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A decade later, it would be renamed the Royal Peacock. The Top Hat Club opens on Auburn Avenue, bringing in major acts like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong. It would be another two years before the state lifted its own ban, but unincorporated DeKalb and many other counties would remain dry for decades, making Atlanta a nightlife hot spot. When stories such as these get told, it is a cause for celebration.Prohibition is repealed-but not in Georgia, which had outlawed liquor since 1908. That vast absence means that chronicles of queer life vanish before there’s a chance to document them at all. People who would have lived to tell glorious tales rapidly died, and the number of survivors continues to shrink. The historical record suffers mightily because of the AIDS epidemic. They would end their days inside, at home or in a hospital. Soon enough, however, Atlanta’s queer citizens, many of whom had proudly marched in verdant Piedmont Park, would deteriorate. Of the newly discovered syndrome, Padgett writes in the final pages that the Centers for Disease Control told gay men not to panic. And then the larger, global horror, the inevitability of which casts a pall over the entire book. At the request of his family, the local papers overlooked his death. In “A Night at the Sweet Gum Head,” Bill Smith dies first, in 1980, overdosing on sleeping pills. Alas, a walk through queer history will, often enough, end in tears.
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It’s a fizzy tale of civil rights, quaaludes and music. The imagery verges, at times, on the comic, as when Padgett describes how Miami baggage handlers once misplaced the two-by-sixes that Rachel used during her performance of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Throughout, the book is shot through with elegant digressions about songs integral to the drag scene, and the story of how disco, with the aid of “Saturday Night Fever,” helped mainstream queer life. Padgett carefully recreates the club’s interior (“First-timers stepped in through a pair of doors with feet stomping in the chairs overhead, surrounded by crowds, challenged by the bar that split the club across the middle, daunted by the golden-oak stage and its bare, unforgiving light”) and summons up visions of celebrity patrons - Burt Reynolds sits in the dressing room, “dark hair tousled in the excitement, mustache brushed askew” - and Greenwell’s fellow performers at “the drag tabernacle of the South.” Satyn DeVille, Hot Chocolate and Lavita Allen in particular are imbued with life. The story of Greenwell and the Sweet Gum Head, one of 10,000 American discos opened by the decade’s midpoint, pulses with energy - more so than the sections on Smith, whose struggles with The Barb can occasionally be repetitive. “It is a new beginning for the gay community.” That, Smith said, was unacceptable, and the recently formed group would help enact change. “The state,” he told a journalist, “will not hire homosexuals.” Neither would schools or the federal government. And it was on those 200 acres in 1971 that - risking their jobs and their families - they held their first Gay Pride march.Īmong those gathered was Bill Smith, a charismatic activist shouldering a white purse and wearing a goatee as he recited opportunities that queer Americans were denied.
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It was at Piedmont, a year after the Stonewall Inn rebellion in 1969, that queer residents assembled to form the Georgia Gay Liberation Front. Less well known was Atlanta’s Piedmont Park. There were famed open-air refuges like Central Park’s Ramble in New York City, Griffith Park in Los Angeles and Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. Kicked out of the church and the home, or evicted from the bars, queer people would congregate outside. Historically, a city’s queer population ended up in the park, by default. A NIGHT AT THE SWEET GUM HEAD Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution By Martin Padgett