Table of Contents
- Changing gay history
- Historical perspective of an insane time
- A Twisted Theatrical Twist
- Mafia + McDonalds vs Homophobia + Government
- The Beat at it’s core
- The fine art of perception
- Falling Down the Rabbit Hole
- Climbing Out of the Rabbit Hole
- Action in changing human rights
- All’s well that ends well
- Memories of The Beat from the ’80’s
Changing gay history
For better or worse, I was inadvertently involved in changing the face and fabric of LGBT history in Queensland, Australia, at a time when it was illegal to be gay while police and government were desperate to squash us.
An iconic Brisbane gay bar, within the Brisbane Fortitude Valley club space, Cockatoo Club at the time was owned by Tony Bellino where Vic, having met me at the Sheraton, hired me to work initially as his ‘eyes and ears’ bartender.
Tony found that his Cockatoo Club licensor/manager, Michael, in outward appearances was a nice guy, but had a history of insurance scams, and now had his hand deep in the till to pay his drug habit. Tony sold the Cockatoo Club to his brother Geraldo (Gerry/Geri) and Vittorio (Vic) Conte, in summer 1983 and Vic elevated me to bar manager.
In August, Vic and Gerry engaged a new co-manager, a “money collector” named Jerry James they had used to run around some of their various enterprises collecting their cash, to work alongside Michael initially managing all the money. This continued, for a month or two before Michael disappeared overnight into the ether. Vic’s wife Jan, joined as bookkeeper.
A short while later, it was revealed by Vic’s ex-wife, Jan, that Jerry also apparently had both hands deep in the bags of cash before it reached Gerry and Vic. Jerry also disappeared into the ether, quickly. At which time Vic and Gerry wanted a “clean” start with a fresh new young general manager.
With fresh clean hands (and no criminal record for the license), I was elevated to the top job overnight. Vic’s ex-wife, Jan became my new bar manager to manage the cash during the week. I loved having this pressure off me.
My principal focus was to rebrand the club, with a new business license, establish and operate the new expanded space using a restaurant license to continue to allow us to sell alcohol, and make money in form of cash, and lots of it.
With Vic and Gerry’s blessing (and budget), I developed an extremely theatrical nightclub space, that over the years grew and physically expanded to be the infamous super mega-club.
A Twisted Theatrical Twist
Having learned the set design and construction concepts from my days at the Queensland Theatre Company, the club decor and themes would change on whim, from dungeons & dragons to a cruise ship, to a speak-easy (using some left behind real gambling tables), to a junk yard, to baseball stadium, to moulin rouge, to hell. It was extremely theatrical utilizing a lot of Trompe-l’œil design.
This made regular customers even more regular.
On the huge 2nd floor of The Beat, I maintained a scenic workshop in what used to be a gambling club. I converted this to a painting workshop and props storage, along with my office to provide dedicated space to work on themes.
We opened with a theme of gambling club, that was designed as tongue in cheek to the local vice squad of police, raiding Vic and Gerry’s gambling clubs on a more regular basis. I borrowed real gambling tables from 2 of their clubs that were temporality closed by the vice squad, added a bunch of fake Tiffany overhanging lamps and bought an old restaurant supply of coffee cups to serve drinks in. The wall’s scenic fireproofed canvas drops were painted to look like the interior of a casino, and we added a steel security door at the front door with a sliding trap door in it. Customers received casino chips upon paying their cover charge at the door for use at the bar with drinks. This was one of my favorite themes, particularly when even the vice squad visited, and all had a good laugh.
Early on, thanks to Jerry James idea before leaving, one night as tables, we had glass topped coffins with dummy bodies inside, their hearts beating, along with skeletons in shackles hanging from the walls, where scenic flats or canvas drops covered the wall spaces with an old stone look. Fake cobwebs would be strung strategically, and the lighting design would rely heavily on red. Green lights around the bar made all the tonic water glow, and we played a background sound effects reel of occasional screams, creaks and chain noise that would randomly be heard mixed under the DJ’s 80’s club music.
