This is how- and more importantly why- Queen! was created.

This is the story of how- and more importantly why- Queen! was created.

In October of 2009 I was hired to be the music director and talent buyer for the Chicago institution, Smartbar.  I was absolutely elated, it was a dream come true.  I went to the club the Friday after my hiring and one of my favorite bartenders was at the bar.  They saw me and immediately reached for the bottle of Jameson.  Filled a rocks glass to the brim (no ice).  They stormed over to me, slammed it down on the bar and spat out, “FIX IT.” That was all.

I had been hornswoggled.  It was a goddamned bloodbath.  Patronage was down to double digits on weekends at times.  Multiple booking agencies had stopped working with us.  Residents were getting little to no support.  Out-of-town guests were being told to take a cab.  Touring artists who had played there regularly for years were going to other clubs around the city.  There were no all-building events happening.  Employees, management, DJs and patrons alike were frustrated.  I arrogantly accepted the shot and the challenge.

One of the first things that I, A GAY, noticed immediately was how heteronormative the clientele had become.  It was also very male-focused and misogynistic.  I remember one of my first nights there, someone had downloaded pictures of a Playboy spread that a visiting international DJ had done a decade earlier to hold up in front of her face as she was DJing.  Back then you had to work to get even one pic onto your phone, much less a whole ass photo spread.  I was mortified.  Security was alerted.  But I digress.  

I always felt a bit out of place at the start, like I was the only homo.  That wasn’t entirely true- there were some super rad lesbians on staff but oddly no out gay men that I was aware of, not even as regular customers except for the one token butch fagguette, Jack (not his real name).  It was all very masculine.  My gay friends shared similar experiences of either feeling unsafe/unwelcome there, or they hadn’t even gone because “it was a straight club”. 

So, I made some efforts.  I tried to book all the queer DJs I could- people like Teri and Val, Jordan Bradley (who DJs now as EXTRN and brought in more cover paying gays than anyone at the time), icons like Peaches and the Ostgut roster among others.  I cast out a *very* wide net in order to not only build Smartbar’s patronage back up, but to diversify the crowd as much as possible.  We also launched the precursor and stepping stone to Queen, Dollar Disco, which was started specifically to bring in the North Halsted crowd, industry folk, and hipsters ($2 PBR’s!).  Michael Serafini was a resident along with my at-the-time assistant, Kyle Woods who helmed the Sunday event.

Launching a gay night at the club was something that I had had in the back of my mind for a while, but I knew it would never get off the ground in the environment that I had inherited. Eventually, after a few years of gently working up to it, Kyle’s departure gave me the chance to go full Priscilla.  

I asked Michael if he would like to stay on and be the head resident at a new weekly gay night that I was thinking of replacing Dollar Disco with.  I’m not sure I would have even tried it without him, as he was an established pillar of the House community through Gramaphone and I was determined to keep it music-focused, true to Chicago and all the way homo.  He was one of the few people to me at the time that checked all the boxes.  Somehow Byrd Bardot’s name got brought into the mix and we all agreed to meet.  On a Wednesday in February of 2012, I took Byrd and Michael out to lunch at Nookies Tree on North Halsted (on the company card of course) and we chatted about the possibility. 

We lamented about how more and more of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ events had been taken over and watered down by the straights. How Halsted had gone completely Top 40 (although I think the first few Men’s Rooms may have been happening at Wang’s by then). About the need for new underground music forward events in Chicago that catered specifically to the mo’s. And so on. Michael was into it from the start. Byrd refused to do it unless we paid each host $25 more per week than we were offering.  

At the end of the day we came to an agreement.  Michael would book the DJs (he’s the one who brought on Derrick and Garrett, who was only 19 at the time), Byrd would wrangle the hosts and Smartbar would take care of everything else including promotions and guaranteeing everyone a regular rate (which was admittedly not very much).  I remember throwing out a bunch of potential names at the table, one of which was the current namesake.  It was Byrd who ultimately said “well, what about Queen?”  After that lunch we had our Sunday night.  It launched just over two months later.  Cover was 7 bucks, $5 before midnight.

The first year and a half wasn’t easy.  Pressure came from all sides of management to make the night a financial success.  While Michael, Byrd and the rest of the hosts were getting it from the night manager, I was going into the Monday morning meeting and getting it from the club’s owner, who would take every opportunity he could to remind us that he “was investing a lot of money into this thing”.  Still, we did everything we could to build the night, from passing out industry comp cards at every salon in the city to going to the Clark St. and Halsted establishments to get their staff to stop by after they closed, flyering and postering every club and Queer space in the city and taking out ads in all the gay rags.  Those first few years were truly a labor of love. The first Queen Pride float was in 2013.  It was a rented trolley that Marea found after days of scouring because the flatbed I had reserved months prior suddenly became “unavailable”.

I cannot stress enough how important Marea, the rest of the early Queen team (including Luis Lazu and especially Dan Polyak) and the bar staff were to promoting, shaping Queen’s image and making that night a success.  While I may have planted the seed, it was they who watered and nourished it, and it was just as much their night as it was Michael’s or Derrick’s or mine or anyone else’s.  I did everything I could while attempting to keep the Smartbar train on the tracks the other 4 nights of the week.  When I dropped the ball, they picked it up and ran it to the end zone.  Still, out of everything I was able to do at that place, I truly looked at that Sunday as my baby, my proudest accomplishment. 

While crowds were hit-or-miss for the first year or two, eventually things started tipping and Queen started to get the numbers that you see now.  That was after I left though.  It was the work of the staff, hosts and the synergy of Derrick, Garrett and Michael as resident DJs that made it what it was and is today.  Queen was also the final official residency that Frankie would have before he passed.  While he was an original SB resident in the 80’s, he hadn’t been playing there exclusively as of late.  It was the biggest honor of my whole tenure to be able to bring him back to that club as an official and exclusive resident for those last few years of his life.

I wanted to put this in writing not just for the sake of posterity, but much more importantly to hopefully inspire people to think about intention in creating safe spaces for marginalized communities, and what it takes to create and curate these spaces within the more oppressive frameworks of American hyper-capitalism where community is commodity, and clubs which serve/are run by the status quo and lack the awareness to change.  Queen was never something that happened by chance, nor did it suddenly come about because anyone “approached me to propose” it.  A lot of effort went into making that night happen, for years before it actually materialized.  In the end it was simply a part of my larger answer to the puzzle of the club that I had inherited.

As one final thought, I don’t believe any marginalized community has a reason to trust anything presented to them by their oppressors. That’s why I think it’s worthy to note that a member of the Queer community was at the helm of that club at the time of Queen’s creation.  It really was a by-us-for-us event.  We carved out a tiny corner for Homos Who Love House in the middle of the straightest, sportiest sports neighborhood in the entire city of Chicago.  We gayed that shit up good.  And I will always, always be proud of that.

(Sidenote- It came to my attention quite a few years ago that someone started a ridiculous rumor that I wanted to hire straight bartenders for this night, which is laughably untrue. If anyone knows where that rumor came from, please tell them they got some very, very bad intel lol)

<3