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Vividly can I remember my 18-year-old self with my T-shirt I had ripped the collar off of, having wrapped it into two red ones, and I was just sobbing. There's a part at the south end of the block on Lavaca, and there's these steps. My girlfriend knew the bouncer and was begging. I had gone to the Boathouse, and suddenly, I couldn't get into the Boathouse.
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Halfway through my 18th year, it switched to 19. The Boathouse?! The Butthouse?! I moved to Austin in 1981. And in the interim period, we would go through and make sure there was nothing going on. That's why Stephen Moser would call it the Cha-Cha Palace! Because we cha-cha-ed out the side doors, down the fire escapes, around the building, and came back in. Fires would get set so many times in the bar that we made it a ritual on Saturday nights, especially, that we would say, "We're gonna have our fire drill." Of course the queens made it into an event. Friends & Lovers was the target of a lot of hate mongers. There was a projection room at the top, and we projected ongoing movies, whether it was Ben-Hur or anything with men. We were their showroom at that point, and we had multiscreen media on the sidewall. We opened up before Studio 54, and all those boys came down here and looked at Friends & Lovers because Blackstone Productions/High End Systems, they did the deed. So my long-term lover at that point kept asking me: "What is this guy to you? Is he a friend or a lover?" I said, "friends and lovers!" I was trying to avoid answering the question. We had a lot of fun, et cetera, et cetera. Buzzy was a tall blonde, and he was going through his butch reassurance phase. In fact, the very first mascot was not Bevo but their dog, Pig. The name was very interesting, as there was a guy named Buzzy Belmont (Buzzy's grandfather was who Belmont Hall at UT was named after) and his father, Theo Belmont. It was an old vaudeville house with perfect acoustics.