Blade file photo by Henry Linser
Nellie’s is the most recent gay business to open in the Le Droit Park area of D.C., a neighborhood on its way to becoming a gay entertainment enclave.
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KATHERINE VOLIN
Friday, August 03, 2007
When Doug Schantz opened Nellie’s, a sports bar at 9th and U streets, N.W., in July, he said he was interested in attracting straight as well as gay customers. Little did he know he would soon be investing in high chairs.
“Dinner starts at five and from five to eight, it’s very neighborhood-friendly with lots of straight couples with babies,” Schantz says. “Who ever thought I’d have to purchase a high chair?”
The intersection of 9th and U streets., N.W., has seen the arrival of several gay nightlife options in the past few years and last week brought news that the proprietors of Logan Circle gay bar Halo are looking to open a gay dance club in the area.
Local music venues DC9 and 9:30 club hover right around the intersection, as well, and both have hosted gay nights for years — indie-queer night Taint at DC9 and gay dance party Blowoff at 9:30.
New condos in the area have also drawn gay couples, searching for a happening and more affordable area of the city. Mitch O’Brien and his partner, Josh Brekenfeld, recently purchased a condo across the street from 9:30.
“When we picked it, we were looking at two criteria: the actual space itself and the location,” O’Brien says. “We wanted something that was close to everything that we liked, but an up-and-coming area at the same time.”
The diversity of a neighborhood in the gentrification process is appealing, says O’Brien.
“It’s a nice neighborhood because it’s a fusion of the new gay, Little Ethiopia and on the verge of Le Droit Park and Shaw and Howard University,” O’Brien says. “It’s kind of this fusion here of different subcultures in the city which I find fascinating.”
MOST LOCAL GAY nightlife promoters, however, say that the gay-friendliness of the neighborhood, while an added benefit, was periphery to their decision to create nightlife options there.
“We looked at a lot of venues, and we wanted something that was both accessible via public transportation, walking distance from the traditional gayborhood, but was far enough away to be a destination,” says Karl Jones, one of the co-creators of Taint.
Ed Bailey, the nightlife entrepreneur behind Halo and the now-closed Velvet Nation, says that during the quest for a location for a new gay nightclub, a gay-friendly or gays populated neighborhood was a plus but not a requirement.
“It was just an added bonus that it was in clearly a neighborhood that is right on the brink of becoming kind of what Logan Circle has become,” says Bailey, “In the sense that it’s a highly gay populated, residential neighborhood with a lot of new and interesting start-up businesses.”
Bailey adds that his business plans have been supported by local neighborhood groups. The area’s Advisory Neighborhood Council members did not return calls by press time.
Three and a half years ago, when Taint began, the area was different than it is now. Walking to the first Taint event, Jones says he was offered both drugs and sex by people on the street.
“I don’t think we ever encountered too much hostility,” Jones says about the gay-friendliness of the neighborhood in 2004. “I think the hostility wasn’t so much about queerness as about whiteness or privilege coming into a neighborhood that’s been struggling for so long. I have noticed a significant decline in the three and a half years we’ve been doing Taint in people who’ve been milling about asking for money. I think a lot of that’s been related to the gentrification and the moving east.”
Some see the concept of a “gay ghetto” as fading.
“I’m not sure that there are anymore strictly gay neighborhoods, but I don’t know that there were any strictly gay neighborhoods to begin with,” Bailey says. “I think gay people are willing to kind of go to the fringes at first and gentrify areas, and people catch up. A good mixture is better.”
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