Tag: Backstreet

Mr. Charlie Brown, the reigning queen of Atlanta drag queens, has taken her final bow. The performer died Thursday night at Piedmont Hospital from complications following heart valve replacement surgery. He was 74. For 50 years, the self-proclaimed “Bitch of the South” entertained Atlantans with his bawdy brand of comedy, withering audience monologues, and risqué musical numbers on stage at Lips Atlanta, the Atlanta Eagle, Underground Atlanta, Illusions, and dozens of other nightlight spots.

"I got into DJing because I was an introvert—really shy. But I loved nightlife, and I loved going to Backstreet. I just couldn’t quite find my groove. But once I figured out that I could throw a party with a DJ booth around me, I was like, 'Oh, it’s on now.'"

With the help of the nearly 10,000-person Facebook group I Partied at Backstreet who served as curators, we’ve assembled this massive three-decade, nearly 12-and-a-half-hour Backstreet playlist for our readers.

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.

The first Atlanta Pride was held in Piedmont Park 50 years ago to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Our LGBTQ+ community has made many strides over the last half-century. But we have far to go.

While the AIDS crisis brought the gay community and its bars together, COVID is driving them apart.

From 1933 to today, Atlanta has gone through prohibition, hundreds of clubs, a change in the legal drinking age to 18, and more. Here's the exhaustive (though not complete) timeline of Atlanta’s nightlife.

Our nightlife hit an ecstatic peak in the 1990s, a decade lubricated by the free-flowing cash of the dot-com boom, the flash of the burgeoning hip-hop scene, and the youthful exuberance of the Olympics. Of those years, none, arguably, was better than 1996, when you could conceivably hit all of these places in one glorious night.