The Seattle Eagle Sells Out?

Poster child of bar demise (and re-birth)

 This posting from Adrian Ryan on The Stranger speaks directly to the angst many of us are feeling in the leather/kink community.  What the f**k happened to our leather bars?  Every city we visit the story is repeated almost verbatim, ie, our bars are "leather" in name only.  Go to an Eagle in almost any city (at least in the US) and you're more likely to see tennis shoes and cargo pants than leather.  And forget about full leather.  The only time we see leather of any quantity is for specialty gear nights and even then we have to tolerate cotton (ewwwww!) sliding against our leathers.  

To be fair the bar owners are just doing what they have to to keep the doors open.  We, the so-called leather people, can't get off our collective ass to get our gear on and get out.  When will the backlash start?  When, and how, do we take back our spaces?  Open for suggestions here...

While Seattle’s freshborn queer nightscene frets and scrambles over the relatively timely, yet still infinitely regrettable, demise of the War Room(formerly Blu, previously Mr. Paddywacks, nee The Brass Connection, AKAThe Brass Rail) and everything she stood for (like Hard Times, God dammit—Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle, she died young), some fascinating nightlifey things seem to be brewing at, um, The Eagle.

Yes, The Eagle.

But really, no. The Eagle.

For the benefit of the naïve, the wholesome, and the unwary, I’ll slop together a picture: The Eagle is ancient. It was born to be the most scurrilous of gay bars—a rough old stand-and-deliver fagbar standard, a deeply niche-marketed leather-daddy gay bar chain of sorts. Yes, chain! There are/were Eagles in New York, San Francisco, Portland, Atlanta…Jesus, everywhere with a pulse, a fresh supply of chaps, and a protracted anus. To be quite blunt (oh, innocents! Shield thine eyes!), The Eagle was designed for and populated by lusty leather-lovers, the piss-thirsty, and the fisty. The boot-licky. The cigar-chompy. It was shadowy and seedy and conspicuously secret by design. Tom of Finland, the whole thing was, if you get my drift. And so it went for ages.

The Eagle.

However. Disquieting new chatter from the frontlines indicates that the old Eagle is making an aggressive snatch at an even bigger piece of the gay nightlife pie.

Startling, very deliberate changes are transforming the old Eagle into a very un-Eagley place, indeed. The scandalous old pool table, for example—upon which tangoed the ghosts of a million alleged gangbangs—has been permanently evicted, replaced with a dance floor, blink-blinky disco lights, and a new DJ booth. (And Tom of Finland wept.) And in accordance with said new dance floor, The Eagle has rolled out a series of new DJ-driven club nights that cater not to the excessively hirsute and brutish Eagle crowd of yore, but to the discerning, hard-partying, markedly less grizzly and far fancier Hard Times/Comeback/Pony crowd of now. They host a brand new every-SaturdayUnderwear Party aimed at body-shaved metrojoxuals, a Thursday night dance party called Shakedown, an every-now-and-then event called Tainted Love—all very un-Eagley events, traditionally speaking.

And now, enter the glitteriest, rhinestone-studdiest, most non-Eagley event of all!

Poised and ready to scoop up the soon-to-be wandering and homeless Hard Times crowd (but quite eager to remind us that the event not a Hard Times replacement, as the event is not canceled, merely without venue at the moment) is "Fringe", a new DJed dance event devised by Brad Crelia (AKA Captain Underpants) and Kevin Kauer, the incredible scene photographer/nascent DJ whoso artfully chronicled the divine madness of Hard Times (final one at The War Room, this Wednesday! Don’t forget!). Of the new event, Mr. Kauer says,

It shall be amazing…the first is going to be sailor themed with rhinestoned sailor go-go dancers, spun by DJs Nark (Kauer) and JT.
Fringe’s inaugural fringing will commence Friday, December 4th, with big plans to continue every Friday thereafter, forever (including Christmas! The sacrilege!)—marking, perhaps, the final glittery goodbye to the hand-balling bodyhair farmers of The Eagle’s many sordid yesterdays.

Farewell, old Eagle. Hello, new Eagle! It will never be the same (or quite so fisty) again...