40-Year Phase

[2 articles]

40-Year Phase

http://www.metroweekly.com/feature/?ak=4932

D.C.'s long-running lesbian bar marks a milestone

by Will O'Bryan
February 25, 2010

When it comes to pivotal years in LGBT history, 1969 -- year of the
late June riots at the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York City --
overshadows its neighbors.

But 1970 deserves some credit, too. All My Children made its debut
Jan. 5. The Boeing 747 started regular service. Diana Ross & The
Supremes gave their farewell concert in Las Vegas. The gay-themed
Boys in the Band opened in movie theaters March 17. [see below] And
less than a month prior to that, Feb. 27, 1970, there was another
opening, Phase 1. Coincidentally, according to the Rainbow History
Project, the first issue of the feminist newspaper off our backs came
out the same day.

"Chris worked here when it was 9 Chains, a leather gay bar," Allen
Carroll says of Chris Jansen, first his lover, later his business
partner. "I worked at Jo-Anna's down the street, a lesbian bar."

As Carroll remembers, he and Jansen, along with a straight woman,
Delores Plant, who owned and lived in the Barracks Row-neighborhood
building at 525 8th St. SE, agreed that it was time for better
tenants than 9 Chains. Carroll points out, for example, that 9 Chains
management was responsible for supplying Plant with her heating oil,
but were sometimes lax in that duty.

"Chris would raise hell about that, because she was cold."

The notion that Carroll and Jansen could replace 9 Chains as tenants,
instead installing a lesbian venue, must have seemed like a good idea
to Plant, as that's exactly what happened. And once Phase 1 opened,
Plant was part of the family.

"I loved her -- she was the sweetest thing," says Carroll. "She'd
come down at the beginning of the night and bring food trays for the
girls who were working."

The name "Phase" was suggested by a friend. Carroll says he tacked on
"1" and just liked it. That was that. And catering to the lesbian
community, well, that was never in question.

"We never even thought about that," he says, adding that Jo-Anna's
was closing, so there was need for another lesbian venue. Beyond
that, he and Jansen, who passed away in 2007, felt comfortable with
the lesbian community. "We wanted to keep it always women. It's been
women from day one."

Above the space occupied by Phase 1 are two apartments, long vacant,
where the building's late owner, Delores Plant and her husband once
lived. There's a bed up there where Carroll might catch a catnap on
occasion, but that's all. Sitting in the bar, hours before opening,
there's a sort of sadness in Carroll's story, the sort of sadness
that's bound to accompany any story that spans decades.

But there's also happiness -- plenty of happiness. It's easy to
imagine the electricity when Carroll and Jansen met, about a year
before opening Phase 1, their cars idling next to each other at an
intersection.

"I was about 28. He was about 23. The stoplight was right out here on
Pennsylvania Avenue. I think I said, 'You want to have a cup of
coffee?'" Carroll recalls with a smile that hints there are likely
more intimate details of that meeting, but he won't be sharing them.
"He told all his friends he'd finally met the man he loved."

While that relationship is part of the story, Phase 1 is really about
a community, or a family, that revolves around a fairly basic bar
that has changed far less than the neighborhood around it.

Angela Lombardi joined that family about five years ago. Moving from
Southern California to attend George Mason University on a soccer
scholarship, she fell into D.C. nightlife. She has no intention of falling out.

''I long to do nothing else," she says, mentioning jobs bartending at
the 9:30 Club and Polly's on U Street NW before coming to Phase 1.
"It's why I wake up in the morning. It's such a luxury to love what you do.''

Although Lombardi generally shied away from the gay scene, a
co-worker's girlfriend eventually coaxed her into the Phase and, from
there, into a job. She hasn't looked back. Instead she's taken Phase
1 forward, designing a contemporary logo, launching a website, and
adding a bit of spice to the Phase 1 flavor.

"We just started doing belly-dance shows. We still do D.C. Kings
shows. We're really trying to encompass all things queer and
entertaining, a little something for everyone," Lombardi says, joking
about bringing the bar into the 21st century with treats like Jell-O
wrestling to go with that website. Still, she knows that there's an
unpretentious quality to Phase 1 that nobody wants to touch, herself included.

"We're old school," she says with pride, excited about the new
addition of Pabst Blue Ribbon "pounders" to the bar menu. "We're
basically a lesbian dive bar. We're not an L Word bar. We've got
great staff, cheap drinks, and crazy, fun shit happening on any given night."

