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On the Other Side

[whitespace] All but arrow-straight bars and clubs for our neighbors to the south

By Traci Hukill

THE BLUE LAGOON IN SANTA CRUZ suffers from an embarrassment of riches that has led to an unfortunate personality split. Not only is it the only game in town for gay men, but it was, until recently, the only game in town for anyone wanting to dance--to anything besides Loverboy covers, at any rate. For house, hip-hop, disco, funk and '80s, the Blue was it.

So the inevitable sad story began to unfold in the early '90s as straight people started filtering into the bar's smoky interior (for these were the good old days) to get down with their bad selves under the strobe light and maybe spend some quality time staring up at the gay videos playing behind the bar. This left gay men trying to sort out who's who on their own turf--and especially who might punch their lights out.

John Bunch, a seven-year veteran of the bottle side of the Blue's bar and owner of one of the nicest GQ jaw lines this little girl's seen in a while, confirms that while the Blue Lagoon is still a men's bar during the day and early evening, at night it's pretty much straight.

"There's an evolution that takes place," he says. "I've seen it happen lots of places. It's all gay, then people bring their cool straight friends, and then they bring their friends who aren't so cool."

Dante Oliveras, 22, remembers sitting outside the bar when he was a wee little thing of 13 picking teams. "It was nothing but gay people," he recalls with a touch of wistfulness. "Now I can come in here, but I can't pick people up. They give you dirty looks if you're just holding hands with someone."

"My sister is a Budweiser model," the Gap-sweatshirted Cabrillo student goes on, "and all her friends are models. They used to come here and be so happy because they could dance and not be gawked at. But now it's a meat market. They don't come here anymore." Ah, but straight couples are wandering in as we speak, and the few jock boys in the room squirm when they realize they're still on the gay side of the evening's cusp.

As luck would have it, the one other downtown bar with a dance floor and a DJ, Club Dakota, is--a lesbian bar! But Dakota's owner, Jeffrey Stout, has learned a lesson from the Blue Lagoon. "What's happened down the street," Stout surmises, "is women enjoy going dancing there because it isn't a meat market, and then their friends, and the guys go there. On weekends, we probably turn away one in five. No one gets past the front door that probably isn't who we want to have in our bar."

Although Dakota's policy isn't etched in stone and Stout doesn't elaborate on what constitutes an undesirable, it seems fairly clear his bar isn't about to be invaded by penis power. Straight-boy sightings remain uneventful without being commonplace.

Over the hill in San Jose, the sad legacy of Hamburger Mary's, overrun by straight folks and newly incarnated as mostly straight Club Ecco, remains a warning to the few gay dance bars in town. Says Annette Owens of the Savoy in Santa Clara, a women's bar, "We do get a lot of straight women coming in because there's not a lot of ogling. But we haven't had the follow-through with the straight men coming in. We do have them sometimes, and I welcome them, but we want our clientele to feel comfortable. A lot of our patrons look at the establishment as their own."

Dennis Andrews, owner of Silver Fox and the new Foxtail, hopes to pick up Mary's old clientele. He doesn't view it as a problem, but he does say that "we have a lot of straight couples in here, especially for our drag shows." From the sounds of it, he'd be happy with a mixed crowd. "We want a combination club," he says, "like in the old days."

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From the October 19-November 1, 1998 issue of the Metropolitan.

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