Another night it may a cruise ship (R.M.S. BE▲T) with everything in white, portholes on the wall flats and canvas drops with iconic views of things around the world, all the staff dressed in ships uniforms and all drinks with parasols, flowers and colored straws.
It was a lot of work with the themes, but it paid off in dividends. I was able to increase the base salaries of all long-term staff and had extra cash to hire out of work actors, models and musicians to be a part of the entertainment mix. Before I left, I had scenic painters and a props person.
I only ever painted one element myself, from scratch, the dragon on front of the DJ booth, during a hell theme. I was quite proud of my artistic ability, largely donee while high on booze and substances.
Sometimes a theme would last for a couple of weeks, sometimes I would change it twice a week. This concept worked so well, particularly since nobody, but me and my production designer knew when the changeovers may happen. Not even my staff would know for fear of letting the cat out of the bag with loose lips – and trust me, in gay clubs, everyone had loose lips since smartphones and text messaging had not yet been invented.
At close of business, designated changeover staff would be told to report to work at 10am the next day for the changeover of the new design.
Our intentionally over the top garish drag shows never stopped the flow of the evening, and were performed on the bar, on tables, on top of the cigarette machine near the front door, in the DJ booth, on top of the bass speakers near the dance floor, and once on a bungee swing over the dance floor. Think a hairy man sporting a tilted orange wig, one eyelash up, one upside down, with smeared lipstick and dressed in fabulous couture, often with massive scenic hats (a scale model of the Sydney Opera House was favorite), throwing sarcastic shade at customers walking past, often “copping a feel”, and singing along in good harmony, but in the wrong key, to a 1980’s pop hit. These were ocker Australian drag characters, similar to what can be seen in the later movie “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert”.
It was important to me to keep the “beat” of the music continuing all night, to keep people from getting tired. Stopping the music for a show at its peak would have been a disastrous concept, which I never allowed on weekends. The drag performers worked with my DJ’s to our music, not the other way around.
The Beat at it’s core
It was now a national destination, with people from Sydney and Melbourne and Adelaide coming to Brisbane in solidarity. Queensland anti-gay laws were the talk of Australia. The owners of both the most well-known openly gay bars Exchange and Patches on Oxford Street in Sydney came up and offered their support in any way to me. They placed promotional materials in their own bars and held raffles to win a bus trip to The Beat. It was Priscilla ahead of its time.
The Australian gay community was rallying against the Queensland government, and unexpectedly (and fortunately), The Beat became somewhat its command centre.
Young gay boys came out of the closet to become activists, protesting the Queensland government, joining local Queensland chapters of National Groups such as Campaign Against Moral Persecution (C.A.M.P.). Fashion designers incorporated pink triangles into leather jackets and customers brought VHS recorders to the club to videotape the police
Brightly colored and massively sculpted wigged drag queens upped their fabulously couture and silly games and left The Beat at 6am to hang around conservative church doorsteps in their churchgoing finest on the Sunday mornings including resident drag personalities Bambi, Chanelle, Tiffany Jones, Hazel LaBelle, Brandy Renee, and my headliner, Trixie Lamont.
The ‘Sisters of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence’ a Sydney based facetious anti-religious, sarcastic pro-gay group setup a Brisbane chapter, based at The Beat after a consecration ceremony, with my now assistant GM nicknamed “Patch” being ordained as ‘Mother Inferior’. It was here at The Beat that I too was ‘ordained’ as ‘Mother Mame Dennis’, a pun on the musical MAME, for my ‘carefree, fun spirited, galivanting, globe-trotting, intoxicating, highfalutin, bon vivant leadership’.
Even journalists would regularly come to The Beat hoping to catch a police action against our customers or us.
One of these journalists, an undercover reporter for the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission) was a regular at The Beat, and while initially engaged to report stories to try to bring us down, converted to becoming a loyal supporter and refused to file the stories that the ABC wanted resulted in becoming a lifelong friend.