That crazy, fun shit will be the highest order as the Phase 1 crew
celebrates the anniversary this weekend. A special fete running from
Feb. 25 to 27 includes live performances by Hunter Valentine, The
Pushovers & Kaylan Rexer, music from the Phase's decades, drink
specials, and the revival of a bit of the bar's past, the Miss Phase 1 Pageant.

"We're doing it classic-pageant style: eveningwear, talent,
interview," Lombardi says. "It's just going to be a hot mess."

Whether it's Jell-O wrestling, tiaras, or just a night of looking
after the ladies, Senait, the mono-monikered bar back, is thrilled.
Emigrating from Ethiopia in the late 1990s, Senait found Phase 1 in
2002. And while the 41-year-old is marking about seven years as an
employee, she grants that her first forays as a Phase 1 patron
weren't necessarily the sort of party she was looking for -- though
that didn't stop her from making the trek regularly from Manassas, Va.

"It was kind of dark and everyone kept to themselves," she recalls.
"But I just kept coming back, Thursday through Sunday, hanging out
there all the time."

Senait's diligence was rewarded not just with a job, but with a sense
of family. Without any biological family in the area, she underscores
just how important that is to her.

"Once you walk through the door, you're safe," she says. "You're free
to be who you are. Once you walk through that door, you have one
goal: to have fun and make friends."

Senait is also proud to be part of a bar that has been offering that
same feeling to women for generations. And Phase 1's position as a
community pillar isn't lost on any of the staff. Even the owner of
The Hideaway, billing itself as the oldest lesbian bar in the
country, having opened in St. Petersburg, Fla., in the summer of
1969, can appreciate Phase 1's role.

"Any business -- gay or straight, lesbian, transgender -- that can
operate successfully for so long deserves admiration," says Hideway's
Karen Slaugenhaupt. "Keep up the great work. Kudos to them."

After all, it's about community, not competition. And though some
might raise eyebrows at a 40-year-old lesbian bar being owned by a
gay man, Lombardi is certain it's thanks to Carroll that the bar made
it so far.

"It's definitely Allen's baby, his absolute constant for 40 years,"
she says, despite Carroll's owning Zeigfeld's/Secrets, as well as
other bars over the years, including The Other Side. "I wouldn't be
surprised if he's more comfortable at Phase 1 than at his own home.
He's kind of like our dad. Sometimes he's hard on us, but he loves
his staff. He'd do anything for us. We are a family. If it was about
dollar bills to him, the Phase wouldn't be here.

''I can't put into words how important this bar is to me," she
continues. "It's more than a bar -- it's what queer culture has gone
through. It's never faltered from its course. It's held true to being
a lesbian bar. It's never attempted to be something else ­ when it
would have been easier to be something else.''

Carroll doesn't deny that. Indeed, he says, there were times when it
would have been fiscally advisable to shutter Phase 1. He had other
ventures to turn to, and the lean times could go on for years. When
various gay men's bars would tempt his clients with women's nights,
he took a hit. But he and Jansen stuck with Phase 1.

There are some things you just can't quantify in dollars and cents.

"Women go away, but they always come back and they're so glad that
the Phase is still here for them," Carroll says, naming various women
from the Phase's herstory. There was Mary Knowles, a mangager, and
Pam Porter, a bartender. And "Mitzi," whose last name escapes him.

"I have a group of older girls that come every year on a Sunday, a
group from Rehoboth," he says. "They used to come here years ago.
They're in their 50s and 60s. They come in and have a ball, dance --
we play the old music from back then. These old girls have fun. I
could tell a story about each one of them.

"I had a girl come in a few months ago. She said, 'You don't know me,
but my mother used to come here.' It makes you feel like it's always
been here. There have been times when I thought, 'Well, maybe it's
time.' There've been times when it's been bad, believe me. But I just
couldn't let go of it. I hold onto it. I'm that type of person. I
don't like to let go. My women -- they've always been part of my
life. And this is the Phase 1. It never changes. It's my baby."
--

For more information about Phase 1's 40th Anniversary celebration,
call 202-544-6831 or visit phase1dc.com. Patrons with photos from the
bar's history are asked to e-mail copies to phase1dc@gmail.com or
have them scanned by Phase 1 staff, as part of the anniversary.
Further, patrons with stories to share of the bar's history are
invited to arrive early (doors open at 7 p.m.) during the anniversary
celebration to share memories on camera, to be screened at the bar.

