By Buddy Early, July 2019 Issue.
To
celebrate Echo’s 30th birthday, this year I will be catching up with
some of Arizona’s LGBT personalities from past and present to revisit the
people, places and events that helped shape our community.
When I was younger — much younger — I
could hold my liquor like I held my secrets. (I held onto a pretty big one for
24 years.) Let’s just say I enjoyed a beer or 12, and the place you were most
likely to find me twenty-plus years ago was a cabaret bar on North Seventh
Street. As someone who was still finding his place in the community, it was
where I felt extremely welcomed and comfortable, where everybody knew my name.
I think a lot of people back then had that
experience with Wink’s. There certainly were bars around before it, bars that
have been around long after it, and bars that were around before and
after it. But Wink’s held such a special place in many hearts that they still
celebrate the Starbucks-sized show bar 15 years after it closed. Recently
another Wink’s Reunion was held at Stacy’s at Melrose, gathering former
employees and patrons for another last call.
Clayton McKee, former Wink’s deejay and
current black V-neck wearer, organized the reunions until 2013, which was the
last one until this year. For both Clayton and me, Wink’s was the portal of
entry into Phoenix’s gay social scene.
He had moved here in 1993, and during his first visit to the bar a
longtime employee shouted, “I knew you were gay!” (The employee had seen Clayton on an episode
of The Maury Povich Show, on which he appeared as a George Michael
impersonator.) It wasn’t long before Clayton was behind the bar deejaying for
shows.
“We always said that Wink’s was the place
you could take your mom,” Clayton told me over brunch, where we reminisced
about days gone by like the two old farts on The Muppet Show. “It was a
quaint little neighborhood bar, a place you could go where everybody knew your
name.” (See? I told you.)
It was the gathering place for community
big shots. If you threw a dart at the Wink’s monthly calendar you were likely
to hit a fundraiser for an HIV/AIDS organization; if not, it was for the
Arizona Human Rights Fund, or Pride, or the Community Center, or a gay softball
team, or a drag queen who fell down a well.
But it’s also where the movers and shakers met — purposefully or by
chance — to plan, deal, and celebrate community successes.
The family atmosphere is why Clayton
started hosting reunions after the bar’s abrupt closure in 2004. Staff and
regulars did not have an opportunity to say a proper farewell, so Clayton
gathered them all a year later at Plazma, and then every year for nine years.
“There were rumblings for a few weeks, but
everybody got the news (of the closing) that Sunday morning,” said Clayton. “We
were doing whatever we could to let everyone know it was the last day.”
It was before smartphones and social media, so people texted, paged,
called and dispatched barflies like carrier pigeons to deliver the news to the
regulars and semi-regulars. A notice to drag queens went out, a notice that
anyone who wanted to perform was welcome.
Clayton was the deejay one last time to a
packed bar, although that’s about all he remembers since “I was so drunk I ran
the entire show and don’t remember it.“ Still, he holds on to hundreds of
memories from his 10 years at Wink’s — not to mention the physical memories he
took after one last last-call: chairs, glasses, candles, ashtrays, a bottle
opener, the ice scoop, dressing tent, stage lights, the awning sign. Other
memorabilia are floating around town, in the possession of employees and
patrons.
Clayton and I
shared some our fondest memories: performers falling on their asses; employees
taking all the liquor from the bar for a White Party road trip; Barbra Seville
in high glamour riding through the crowd on a bicycle someone had left outside
the door; the scandals that occurred in the restrooms … but neither of us is
delusional. We know it was just a bar to most people. People made bad decisions
there. They got drunk, high, and got hit by cars trying to cross the street.
(Some people will tell you Wink’s was a place for drug trafficking. But so was
my high school, and I still have fond recall of that place, too.)
A number of
establishments have filled the voids left by Wink’s closure. Perhaps some
twentysomething will write a column like this when he or she is 48, extolling
the memories of their favorite place. In fact, I hope they do.