Additionally, politicians, TV personalities and film actors came to drink, party or play
The Boy from Oz, Peter Allen, was a quasi-fixture at The Beat when in Brisbane to/from his retreat in Oak Beach, Port Douglas. By late 1985, the opposite of his stage persona, the quiet and reserved bi-coastal Peter was living in California, but still called Australia home. Since his divorce from Liza Minnelli (whom Judy Garland had connected him with), his post-Liza partner Greg (who was also Peters tour & lighting manager) had passed away from AIDS, and he met my boyfriend of the time, Shaun (another big-haired model) at The Beat. The 2 of them hit off, and Shaun abruptly dumped me to head off with Peter up to his Oak Beach retreat and then back to SoCal. Upsetting at the time, as it turns out, this was a godsend since it freed me up to meet the love of my life a few years later.
Years later, I would go on to work with Liza Minelli twice, both in concert and in my Broadway musical VICTOR/VICTORIA.
Over the years, other entertainment personalities such as Harris Milstead (Divine), Culture Club, Keith Haring, Wham! (George Michael) arriving by limousine at the front door (and sometimes quietly by minivan at our back door down Lucky Lane) making The Beat their place late at night after local concert engagements.
The Park Royal Hotel (where 99.9% of all pop stars routinely stayed) whose manager was a regular, considered us the new “in” alternative later night club, and would privately recommend us to his V.I.P. guests. Sometimes they came just to drink, and sometimes to show solidarity with our cause, and nearly always, both.
Even the New Zealand All-Blacks Rugby team came, and partied, and had respectful fun, which caused a parking lot bloody fight with the Queensland Rugby Players wanting to ‘poofta bash’. Fortunately, the All-Blacks won.
Early in the days one fabulous night a few weeks before Christmas was when band members, apparently bored with the promoter Paul Dainty’s (later my friend) formal party at the Park Royal Hotel after David Bowie’s “Serious Moonlight” concert at Lang Park stadium, decided to grab Bowie from the Crest Hotel bar and come over to The Beat now infamous back door in Lucky Lane at about 2am. It was a mid-weeknight, so the club at that hour was relatively quiet (much to the dismay of regulars in the days that followed). They had a couple of days off before the Sydney concert, so they decided to drink “hard” until about 8am, in the darkness of our rear lounge, quietly inviting certain boys and girls to join them.
Lucky of Lucky’s Trattoria was often seen screaming in an animated Italian way at the anti-gay bashers at the parking lot across the street from his restaurant to anyone he deemed homophobic at the time.
Falling Down the Rabbit Hole
Randomly, at my whim, I would get on the DJ booth microphone, and call “free drinks” or “half price” for the next 5 minutes or so – my bar staff hated this, but customers loved it of course. It created a dangerous rush of customers to each of the bars (we had a couple of bars at the time), which presumably, also created new ‘nookie nights’ due to the throbbing of bodies pushing against each other to get to the bars.
To be honest, I tended to be wild, and do dangerous and crazy things randomly at The Beat, which looking back could be attributed to my quickly growing substance abuse.
The local police (vice squad) would sometimes give me an “8-ball” of cocaine, or a handful of LSD/acid drops they had captured in a recent drug haul and loved to share some of this with me in exchange for drinks, friendship and occasionally girls/boys to hang out with.
The cocaine always remained upstairs, hidden in little plastic bags inside a window air conditioner near my office, below the AC air exhaust fan. No sniffer dog could therefore smell it, and not even my police suppliers or staff knew where I stored it. To avoid entrapment, I only ever accepted the drugs in my upstairs office, and only after they imbibed first, in front of me.
I was never, ever a pimp, but I was happy to connect the members of the force with those girls and boys I knew enjoyed the ‘friends with benefits’ schemes of the ‘80’s then let them work it out themselves.
I admit that I was so damned promiscuous, my assistant manager, Patch, and our bartenders would sometimes sit certain boys at the bar stools in a sequence where they would bet amongst each other as to which boy would interest me the most. I would often pick one (or two) to join me upstairs in my office to play with. It was this weird game where I would walk behind the bar look at the line of boys and choose. I’m not proud of my promiscuous behavior those days, but in the early ‘80s this was considered ‘normal’ in the scene. I am so lucky to have been completely spared from HIV/AIDS.
