He also owned a place in Provincetown called the Crown & Anchor, which was a hotel, gay bar, and cabaret for female impersonators. Back when I was a child, my dad’s clubs were located in Boston’s Combat Zone-basically, it was the red-light district. Our dad, Carmine Vara, ran gay nightclubs in Boston and Provincetown. HENRY VARA: Now 63 and retired, Henry lives in Sarasota with his wife, Nancy, and owns a farm. My father and mother came down from Boston first, and Henry and I followed a few years later. My grandfather knew gay clubs were big money. Lights and a bell would go off if the cops showed up. Back in the 1960s, in Boston, our grandfather my dad’s dad, owned the Punch Bowl, one of the most prominent gay bars in Boston. Now 65 and retired, Vicki lives on Lake Lanier. The siblings managed and owned the club from the early ’80s to 2004. VICKI VARA: Backstreet was owned and operated by the Vara family, first by founders Carmine and Janice, then by their children Vicki and Henry. Here, we chronicle Backstreet’s infamous 10,000-plus nights of dancing, drag, drugs, and debauchery, spanning the years from 1975 to 2004-recounted by the people who owned the club, worked there, documented its life span, and, of course, partied inside the legendary Atlanta nightspot. On July 17, 2004, the club closed for good and is now the site of the 36-floor Viewpoint luxury condos, built in 2008. In 2003, after years of battling neighbors and city hall, Atlanta officials declined to renew the club’s 24-hour liquor license, the sole remaining one in the city.
#Redneck gay bar song movie#
In 1981, the space even served as the set for the NBC TV movie For Ladies Only, starring Gregory Harrison and Marc Singer, a peek inside the Velcro-fastened, police-uniformed world of a male strip club. Over the decades, the club was featured in the HBO documentary Dragtime, Comedy Central’s Insomniac, and MTV’s ElimiDate. But as the century drew to a close, Midtown, once a haven for hippies, slowly reinvented itself into a swanky live-work-play district, with million-dollar penthouses near the club’s main entrance-condos owned by working professionals who wanted to sleep at night. Or, as the Backstreet staff T-shirts more succinctly stated, “Always Open & Pouring.”Īs other nightclubs, including the Limelight, Club Anytime, the Velvet Room, Club Kaya, Esso, and Club Rio, opened and shuttered around them, Backstreet remained party central for nocturnal revelers for nearly 30 years. But by the time it closed in July 2004, Backstreet had become a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week playground for the entire city. In the beginning, the massive, three-level, 10,000-square-foot space (it had housed Lang’s Interiors in the 1950s), catered almost exclusively to the city’s burgeoning white gay male population. In 1975, at the dawn of disco, Backstreet officially opened for business at 845 Peachtree Street in the heart of Midtown. It was the Studio 54 of the South even before the infamous New York club opened its doors in 1977 and, miraculously, it endured nearly 10 times as long. Photograph by Russ Bowen-Youngblood/ Eclipse & DAVID Magazine