Pandemic threatens DC's disappearing LGBTQ bars, pushes out drag queens

Chanel Devereaux used to spend every Sunday morning adorning herself in rhinestone costumes, affixing brightly colored and well trimmed wigs to her head and painting on glamorous makeup. She’d appear before a hungry and tipsy crowd of joyous patrons to enjoy her lip syncing performances and witty comedy at Perry’s drag brunch.

“Cheap drag ain’t good, and good drag ain’t cheap,” said Chanel Devereaux, one of D.C.’s most popular drag queens. She added that getting ready for those performances often required waking up before the sunrise to put together her fiercest look.

Now, whether it’s cheap or not, there’s hardly any drag left.

Mayor Muriel Bowser ordered bars and restaurants to halt indoor service on March 16, 2020. There would be no more drag brunches, drag bingos, drag lip syncs or drag competitions, leaving Devereaux and every other queen without work, and putting the LGBTQ venues that hosted these events in financial danger.

Not long after the Mayor’s order, Ziegfeld’s, which had been a staple of LGBTQ nightlife for 40 years, announced it would be permanently closing on May 1. It was the third LGBTQ venue to close in three years. Then a fourth, DC Eagle, closed on May 8 after economically failing. Only a handful of LGBTQ bars and restaurants remain, including A League of Her Own, Perry’s and Pitcher’s.

“All of my income was cut off. I sew clothes for other entertainers, but if you’re not performing, why would you buy costumes? Thank god for unemployment,” Devereaux said as she chuckled. Despite her 17-year residency in the city, Devereaux has maintained her native Kentucky accent, which makes all of her comments sound jovial, but her laugh in this moment was cynical. “I understand the reasoning behind no live performances. But when you go from having a decent income to having none at all, I didn’t know quite where to go.”

Devereaux said some queens have fled to other states that are more open during the pandemic, looking for any bookings that will help them pay the bills. Some have gone as far as Florida, while others commute to Virginia or Maryland. Devereaux herself has recently been able to book shows in Alexandria and Baltimore.

“What should have happened was former President Trump should have been a big boy and said, ‘Okay, we are going to have a mandatory lockdown,’” Devereaux said. “Had he kept everybody in the house, had he instituted mandatory mask-wearing, we would not be in this particular state. The drag artists would have been okay. … It turned a situation that was sad but bearable into something catastrophically worse. The drag artists got left out of that conversation because we are not looked at as artists. We are looked at as third-rate performers. But whenever you need performers for your charity event, you’re calling every drag queen you know. I think there was a big misstep, but it’s not anything that hasn’t happened before. The LGBTQ community is never consulted in any national decision.”

As businesses fail, there are less spaces where drag queens can book events, making the city’s drag scene more competitive, tense and unreliable. But drag culture has always been competitive. From the 1970s ball scene in New York City, popularized by gay men and lesbian women, to the contemporary competitive reality show “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a drag queen’s look—her wigs, costume, performance, entity—has to outshine some other queen.

Devereaux said she feels excluded from D.C.’s drag scene because she is transgender and because competition is heightened by the lack of available LGBTQ venues.

“Not every place is looking for a performer like me,” Devereaux said. “They hire exclusively male performers. There have been places that only hire boy queens because they wanted to have the illusion of going from ‘dude to woman’ just using makeup and padding and not, like me, using surgical enhancements.”

Ally Spaulding has been performing in drag for four years as Ophelia Diamond, and she recently became the general manager of the city’s sole lesbian bar, A League of Her Own. Spaulding calls herself an AFAB (assigned female at birth) queen: she’s a cisgender woman who performs in “hyperfeminine” drag. Her type of drag isn’t as accepted in the community, either.

“D.C. is very cut-throat when it comes to drag,” Spaulding said. We don’t have as many queer spaces, so to get a booking you have to be very good or you have to know someone. It’s nepotism. … Being an AFAB queen is just not as accepted here, you have to do a lot more work than all the others. There is that gatekeeping aspect, and D.C. just has a heavier gatekeeping aspect than other cities that have more queer spaces.”

Spaulding, like Devereaux and all other queens, had to stop performing drag in March. She also lost her daily job of managing her bar. She moved to the city two years ago to help open A League of Her Own. She talked about the bar as if it’s her family member or best friend. Spaulding said it wasn’t just a loss of income, but it was a “loss of self.”