I think cocaine saved my life, with the AIDS crisis now hitting Australia, and my promiscuity untamed, I did so much cocaine for a brief time, I couldn’t have sex. By the time I weaned myself off the powder and I migrated towards more of the hallucinatory variety, there was more education about how to avoid HIV, and introduction of widespread condom use.
I had a piece of jewelry from House of Hung in Singapore that hid my tiny sheets of acid – basically each a ½ cm square of tissue paper with a micro-dot of acid on its centre, slid inside a hollow on a white gold pinkie ring. I would simply slide off my ring, and with a tongue damp finger, the tissue would stick to it, and I would place it on my tongue. Thus, I could discreetly take a ‘hit’ whenever I felt the urge while downstairs in the club, and nobody would be the wiser.
Often at 7 or 8am, coming off a high, as I was leaving The Beat to drive to my home, I would stop by the sleazy roadside Windmill Café dump (later known as Greasy Harry’s) on Petrie Terrace to load up on munchies style fried junk food, including fried potato scallops along with a fried breaded veal chop, typically munching it all down with one hand, while driving (my manual transmission car) with the other. Stuffing food between my teeth while changing gears with crumbs and grease dripping everywhere. How I never had an accident is shocking to me.
In addition to my favorite of drops of acid regularly at peak times, I was also becoming an alcoholic.
After a few years of living the bar life, Johnnie Walker was becoming my best friend, and it wasn’t until one night I woke up on my dance floor around lunch time with the cleaners vacuuming our carpets nearby, where I was found laying on my back on our disco light up dance floor, with an empty bottle of scotch in hand, and the disco lights spinning and pulsating to only the sound of grinding motors (acid trips make you enjoy kaleidoscopes of color and movement), and the back of my head was wet in my own little pool of vomit.
I quit, cold turkey, there and then – no more booze or drugs.
After that change of life moment, my bar staff had specially marked liquor bottles for me, so when customers bought me drinks, I would, secretly, be drinking black tea and 7-up or soda. If customers watched, they saw my drink poured and thought was my known drink of choice, Scotch and soda.
I am by no means a nun, a few decades later, I occasionally still drink, mostly when out, and mostly wine and beer – usually never at home, unless a party celebration, and never alone.
Fortunately, I have always hated the smell of marijuana, and am too lazy to make the fiddly joints, plus I get headaches from it.
The last time I knowingly ingested any other substances was a long, long, long time ago.
Climbing Out of the Rabbit Hole
Typical Friday and Saturday club goers would now come during the week, just to ensure they didn’t miss a scene change to a new theme. Business was building, most importantly the weekday business. As Vic put it, I was becoming “clean again” – no more booze or drugs, and amazingly was getting a clearer head in decision making.
I think it was around this time I finally became an adult thinking entrepreneur, and no longer a boy living out a real-world addiction infused and hazy gay fantasy, yet my promiscuous vice remained.
I handed out batches of secret complimentary door passes (to avoid cover charges) to hundreds of local cute (and typically big haired gay boys) on condition of secrecy, and never handed them out to women, ugly gay leeches, or knowingly straight men. I also targeted blonde surfer boys on the Gold Coast / Surfers Paradise, by visiting the few gay clubs with fistfuls of passes and promises of free drinks. I never solicited the clientele from competing clubs such as The Terminus, since keeping a happy scene was just as important, indeed, I tried to avoid visiting competitors bars and clubs for fear of misinterpretation.
The combination of what today would be called guerilla marketing, ensured that most of our regular customer base were hot, young, good looking, gay boys. Yet legally, everyone was welcome, if they paid the cover charge.
Further, realizing that profit on soft drink is MUCH higher than that of alcohol, I would designate some late-night hours to be soft-drink only bar times, usually around 4am when the club was full. This had an additional benefit of pacing my customers alcohol levels, keeping them partying (and spending) for longer, often until 7am. The cost benefit analysis is simple, and one of the secrets of the bar trade to this day, as an example:
Suspecting some sticky fingers from my own bar staff within the 3 bars, I instituted a “cash register control system: to make the bartenders THINK I was able to track cash and balance this with weekly alcohol consumption. Actually, it’s impossible due to the combination of post mix syrup soft drinks, bottled bear and different prices of different alcoholic drinks. But my staff had not figured that out. A week after installing this, I noticed the cash take consistently went up by about 10%.
