These aren’t your thirsting-for-fame contestants on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Except for the hostess of Friday and Saturday nights performances, these queens are delightfully up there in years, defying the conventional wisdom that being gay is for only the young. Since it opened in 1987, drag queens have claimed the scene. Its clientele is an eclectic mix: nearby residents in for a drink and to borrow a letter opener to read mail Michael from across the lot, in to let customers know the meat he’s been grilling on a sidewalk barbecue is ready to eat older (much older) gay men young queers looking for their safe space, pulling on a vape pen and the random tourists who come looking for “the other” when visiting a new city. Beer comes in cans and bottles only, or a bartender’s heavy pour into a bourbon and soda or a seven and seven, all at surprisingly cheap prices (a Maker’s Mark on the rocks is only $6.25). The single room is tiny, on a rough block in a rough neighborhood, and drinks don’t really get fancy. Let’s be frank: Aunt Charlie’s is a dive bar in every sense of the phrase. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Collette LeGrande performs during The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. That gayborhood transitioned from here to Polk Street and eventually to the Castro, now the gay heart of The City.
When the oldest continuously operating gay bar, the Gangway closed in January of this year, it left Aunt Charlie’s Lounge with a bittersweet claim to fame: It became the oldest and only gay bar in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood that once was the home to the majority of gay bars in San Francisco. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show LessĪ silhouetted figure, slightly hunched and topped with something akin to a park ranger’s hat, enters out of the bright daylight into the small, cramped space that sits at the eastern edge of The Tenderloin on Turk Street.Ī regular has arrived at Aunt Charlie’s Lounge, bearing a boxed dinner from Popson’s from around the corner on Market Street, a gift for Gabriel, the mesh-tanked bartender who’s managing the joint on a recent late Thursday afternoon. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 6 of6 Olivia Hart puts her rings on before The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 5 of6 (Left) Max Beaverhausen, 21, tips Sheena Rose with a dollar bill during The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 4 of6 Olivia Hart performs during The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif.
Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of6 Max Beaverhausen, 21, (left) cheers during The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. Sarahbeth Maney / Special to the Chronicle Show More Show Less 2 of6 Dan Correa (center) laughs while Collette LeGrande sits on his lap during a performance at The Hot Boxxx Girls Drag Show in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. (Another show was Marissa Leitman’s “There Will Always be Roses in San Francisco” about High Fantasy, a weekly drag nouveau event that ran from 2010-18.1 of6 Olivia Hart (left) and Collette LeGrande talk in front of Aunt Charlie's Lounge in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, Calif. It is so much fun.”īell, a photographer, also has documented the Hot Boxx Girls, the bar’s pioneering drag queens, in an exhibit at the Tenderloin Museum that’s among a recent series. You feel like you’re going into a bar in 1976. Billed as The City’s oldest queer dance party and run by DJ Bus Station John, Bell said, ““It’s old disco music. It’s a place for queer people to go in the Tenderloin, since all the other bars are basically closed,” said Bell, who lives in the neighborhood and has attended Aunt Charlie’s Thursday night jam-packed Tubesteak Connection for 16 years. I’ve had so many people text me and say, ‘I don’t want to live in a world where there isn’t an Aunt Charlie’s,’” said Darwin Bell, a 20-year patron of the bar who admittedly initially was shocked by the overwhelming reply to the call for help.īell is among an eight-member collective working to save the establishment near the corner of Turk and Taylor streets, which opened in 1987 and has been shut since the quarantine began in March. “It really just shows how important this bar is. With nearly $70,000 raised in a crowd-funding effort in just five days, fans and supporters of Aunt Charlie’s Lounge in the Tenderloin are feeling optimistic that the beloved scrappy San Francisco drag bar will survive the COVID-19 pandemic.