“We’d be standing out there in our beards doing drag all night.” and people would still be begging us to do more,” Brown said. Charlie Brown and Lily White (Courtesy photo) That same night, he was offered the third floor at Backstreet and in 1991 Charlie Brown’s Cabaret was born, featuring the best in Atlanta’s drag scene. But the star every night for more than 20 years was drag legend Charlie Brown.Ĭharlie Brown was doing a drag show at Tallulah’s, a lesbian bar in Buckhead, when he got the boot from that club. The disco stars always brought in huge crowds. “And years later I got to meet the Weather Girls when they performed at Backstreet.” “The first song I ever danced to with a guy was ‘It’s Raining Men,’” remembered Grooms. “I loved it because we finally had such a good reputation … it always had been like a family.”īackstreet earned national and international acclaim during these years and attracted some of the hottest acts of the time – Sylvester, Gladys Knight, the Weather Girls. “When we went 24 hours, crowds sorted and the straight people went upstairs,” Vara said. When Backstreet became a private 24-hour club around 1985 or 1986, the club truly took off, Vara said, and on a good weekend, some 6,000 people would pass through the front doors. “It was strictly gay and exclusive in the beginning.” I thought it was just wonderful,” Vara said, who later owned the club with her brother, Henry. Before it became a 24-hour club in the mid-1980s, Backstreet was known for its Sunday T-dances, Vara said. It was an incredible feeling being there.”īackstreet was purchased by Vicki Vara’s father in the mid-1970s and the club was first named Encore. “It was a place where we could be ourselves. “It wasn’t safe anywhere, but it was safe there,” Grooms said.
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The club became a home while the bartenders, the staff, the drag queens, the partiers were their family.įeatured on HBO, the Travel Channel, MTV, VH1 and numerous Atlanta TV shows, Backstreet welcomed everyone and provided that safe haven so many sought. It was something I never experienced before in my life.”Īsk anyone who danced at Backstreet during its heydays in the 1980s and 1990s and you will likely hear similar stories. “I thought I was the only person like me. I broke down on the dance floor,” he said. The expansive 47,000-square-foot building with three levels at the corner of Peachtree Street and 6th Street was alive with hundreds of men dancing together to booming beats under an electric light show and that unforgettable, giant shimmering disco ball. And when Grooms entered the legendary nightspot, he was overwhelmed by what he saw and felt. “That’s what we were called back then,” Grooms, now 56, said of the invitation. One Friday night, a co-worker told the 20-year-old Grooms, “I’m going to take you to a fag club.” It was 1983 and Mitch Grooms had just moved to Atlanta from rural Paris, Tenn., where he found work at a Krystal restaurant on Jimmy Carter Boulevard in Norcross.