A few months later, during a scene change, without saying anything to any of my bar staff, I had purchased half a dozen old 2nd hand security cameras, at the time, these were big clunky things. My resident designer screwed each above the bar, pointing them generally towards the array of tills. He stuffed the cables up into the ceiling tiles, so it looked like they were connected. He then put an old broken TV set in my upstairs office, along with an old clunky Betamax videotape machine below the TV. Again, all perception and nothing explicitly said to the staff. Indeed, these days, fake pretend security cameras, with a tiny blinking red light powered by a battery, are commonplace in most bars worldwide.
In the coming weeks, the weekly cash bar take went up again but this time by about a whopping 25%. Although I suspected a couple of them, I never worked out, nor cared, which of the staff had sticky fingers, since personalities (and sometimes their flirty looks) brought regular customers made up for it in the long run. Most bars and restaurants assume a 10% theft rate by staff in their operations.
The combination of regular themed decor changes, secret door cover charge system, soft drink spree at peak times and pretend anti-theft security measures was my key to building up the business from about AUD $12,500 a week to over AUD $40,000 in profit each week – in the mid 1980’s.
Delivering the “take” every Monday late afternoon to Gerry & Vic’s office was also interesting. We had a slew of little canvas bank bags, and each week, the cash was counted and buddled in clusters by denomination and wrapped with a single rubber band. Each bank note domination bundle was put into its own canvas bag, at the time $5, $10, $20 and $50. The heavy coins, in another bag. The weirdly shaped and very heavy $0.50 cent coins and below were never delivered, and instead used in our operational costs.
After retaining a cash float in my office at The Beat, I would take the bags together shoved into in a common department store shopping bag, for the 3 or 4 block walk to Gerry & Vic’s office above their Manhattan Club, along with a single tiny piece of paper from my bookkeeper detailing in handwriting each bags value, plus a combined total note.
Either Gerry, Vic or their GM Robin would simply place each bag on a kitchen weight scale on their desk, and thereby know, almost accurately, how much each was containing. If the combined value of each of the collective bags was equal to, or more than the previous week, I was “good to go”. If it was less, they looked for an explanation, and were always polite in those weeks.
Fortunately, nearly all weeks the combined value of the weight of the bags were getting heavier. If particularly heavy in a given week, they would often reach into one of the bags, usually the one containing the $20 rubber band wrapped bundles and throw it at me saying “good job kid” – I would then divvy up this bonus with my bar staff and DJ, which built loyalty and commitment.
Vic and Gerry were so thrilled at the new waterfall of cash this young kid was making them, we upped the game, acquiring adjoining building spaces, expanded the club, more than doubling its size.
Amidst various anti-gay, anti-police, anti-government, anti-anything campaigns by news media, print, radio, and TV, grabbing at straws trying to sell advertising, The Beat became more and more popular, proving there’s is no such thing as bad press.
After many years building the success of The Beat I moved to the USA in late June 1987 to pursue my Broadway career, after this cartoon of me appeared, sitting behind my desk, throwing cash in the air, (alongside my Assistant Manager, “Patch”), blocking traffic in the middle of Ann Street, with a silhouetted line up of patrons entering my club.
With too much parental, government, and media pressure on me, I chose to buy a one-way ticket to return to the U.S.A., with no visa, with my money tied up in real estate, alone, cash penniless, but with a dream to return to my first love from my QTC days, and aim for the theatrical pinnacle, Broadway. I handed the keys to my apartment to Patch asking him to sell everything and send me the money (he didn’t), and with reluctant approval from Vic and Gerry, I gave Patch the keys to The Beat, after a staff meeting to handover.
At a farewell party June 14, 1987, I was given the first dollar we received across the bar in 1983. This is an extract from a farewell gift book the staff put together for me when I left for the U.S.A. including funny photos and descriptions from my staff.
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