These paired stories dance with each other, even though they intersect only briefly - inside the world of the Sweet Gum Head and queer Atlanta. With so many real-life figures to tell this story of Atlanta’s gay revolution, how did you ultimately choose Wells and Smith as your main narratives?
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Their two narrative threads are augmented by a host of other characters with their own tiny dedicated chapters, including Hot Chocolate, Frank Powell, John Austin, Maynard Jackson, even Anita Bryant and Gloria Gaynor.
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Their stories run parallel over the 1970s but never intertwine, painting a portrait of what was happening both inside The Sweet Gum Head and outside in Atlanta’s communities. The book’s structure is anchored through two key figures: drag queen Rachel Wells presented by John Greenwell, and political activist Bill Smith. When I realized I could also write about this struggling gay rights movement in the same time frame as that of the Sweet Gum Head’s existence - from 1971 to 1981 - and cast it as the history of the era between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis, I knew it was a book. It’s an art form that asks very fundamental questions of identity - who am I? But it also lives in the world of satire and drama, and that all erupts out of the lives of the performers, quite naturally. Most of all I’d have to sketch a serious treatment of drag. The Sweet Gum Head was a place for all kinds of radical queerness, from drag to drugs to disco. But it wasn’t fully shaped until I knew more about the queer community of the era and how it lurched into a new and very public existence. I fell in love with the idea, the time, the place, almost immediately. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by that? It took only a few days of reading and a first interview, in this case with actor Leslie Jordan, to grasp the story lying in wait. I still wanted to know: What made modern Atlanta? I struggled with the idea for a couple of months until I accepted some kind advice from a mentor and started fresh from a single thing I’d seen in Atlanta Magazine: the name of a 1970s drag club, the Sweet Gum Head. I’d read Atlanta histories of the decades since that were thin, narrowly focused, or read more like PR than history. I thought I’d use the MFA program to write a history of Atlanta from the day after Dr.
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I wanted to carve out that space in my writing life again. It was long overdue: I’d parked an early career in feature and magazine writing to become an internet entrepreneur and editor, and before I knew it, two decades had passed. In 2016, I enrolled as an MFA student in the journalism school at the University of Georgia. In our interview, Padgett reflects on capturing the optimism of the era before the AIDS epidemic, his writing process, how queer activism has evolved, drag moments in post-Katrina New Orleans, and the future of the gay bar.Ĭan you tell us about the book’s origins and the moment you knew The Sweet Gum Head had a larger story to tell? How far into your research did you realize this was a book-length project? “That clarified greatly what truly mattered in the story.” “I became a guardian of many people’s lives,” he says when discussing how he approached telling other people’s stories.
Drag night gay bar atlanta full#
Through two main figures – John Greenwell and his drag queen persona Rachel Wells, and troubled gay activist Bill Smith – along with host of supporting characters, he weaves together a full narrative about the 1970s queer urban experience in the South. Padgett chronicles a decade of Atlanta’s gay community evolution (and revolution), anchoring the story in Cheshire Bridge Road’s once-famous performance venue, the Sweet Gum Head.
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Beer and wine are available, too.In the preface to A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drags, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta’s Gay Revolution, author Martin Padgett writes, “Relatively few stories of the queer revolution have been recorded … History is a bridge made of sand.” But throughout the day, you'll find all sort of other tasty dishes, including Coca-Cola BBQ-glazed salmon salad, vegan BBQ burritos, and turkey pot roast with green beans and mashed potatoes. These affordable, down-home eateries are best known for breakfast (served all day), with treats like eggs with chicken sausage and grits, and smoked-salmon scrambles standing out in particular. But the original and highly charming Candler Park location has long been a favorite with Atlanta's gay community, going back to when it opened in 1993, and the much newer Midtown location near 10th and Piedmont is still an LGBT mecca. Sure, these days, Flying Biscuit Cafe is well-known among the hetero suburbanites of Atlanta and Charlotte, as this regional chain now has more than a dozen outposts around the metro Atlanta area, including Brookhaven, two in Buckhead, Evans, Johns Creek, Kennesaw, Midtown, two in Peachtree City, Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Toco Hills.