“I rarely meet a drag queen who thinks it’s just cool to put on makeup. It’s cathartic, there’s so much unsaid therapy in it. This is where I get to be that part of myself that everyone, growing up, told me was wrong,” Spaulding said. “To stop having that cathartic moment is harmful to our mental health. A lot of people don’t realize there is that aspect in performance. It’s saying, ‘Here I am, a part of me that you don’t know or didn’t understand. On stage you celebrate it, you pay me for it. You are dazzled by that part of me I’ve had to hide.’ That’s been a huge blow to our community.”

Just as drag queens have suffered during the pandemic, so have the few remaining LGBTQ venues. Bars and restaurants restricted in-person service until June 22, 2020, when D.C. finally entered Phase 2 of its reopening plan. Unfortunately, in December, bars had to shutter again as the city re-entered Phase 1. Performance venues and nightclubs have remained closed throughout the entire pandemic since the city has never entered Phase 3 of reopening.

“You don’t make money owning a bar,” said David Perruzza, the owner and manager of Pitchers, a gay bar in Adams Morgan that also owns A League of Her Own. “We went from 47 employees to 12. All of us hustle, we bust our butts to make sure we stay afloat. We have one person in the kitchen. … The mayor killed us by closing us at 10 o’clock, and that’s been since December. Two weeks of work is barely one week of pay.”

Before the pandemic, Pitchers hosted Thirsty Thursdays, a weekly drag performance. Perruzza hired different queens every week, from seasoned queens who have performed for years to amateur queens looking to make a name for themselves.

“A lot of drag queens can’t get unemployment because they have to prove they’re independent contractors, essentially, but so many of them just live on tips,” Perruzza said. “Drag shows would totally help save us right now, and there’s a lot of out-of-work queens who could use that too.”

Perry’s Restaurant near Kalorama Park hosted D.C.’s longest running drag brunch every Sunday until March 2020. General manager Justin Shine said those brunches were part of Perry’s mission to make everyone feel welcome. For Shine, those drag brunches were his “church.”

“We’re waiting for it to come back. The District of Columbia has been so conservative, and I get why. However, how they’re re-introducing opening back up is so slow, it’s inconsistent,” Shine said. “You’re putting drag performances at Perry’s in the same category as the Kennedy Center, as the Anthem. I wouldn’t classify us as being the same at all. It’s a staple of that neighborhood, a staple of D.C., a staple of gay and queer culture.”

Spaulding, Shine and Perruzza all acknowledged that there’s a lack of LGBTQ spaces, especially for women of color, Black people and transgender people. Though on its face the city seems liberal, each of these managers noted that conservative policies and mentalities negatively impact the LGBTQ community.

Perruzza said that he’s been to straight-owned bars where he didn’t even feel comfortable holding his husband’s hand.

“Financially, there is a lot of risk in opening a queer space, especially when it is focused on women, nonbinary and transpeople because there isn’t that financial privilege. We are lucky that [Perruzza] was able to open this space, but we are independent. It was his financial support, not the city, that allowed us to make it through COVID,” Spaulding said.

A lack of systemic support from the city isn’t new. Political and economic business interests have often destroyed LGBTQ neighborhoods rather than preserved them. Devereaux has seen these spaces wiped out over her nearly two decades residing here.

“I was angry in the early 2000s. Where the Nationals’ stadium is, is where the gay, redlight district used to be. You could see drag, see strippers. It was bulldozed because they wanted to put a baseball stadium there for more tax revenue. Have you noticed that the stadium hasn't been full but twice since it was built? You literally took out an entire queer space section and got rid of it to make it more palatable for the straight folks,” Devereaux said.

Zigfield’s was in that area before the stadium was built, causing the property to be razed. Then the bar was rebuilt near the Capitol until the pandemic forced it to permanently close.

Despite pandemic challenges that have closed LGBTQ businesses and halted LGBTQ events, drag queens and the owners of the bars where they used to perform are still hopeful. Eventually, bars will reopen, and queens will spend hours painting their faces with make-up, rhinestoning their gowns and fixing wigs atop their heads.

Devereaux said she has a fabulous, new, red gown that she can’t wait to showcase at Perry’s. She’ll be able to strut between tables in stilettos, lip syncing along to a pop hit while happy patrons gratefully flap dollar bills at her. She’ll twirl in her gown as it sparkles, and she’ll be the most expensive looking drag queen in the city.

“Drag performing is going to feel different when we come back. People are still going to be scared. There are going to be a lot of people who will want to go to a drag brunch with queens swinging from the chandeliers and getting granny drunk on mimosas. To get them back a year that they lost, I don’t know if we’ll be able to do that,” Devereaux said, pausing for a rare moment of silence, maybe reverence. “When things open up again, it’s important for people who are queer, who want queer spaces, you have to go out and support them, otherwise they’re going to disappear.”