If you don't live in Washington, D.C., you probably don't think of it as an especially gay place. But consider for a moment: this is a city whose central landmark is a five-hundred-foot phallus. And isn't American politics itself quite often just an expression of male desire in its rawest form? So it should come as no surprise that our national capital is also a national queer magnet. Student-government presidents arrive here, straight (in both senses) from college in Nebraska, brimful of latent energy, smitten with puppy love for the senators who've just given them internships. They're just a hop and a skip away from full-blown homohood. You'll see them a few months later in one of the gay bars on 17th Street, still wearing neckties at happy hour, working the room like congressional candidates at an Elks banquet.
     This is all well and good if you've got a sweet tooth for corn-fed preppy types, or if your idea of flirtation involves a discussion of Medicare reform. But not long after I moved here, back in the early days of the Clinton Administration, I decided that the gay scene wasn't really for me. The insistent undercurrents of desperate ambition — both sexual and political — weren't what I was looking for on a Saturday night. I preferred the kind of place where you couldn't always tell who wanted what, or who wanted whom.
     Of all places, I'm not sure exactly how I ended up hanging out at the New Vegas Lounge. Its name itself was almost a joke: there was nothing new about it, and nothing Vegas about it either, except for an atmosphere of seediness and squandered talent. It sat adrift on a half-vacant block, across the street from a Baptist thrift shop and a used-car garage. The inside, with its warped tin ceiling and rec-room decor, wasn't much more promising; the owner, a taciturn, middle-aged black man, sat on a stool by the door collecting the cover. But most nights, if you were patient, a band would set up at one end of the room and start belting rhythm-and-blues — old chestnuts by Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett that they played as fervently as if they'd just written them on the spot. Sometime past midnight, the taciturn owner would slip off his sport jacket, take the stage and wail out a ten- or twenty-minute version of "Mustang Sally." He called himself Doctor Blues.
     Always the same formula at the Vegas Lounge, night after night — and yet, somehow, it was also a place where the unexpected seemed to happen. Maybe it was the lethal effect of R&B on a Saturday night libido. Or maybe it was the fact that I felt comfortable there, unlike in the gay bars, where hooking up was a competitive sport, and I often felt like the kid who got picked last for kickball. But somehow at the Vegas Lounge my luck was better.
     First there was the time I went with the cute New Republic intern, a straight boy I'd had my eye on back in college. That was the night he turned out to be not so straight. Thanks, Doctor Blues.
     The bar crowd was always mixed — not so much gay and straight, but black and white, old and young, neighborhood folks sitting alongside frat boys. Most of the time I couldn't manage to drag my gay friends, so I brought my straight ones. One night, I went with my old freshman roommate Dave, who's held on to his taste for college women long after his own graduation. He immediately spotted a tableful of likely prospects sitting up by the front. We had the waitress bring them a round of beers on us, and before long they'd waved us over to sit with them. They turned out to be sophomores from G.W.U., on a night out with their fake IDs. Six girls and a guy. The odds were in Dave's favor, he thought — at least until closing time. The six girls caught cabs back to campus; the guy peeled off and followed me home.
     I even spent one New Year's Eve — was it '95, maybe? — at the Vegas Lounge with Alex and Phil, two straight guys I'd been friends with since grade school. Our twenty-five-dollar cover got us champagne in plastic cups and a cold-cuts buffet at midnight. Everybody danced. No one else there was gay, as far as I could tell, but when the band started playing "Stand By Me," I grabbed Alex for a slow dance. The male-female couple next to us turned to stare, and the guy half peeled himself away from his partner to ask leeringly: "So . . . how long have you two boys been together?" Alex, god bless him — straight as an arrow, already engaged to be married — replied, "Since sixth grade, actually." The guy laughed. He turned out to be gay, actually, and the woman he was with was just a friend. When the Vegas Lounge closed, we all went dancing at a gay cruise bar, and the woman and I kissed on the dance floor, in the lurid glow of the porn movies playing on overhead screens.
     I haven't been back to the Vegas Lounge much lately. The neighborhood is gentrifying; there's an organic-foods supermarket being built where the used-car garage used to be, and rumor has it Starbucks is moving in around the corner. The responsible adult in me (over the past few months, I've become both a thirty year old and a homeowner) is glad to see the area going upscale.
     One night last week, toward the end of a blind date that was all too obviously going nowhere, I insisted we stop by at the Vegas Lounge. It was my first time there in more than a year. Walking over, I told the guy about the music, the dancing, the great crowd. But when we got inside, we were the only customers. Doctor Blues, looking more taciturn than ever, sat at the bar watching a baseball game on TV. My blind date looked around: at Doctor Blues, at the neon beer signs, at the tin ceiling, at the empty bandstand. "Great place," he said sarcastically. Yeah, I thought, if only you knew.

New Vegas Lounge
1415 P Street, Washington
(202)483-3971

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