It's hard to imagine a gayer place than MC Film Fest. From floor to ceiling, the Ybor City storefront is stocked with rainbow tchotchkes and GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) novelty items: greeting cards emblazoned with images of muscle-bound hunks; feather boas; framed Judy Garland collectibles; pride flags for specialized niches within the gay community (bears, leathermen); an assortment of lubricants and a collection of gay, foreign and independent films on VHS and DVD.
Still, every once in a while a couple visiting from Oklahoma or Kansas wanders obliviously past the shelves of rainbow stickers and the gay-themed pet accessories before it dawns on them, says co-owner Carrie West. The reaction is abrupt, he says: the woman tightens her grip on her purse; then she grabs the arm of her male companion, and they make a beeline for the exit.
"But most people are glad to find something a little different," West deadpans.
The quirky store is the brainchild of West and his partner of nearly 30 years, Mark Bias. On a typical day, both men sport ponytails (West is the blonde; Bias the brunette) and polo shirts embroidered with the store logo as they work behind the MC Film Fest counter, offering a friendly greeting to customers who come through the door. Once a week, they update the store's colorful website (mcfilmfest.com; click "gossip") with the latest news about GLBT events and businesses around the Bay area — a tradition known as "Dishing with Mark & Carrie" that has a loyal following both within and beyond the local gay community.
Since moving their business to Ybor last June, the pair has made waves in the historic district by founding an alternative chamber of commerce dubbed the GaYbor District Coalition, and local business owners say membership has already boosted their bottom line. In 10 months, the coalition has amassed 91 members — many of which are straight-owned businesses eager to work with anyone who can bring customers to the area and help clean up the district's tarnished image — and a reputation for offering neighbors a smile and a helping hand. According to Bias, GaYbor's goal has been nothing less than to change the way Ybor business owners relate to each other.
"Before it was, 'I'm gonna cut your throat and put you out of business,'" Bias says. "Our thinking is, 'I want you to be more successful than I am so that I will be [even] more successful.'"
Their approach has sparked the interest of local leaders, including Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, who has openly sought to counter the rift with the GLBT community caused by the Hillsborough County Commission's 2005 ban on expressions of gay pride on county property. Both Tom Keating, the president and CEO of Ybor's official Chamber of Commerce, and Vince Pardo, manager of the Ybor City Development Corporation, have attended GaYbor meetings and maintain ties with the group.
"There's no more positive duo than Mark and Carrie, and they set the tone," says Keating, who adds that he feels a personal affinity with West and Bias because they've been together as long as he and his wife.
Both those within the gay community and officials like Keating and Pardo say there's something about the GLBT community in particular that enables its members to effect change rapidly — and that something is the gay word-of-mouth network. (These days, MySpace pages and online newsletters like "Dishing" play a key role in such networks, as do shared spaces where conversations can take place.) Economists like Richard Florida have suggested that the power of gay residents to help turn struggling communities around stems from the likelihood that both partners in a same-sex relationship (especially men) make good money but have no children to support, leaving them with an abundance of disposable income. Florida's generalization may be a little off point these days with so many male and female couples finding ways to parent (even in a state like our own where same-sex couples are not permitted to adopt). But more than financial resources or family size, it may be GLBT social capital that spells good news when a gay couple moves in down the block or a queer-friendly business opens up next door. West likens the network to a whirlpool in which a tiny point of suction at the bottom whisks in a much broader area from the top.
With positive word-of-mouth hard to come by in a historic district as well-known for late-night shootings as hand-rolled cigars, that whirlpool just might be Ybor's best hope yet.
As members and potential members of the GaYbor District Coalition shuffle into Spurs Bar, the Tampa skies release a sudden summer downpour. Among the roughly 40 people in attendance there are a disproportionate number of clean-cut men with taut biceps, but otherwise the group is fairly heterogeneous. A round of introductions yields a handyman, a woman with a baby who owns a bar, a realtor, a restaurant owner, a Web designer, a florist, an air-conditioning repairman, several nightclub owners, a photographer who calls himself "the electric fat man," representatives from Reax and Watermark magazines, and a 20something guy named Miss Nina St. Clair who will later urge the coalition to support a local qualifying round for the statewide Miss Florida pageant for female impersonators.
West stands at the front of the room flanked by Stephen Moss, owner of G. Bar and the Honey Pot, and John Gorman, owner of The Forge, a leather bar located in the basement of Lounge 7@14. After announcing that the coalition has collected more than 8,000 MySpace friends, he briefly reviews the group's plans for St. Pete Pride. (Moss and his partner have donated a float that will hold 40 people, West says; coalition members will also have access to a tent where they can promote their businesses at the event.)
