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“We would jump off the balcony onto the speakers, and off the speakers into splits. “The visibility was nice,” says Jones. “It was the club we all wanted to go to, and we never could get into.”

For those who could get in, the dancing was, by all accounts, spectacular. Carding, in which bars targeted people of color by requiring them to show multiple forms of ID, was all too common at predominantly White spaces.

Today, nude dancing is permitted, as long as it’s on a stage and “at least 3 feet away from the nearest customer.” Back then, gay strip joints like La Cage—which later became Heat—as well as Follies, Wet, and Secrets, were filled with “completely naked, completely hot guys” who would get well within three feet of tipping customers, Seymour says.

“It felt like belonging,” says Seymour, who worked as a stripper for a few years in college (detailed in his memoir, All I Could Bare).

“There were thousands of people. Nothing pisses me off more when gays, who know nothing about the leather community, invade a leather bar with a leather wrist band and then complain about the establishment being sub par. “Having it there while the Lambda Rising bookstore was still around gave this feeling of ‘gay establishment’ that I appreciated.”

He remembers the bar’s diversity when it came to race if not gender.

The bar, for Prince, “was a safe space, before we defined places as such.”

Pendarvis concurs: “The Brass Rail was like home for me. The last I came to do so was about a month ago. Though the bar saw its share of violence (“every weekend when we went there somebody automatically got stabbed or cut,” Budd recalls), she says, “It was the place to be.”

A popular cruising spot, Budd remembers the long bar running down one side of the narrow room where patrons, often trans women, would perch.

“That was the thing,” she says. The ClubHouse started with 400 members. Lots of special events.

Boo cline

Because i sall tgem on the inernit

Christopher Garrett

Its my new home yall. “Everybody showed up there,” she says. Right: Today, the space has been converted into a vet office; Credit: Darrow Montgomery

Sometimes, Prince, 68,would party so late at the ClubHouse that by the time he left, he would see people making their way to church.

According to the Washington Blade, Club Madame was meant to be “a cabaret style nightspot offering shows catering toward the lesbian community.”

In ’78, owner BB Gatch rebranded the club as Bachelor’s Mill, which the Rainbow History Project says brought in mostly men.

“People would get naked at Tracks, no problem. Ask any member of the LGBTQIA community to tell you a story about one and they’ll regale you with memories. As Little Gay Pub’s co-owner Dito Sevilla sums up, “Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t have community centers or churches. Now in her mid-60s, Budd currently works at HIPS, but her activism dates back to the 1990s when she began educating the LGBTQIA community about HIV/AIDS.

Before she was an activist, though, she was a young teen who frequented the bar at 14th and Chapin streets NW, where she says many of the city’s transgender residents were regulars.

She remembers an eclectic, racially diverse crowd, thumping house music, and lots of attractive women. It had the feel an eagle should have: dark, seedy, friendly, welcoming. “It implicitly sent the message that there was nothing wrong with looking at other guys .… There was nothing wrong with being queer, because here I was in a room full of other guys doing the exact same thing.”

When he says naked, he means naked.

Thanks for keeping the

Christian Hall

Ive been to the Eagle for Distrkt C and let me tell you, it was an experience.... They played host for political events and fundraisers, and helped raise money to fight AIDS and fund gender-affirming care.