Such a drag: The queen is dead

ATLANTIC CITY - Mortimer Spreng is a redhead. Which you wouldn't know if the only time you saw him was on stage at the legendary Studio Six, where he wore a wig and stilettos.

But the bigger surprise is that the stage door of the Mount Vernon Avenue nightclub, where Spreng's celebrated stream-of-drag-queen cabaret show ran for decades, has been nailed permanently shut.

The demise early this month of the Studio Six megaclub and adjacent Brass Rail bar - the last gay venues in a town once teeming with them - reverberated widely. Studio Six, a place that shut down for the night at 11:30 the next morning, always drew a hetero crowd as well. The Brass Rail dates to 1902.

"It's horrible being here. This was my home," Spreng said early last week, standing outside the shuttered building, looking rather bicycle messenger-y in the daylight, with little of the bawdy flamboyance that drove patrons straight, gay, male, and female to seek his trademark "lipstick kisses" autograph.

The complex, including the Surfside Hotel, has been owned since 2005 by the Sherwood Management Group, which has not revealed its plans.

Studio Six's passing seems at once impossible and inevitable here, where civic institutions implode regularly, like, well, a Boardwalk casino.

Or like the Miss America Pageant, a gay high holiday here, which decamped for Las Vegas two years ago, ripping a hole in the heart of the city's gay culture.

When Miss America left, it doomed the equally beloved Miss'd America drag pageant. The riotous AIDS fund-raiser was held from 1991 to 2004 on the deck of the Surfside a day after the official festivities.

"It is the end of the era," said Mark Segal, editor of the Philadelphia Gay News, who judged Miss'd America every year, bringing along a cadre of elected officials, including Vince Fumo, another judge. "It puts the final closing on Atlantic City being a major tourist destination for the gay and lesbian community."

News of Studio Six's closing left no one more bereft than Spreng, a Miss'd America winner (1995) and the most famous drag queen in Atlantic City since the fabulous Tinsel Garland. (Miss Garland, history will note, was the first to call out "Show us your shoes!" to Miss America contestants as they paraded past her home at New York Avenue and the Boardwalk.)

"It was a grand old lady of a nightclub, and its passing has been felt deeply and with great sadness across the country," Spreng wrote in an impassioned letter to the Atlantic City Press, imploring that attention be paid.

Really, it's been a steady decline since the 1970s, when clubs like the Ramrod, Chester, Chez Paree and Rendezvous helped make New York Avenue the epicenter of the city's gay culture, a phenomenon significant enough to merit a 29-page scholarly article in the Journal of Urban History. ("This area shook, boogied, and rocked while the rest of the city rotted away from neglect.")

Spreng recalls heading to New York Avenue and its dozens of bars, hotels and clubs as a teenager three decades ago. "Don't get off the jitney at New York Avenue. That's where the fags are," he said, remembering the warnings. Then, the gay beach was in front of the Claridge. These days, it's in Rehoboth Beach, Del.

The opening this weekend of a new gay club on the other side of town has provided some solace. But Studio Six - with dancing, a champagne-and-cigar room, strippers, live performances, and theme parties for virtually every holiday - is not easily duplicated.

"It's a shame," said Gary Hill, who, with his partner, Atlantic City Councilman John Schultz, owned the Studio Six complex for more than 35 years before selling it to Sherwood Management.

"Every owner makes their own decisions," Hill said. "It's very difficult being an independent club owner, competing against an industry with millions of dollars spent on marketing and promotion."

Sherwood Management did not respond to requests for comment. The conventional wisdom in town, however, is that Pinnacle Entertainment, which is building a mega-casino on the nearby site of the recently imploded Sands Casino Hotel, might eventually purchase the property.

Pinnacle spokeswoman Carmen E. Gonzales said that "at this time, that parcel is not in our plans."

The city now has a handful of after-hours clubs in casinos, but for years, Studio Six was the only place to hit after 4 a.m. During Miss America Week, the place shook with hairdressers, contestants' relatives, and even the occasional rebellious Miss A competitor. Kate Shindle, Miss America 1998, showed up for Miss'd America the day after she relinquished her tiara.

"When the Russian circus would come in, all the Russians would come in," Hill said. "It was where the entertainers were entertained. . . . Peter Allen, Divine, Jennifer Holliday, Vanessa Williams, Michael Feinstein, Donna Summer, Bruce Willis. From fighters to politicians. There was nowhere to go after their show."

All is not lost. Larry Belfer, owner of Caligula and some of the city's other gentlemen's clubs, saw an opportunity and hired Studio Six's staff of bartenders, managers and drag queens for a new gay club, West Side Lounge, at 511 N. Arkansas Ave., on the edge of a residential neighborhood, tucked behind the Convention Center. The place was to open officially with a Halloween bash last night.

And after an 18-month period during which he tended bar at Studio Six and performed his show only three times, Spreng has been persuaded to revive his weekly stage show, Mortimer's Cafe, on Sunday nights.

To read Mortimer Spreng's blog entry on the day Studio Six closed, go to http://go.philly.com/studiosixEndText