🏳️🌈🏺Ric queer spaces 4/6
🏳️🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️🌈
In Richmond’s late-70s nightlife, Cha-Cha’s was the stop for drinks and dancing, but it also walked the uneasy line between community joy and the control of mob. While smaller venues like Casablanca (later Barcode) were able to fly under the radar, the stage was set for a new venue loud and out venue: Scandals.
Scandals opened in 1983 as a massive entertainment complex in Shockoe— a cavernous disco floor that could hold 700+, a long drag runway upstairs, and ambitions to bring national talent to Richmond. For a time, it delivered: acts like Grace Jones, Beverly Carrington (her Miss Richmond dress is pictured) Sylvester, and Melba Moore appeared, and Scandals billed itself as Virginia’s premier gay performance space. Its reputation stretched beyond the city, landing Richmond on the queer nightlife map.
But despite the owner’s, Steve Edward Proffitt, best attempts, the glamour only hid the problems. There were changing attitudes and more people than ever coming out , but financial problems dogged the club from the start—unpaid performers and contractors , and one partner, a state official, under public investigation. Police pressure was still high as ABC laws still banned gay clubs on paper. Then the rising specter of the AIDS crisis only made things worse. In a last attempt to survive, management tried to rebrand the venue as Rumors, but by the 90s the lights went dark for good.
Scandals’ rise and fall symbolized both the new visibility and the fragility of queer nightlife in Richmond. Yet from that collapse came something different: gay-owned, openly queer spaces that no longer relied on shadows, scandals, or mob money. Christopher’s joined Babe’s in Carytown, proudly billing itself as a LGBT bar in the mid-1980s, followed by others that kept their doors open on their own terms and became community lifelines during the worst health crisis ever to face our community. More next time on that.
The leap from Cha-Cha’s to Scandals and then to Christopher’s shows how Richmond’s LGBTQ community navigated control, excess, and scandal — and eventually began building spaces truly of their own, just when they were needed most.
