. It's going to be everybody's going to mingle together as a society.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Bloom's rosy prediction may sound like pie in the sky to some, but it points out a fundamental dilemma for the gay rights movement in 1997, which is whether or not to assimilate. Ken Darling says there are some who want to work toward a society where gay people can blend into the straight world and celebrate their differences at home. Darling says he's not one of them.

KEN DARLING: I don't think the gay community wants to be fully assimilated into this larger straight culture. I think there are some elements of our culture and definitions of who we are that are richer and stronger if they remain solely part of us and where the stray community is sort of invited in but invited in on our terms.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Claude Peck agrees with Darling, but he tends to look at phenomena like straight people flocking to the Gay 90s as an uglier example of the allure gay culture has always held for people outside it.

CLAUDE PECK: Non-gay is, as far as I'm concerned, can only usurp the trappings, the fashion, the dancing, the music. But they can't be gay just like they can't be Black as they try to imitate Black culture or Black fashion or Black expressions. And I do think that that's an essential difference and a line that will always be drawn.

CHRIS ROBERTS: Meanwhile, Russ King warns that the appearance of a broader acceptance of gay culture in mainstream society doesn't mean acceptance has occurred.

RUSS KING: It ebbs and flows. If you look at even Berlin in the '30s, you know, there was a time when gay culture there was actually fairly well accepted. The clubs, they had drag shows there that were very popular. And then, in very short order, things turned, and indeed the homosexual population began to be the target in just a matter of 10 years. So I don't think we should ever rest and assume that, well, once we get over this hurdle, we're done.

CHRIS ROBERTS: For King, what's happening at the Gay 90s is yet another example of the importance of coming out at home and at work. So when straight people come to a drag show, they see fellow human beings sharing their culture, not acts in a circus. This is Chris Roberts, Minnesota Public Radio.

[MUSIC PLAYING]