On to the bigger focus of the meeting: GaYbor Days, the coalition's own pride celebration, set for the Fourth of July holiday weekend after St. Pete Pride, so as not to conflict with the more established event on June 28. Though the two groups have no plans this year to cross-promote each other's events, St. Pete Pride co-chair David Schauer says, "GaYbor is a great complement to St. Pete Pride."
West's pitch to the coalition is simple but ambitious: He sees an annual Fourth of July parade in Ybor's future — an attraction for both gays and straights, young and old — and hopes GaYbor Days will become a gay tourist attractor on the order of Southern Decadence, a popular Labor Day celebration in New Orleans. The holiday weekend creates a bonanza for GLBT-friendly businesses in NOLA, West tells the assembled GaYbor members; GaYbor Days on the Fourth of July could become something similar if they put the word out, he suggests.
The inaugural installment, titled "Charge of the Yellow Rice Brigay'ed" in honor of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders and their connection to Ybor, kicks off at Spurs and includes events at many of the GaYbor member venues, including a brunch at Streetcar Charlie's and a meet-and-greet with reality TV star (and lesbian hottie) Jackie Warner at The Honey Pot. In lieu of a parade, this year's GaYbor Days offers "the world's largest drag queen promenade" down Seventh Avenue on Sat., July 5, open to everyone from professional performers to amateurs with a yen for some campy fun.
The goal, West explains to me in a separate interview, is to make the Bay area a top destination for gay tourists to Florida. With the zeal of an economic development expert, he speaks of luring travelers away from Orlando and Fort Lauderdale to the benefit of hotels, restaurants, retail and other attractions in Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater. To do that, he says, the area needs a consolidated district or area where gays can come to play and feel safe and welcome. That place used to be the Suncoast Resort Hotel in St. Petersburg, where MC Film Fest maintained an outpost until the complex closed in June 2007 to make way for a Home Depot.
In their spare time, West and Bias have worked as unofficial promoters of the area's gay businesses for years — even traveling on their own dime to gay districts in cities serviced by ATA, when the airline flew out of St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, to spread the word about Tampa Bay. Now, with the GaYbor coalition growing daily, they think the critical mass needed for national brand recognition may be within reach. When the couple introduced themselves as Bay area residents during a recent trip to Milwaukee, people asked if they'd heard of GaYbor, West says.
In less than a year since its inception, the budding gay district has already proved its own importance to the community, both in economic and social terms. The biggest symbol of GaYbor's success may be Streetcar Charlie's, a GLBT-owned and -operated restaurant that has drawn sizeable crowds since opening in February. GaYbor's emergence made the restaurant a viable concept, West says. Other gay-owned businesses have also opened since the coalition's formation: The Honey Pot, Lounge 7@14/The Forge, Spurs and Gallery Live. (The owners of the former two clubs helped cofound the coalition.)
Another of the coalition's victories came in December after West had a Queer Eye for the Historic District moment. Noticing a dreary lack of holiday decorations on Seventh Avenue, he suggested adding red bows and garland to the main drag's lampposts — and the Ybor City Development Corporation took him up on the idea. (West now sits on the organization's board of directors.) When the Parks Department offered to pitch in, the bows were up in a matter of hours.
After that, the district's few skeptics seemed to fall silent. At first, GaYbor "raised some eyebrows," admits Vince Pardo, manager of the YCDC. A few business owners voiced concern that the GaYbor brand would overshadow Ybor's identity as a historic district. For the most part, those concerns seem to have subsided.
Recent transplants to Tampa Bay wouldn't know it, but gay culture has been a part of Ybor for a long time, Pardo says. In the 1980s, drag shows at El Goya — a gay nightclub housed in the building where Czar currently resides — drew a mixed crowd (including Pardo and his wife) and enjoyed renown among out-of-state tourists. What's unprecedented about the current resurgence of gay businesses, he says, is its diversity. Never before has Ybor seen so many GLBT-owned bars and nightclubs, plus a restaurant, a gift shop and an art gallery all thriving at the same time. Factor in the dozens of other Ybor businesses clamoring to be recognized as GLBT-friendly, and it would seem that the GaYbor District Coalition has tapped into a latent desire among community members, both gay and straight, to collaborate and cooperate.
The fundamental needs of neighborhoods parallel those of people, says Pardo, who ran Hillsborough County's Office of Neighborhood Relations before going to work for the City of Tampa in 1999. He points to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, with safety and survival at its base and self-actualization at its pinnacle; in some areas of the city, residents just want to keep drug dealers off their streets; in other (safer) areas, relative luxuries like bike paths or plans for sustainable growth top residents' wish lists. Part of GaYbor's appeal to so many business owners may be the group's rise above the issues that have troubled the district in recent years ("police, parking and punks," Bias says) to dreams and plans for Ybor's future.