--------

The Boys in the Band: Still Offering a Gay Old Time

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-finkle/emthe-boys-in-the-bandem_b_471186.html

David Finkle
Posted: February 23, 2010

Matt Crowley's dark comedy, The Boys in the Band, opened at
Manhattan's Theatre Four on April 14, 1968, little more than a year
before the Stonewall Inn fracas that launched the modern-day
equal-rights movement for homosexual men and women.

It's difficult, of course, to prove a direct connection between the
two events, but it can certainly be said that Crowley's play about
eight voluble gay men--and one declared straight--at a birthday party
represented the Manhattan homosexual at last daring to speak his name
insistently from a stage only 14 months before roaring it in the streets.

Seminal occasions, of course, spur so many resultant developments
that when looked back on, they can tend to seem antiquated, tame
even. So it's possible to attend Jack Cummings III's local revival
(only the second since the 1970 closing of the initial production and
the first since 1996) expecting to encounter a museum piece.

Nothing could be farther from the truth--for several bracing reasons.
The first is that for his Transport Group Cummings has refreshed the
play's theatricality by setting it in an actual Flatiron-area loft at
37 West 26th Street. The pad is furnished with the esthetic appeal
attributed to gay men and their knack for swanky interior design. To
enhance the site-specific nature of his re-visit, Cummings and set
designer Sandra Goldmark (did she shop at the near-by Gracious Home
branch?) arrange the audience in rows throughout the pristine
living-room--with raised bedroom area off to one side.

So while sweater-changing host Michael (Jonathan Hammond) and guests
roam about declaiming Crowley's robust dialogue--never, needless to
say, acknowledging the spectators--there's a ceaseless you-are-there
frisson not unlike the current record-breaking staging downtown of
Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Audience members are simultaneously
present--their reactions easily read--and, presto chango!, completely absent.

The plot, such as it is, has Michael planning to entertain icily
controlled Harold (Jon Levenson) on his 32nd birthday with the help
of swishy Emory (John Wellmann), at-loose-ends Donald (Nick Westrate)
and self-deprecating African-American Bernard (Kevyn Morrow). Any
hope of smooth sailing for this combustible crowd is thrown into a
cocked hat, however, with the arrival of Michael's married and
presumed heterosexual college roommate Alan (Kevin Isola). He enters
during a boisterous line-dance several of the celebrants are doing to
Martha and the Vandellas' 'Heat Wave."

Friction among the revelers--most notably between monogamous Hank
(Graham Rowat) and non-monogamous Larry (Christopher Innvar)--is only
heightened by on-the-wagon Michael's falling off the wagon and
forcing the band-boys to play a nasty truth-telling telephone game.
(Okay, an inebriated protagonist insisting on a game owes more than a
little to Edward Albee's 1962 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?)

Crowley's humor--what's sometimes known as "homosexual humor"--is
probably the second most salient reason for the potent entertainment
value The Boys in the Band still commands. Insults fly around the
surroundings like knives hurled in a carnival attraction, many
reflecting the insular language and mores of what at the time of the
play's debut was still a heavily-closeted sub-culture.

Plays--ground-breaking plays, in particular--go through phases as
they age. The Boys in the Band, written a decade before AIDS struck
the homosexual community (and the rest of the globe), seemed out of
sync with the times when revived in 1996. Then, it was unimaginable
that a group of gay men could congregate without mentioning the
epidemic's devastating attrition rate. Fourteen years on--with AIDS
now accepted as a manageable chronic illness--an entire explosive
evening transpiring without the AIDS specter looming is believable,
never mind that game the men commit to without benefit of cell phones.

There is, though, an aspect of the play that's dated, or, at the
least, dating--thank goodness. At its charged core The Boys in the
Band is about nothing more nor less than internalized homophobia.
Before the final fade-out in the now intermissionless, once two-act
opus, Crowley makes it clear that mass-going Catholic Michael's
turning on his witty brethren--as well as on male escort Cowboy
(Aaron Sharff) introduced as a gift for Harold--originates in his
inability to accept his sexuality wholeheartedly. His late plea that
gay men not hate themselves, along with the line "Show me a happy
homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse," may have been accurate in
1968 (perhaps not), but it certainly no longer obtains across-the-board.

Nevertheless, Cummings guarantees that his actors breathe urgent life
into all of Crowley's slick lines--an especially remarkable
accomplishment considering they're often practically sitting in
ticket-buyers' laps. The direction only flags in one specific, and it
has to do with the staging choice. Because the actors are always
threading through the audience and not always simply in front of it,
focus is occasionally compromised. This means that Michael's descent
from nervous sobriety to vicious drunkenness can seem unacceptably
sudden for some audience members.

Other than that, there's no way to beat this Band.

.