For many, the historic-cum-entertainment district still isn't the kind of place where you'd want to find yourself on an empty side street after dark. Though economic development officials insist that Ybor has outgrown its difficult adolescence, the taint of nightclub shooting deaths — and their attendant headlines — persists. Enter the GLBT network. The gay and lesbian (and GLBT-friendly) customers GaYbor draws add a nighttime presence to the district that has been less likely to cause violence, historically; they also tell their friends that Ybor clubs — or, at least, certain Ybor clubs — are safe. The result is a word-of-mouth boost to the district's image beyond anything that advertising can buy.
For Pardo, the results are clear: He hasn't seen an Ybor nightclub as crowded as The Honey Pot — which promotes its Steam Fridays for gay men and Flirt Saturdays for lesbians but attracts a mostly-straight crowd on Thursday nights — since The Rubb opened in the early 1990s with movie star River Phoenix as an investor. The only problem at The Honey Pot so far, he says, is that so many customers are waiting to get inside that they're blocking the sidewalks — a code violation that means business is booming. The clubs that rack up long police reports aren't GaYbor members, he says. Take one of the group's founding members, The Castle, a gay-friendly Ybor venue known for its goth and S&M-themed décor; when someone asks Pardo whether he approves of what goes on at The Castle, his answer is straightforward: That club, or anywhere gays and lesbians hang out for that matter, isn't the problem.
"They come in, they spend money. … and they go on their way without having a lot of problems," he says. "I say, 'Listen, you take all these high-testosterone places, and that's where I have the problems.'"
The GaYbor group complements the arts and cultural development already underway, says Keating, the Ybor Chamber president. He points to the number of creative industries businesses that have relocated to the area in combination with the recent revival of Ybor's Saturday Art Walk and GaYbor as evidence that the district is already on the path to supporting a diverse day-and-night population of residents and workers as well as tourists and revelers. Keating hopes GaYbor's prominence in the district will help any remaining doubters realize that gay and straight people are not so different from each other, an idea that was reinforced for him earlier this year when a visiting conference of gay pilots took part in Ybor Aficionados, the Chamber's upscale promotion of the district's history and cigars.
"Gays do a lot of the same things that [straights] do," he says.
But when it comes to their enthusiasm for networking and their ability to spread news by word-of-mouth, the gay community (or, at least, its most outgoing segment) seems to run circles around the heterosexual crowd. A listing on the MC Film Fest website, membership in the GaYbor coalition or a MySpace connection serves as a stamp of approval for customers eager to patronize businesses that appreciate — hell, love — them. Streetcar Charlie's, located on a corner — Eighth Avenue and 15th Street — where multiple restaurants have failed before, has gone "gangbusters" (Keating's term) by focusing on the GLBT niche. Other businesses are feeling the effects of being part of the gay network, too.
"Now that they're doing this, I get a ton of orders from people that are in the GaYbor district," says Toby Brees, manager of Island Flowers on Seventh Avenue. "I get people who call me all the time, and they're like 'Are you gay-friendly? We got your name on MC Film.' And I'm like 'Hallelujah.'"
"I've been down here for a while, and you didn't talk to your neighbors before," he says. "Now that more businesses have come in that are gay-friendly and gay, it's really hard for me to stay home (at night)."
If West and Bias were the spark for GaYbor's fire, the economy may have provided the kindling, suggests Mathieu Stanoch, executive curator of Gallery Live, a soon-to-open studio and exhibition space dedicated to gay and gay-friendly artists. The realization that businesses are hurting and things aren't getting better any time soon has taken the sparkle out of cutthroat competition and caused people to gravitate toward cooperation and mutual support instead.
"You have more people in the GaYbor coalition who are not gay, that were typically heterosexual businesses, but then they see how dark this world is going, and they're like 'You know, these people are fucking happy and having a great time — I might as well be on that boat,'" he says. "Because, quite frankly, otherwise you're going down with George Bush and $4 a gallon."
Stanoch, who designs interiors for G. Bar and The Honey Pot, experienced the solicitousness of GaYbor's members firsthand when he decided to open Gallery Live in the unfinished space next door to MC Film Fest. Coalition members helped paint the 3,800-square-foot space, where the first public exhibition (featuring the paintings of resident artist Chou-Chou Guilder) is expected to open in July.
What about when the economy recovers? Will GaYbor's members tire of working together like good neighbors, or is Ybor's gay district here to stay?
"When groups form because they are pissed off about something, they usually will diffuse as soon as the issue is solved," says Pardo, the YCDC manager. "When groups form because they are interested in doing something proactively, they usually have more sustainability. … Because of that, I think [the GaYbor group] is going to be around for a while."
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2008.