On the final night of Scandals’ goodbye run, music blasted and lights flashed in the nightclub as people danced their way through the end of an era.
The legendary nightclub, which was a safe haven for LGBTQ patrons, had its final curtain call in early March after announcing it would not renew its lease in the historic Grove Street building in downtown Asheville.
Linda Oakleaf was one of many people waiting in the alleyway outside the nightclub, ready to party. She said she has been going to Scandals since the ‘90s.
“There's a lot of these institutions that are going, and it's really sad,” she said.
Oakleaf and her wife have been married for 21 years and have two kids, so she doesn’t go out as often but said she is still sad about the closure of a place so rooted in LGBTQ history.
“I came out in 1987, and it has never stopped being fun to walk in a room and look around and be like, "Oh, look, everybody's queer,” she said. “Like that's irreplaceable."
The club left behind a treasure trove of LGBTQ+ history, from drag shows and dance parties to benefits for nonprofits like the Western North Carolina AIDS Project.
Originally founded in 1982 by the late Art Fryar, a community organizer, entrepreneur and trained classical dancer, Scandals served as a place for people to dance, drink, see drag shows and get politically involved.
The landscape of Asheville’s nightlife scene has shifted since Scandals first opened, with an abundance of gay-friendly bars throughout the city. But in the early days, the club was one of only a few safe places for LGBTQ community members to go.
“During that time, a lot of queer folks were just constantly carrying fear and hiding themselves and as soon as you walked in that door, you got to drop it,” Joanna Knowles, a former Scandals bartender, said. “To celebrate ourselves and to celebrate each other.”
Knowles first went to Scandals as a 19 year-old. As a young adult in need of a safe place to dance with her girlfriend, she appreciated the environment Fryar created.
“It was so much more than a dance club, and Art was so much more than a businessman,” she said.
“In a world where much of society was saying, ‘You're dirty, You're disgusting,’ Art was saying, ‘You're gorgeous. Here's a spotlight’,” she recalled. “When things were scary and hard, he said, ‘Hey, let's dance.’”
Drag queens also found a safe space at Scandals. Local legends like Celeste Starr and Aurora Borealis performed for decades at the club, and it was a destination for out-of-state talent.
In an oral history interview, drag queen Faytriana Brown recalled performing at Scandals as a young adult.
“The atmosphere in Asheville is like no other I've ever experienced. It was open arms and welcoming and encouraging. The brother and sisterhood of it all, it was just amazing,” she said. “Then I got on the show at Scandals, and the rest is history.”
Brown went on to win state and regional drag titles. She credited her experience at Scandals as propelling her career to new heights.
“Coming to Asheville, I got polished,” she said. “Because to be on the show at Scandals you had to have fresh tights, you had to have body, you had to have nails, you had to be together.”
A place to ‘mobilize’
The influence of the club extended beyond entertainment and into activism, Knowles said.
As a young adult, Knowles vividly remembers a night at the club when Fryar made everyone stop dancing so they could meet Leni Sitnik, an activist who would go on to become Asheville’s first woman mayor in 1997.
“Art got up on the stage and got us all wild children to stop dancing and he brought Leni Sitnik up,” she said. “And somehow he magically got us all to stop and listen, and he asked her questions that were relevant to me and relevant to my friends. He just brought local politics home for me in a way that's never going to go away.”
Fryar ran the club until the early 2000s. In that time, “he really activated queer folks,” Knowles said.
“When he was running the club, we voted in droves,” she said. “It's the first time I as a young person realized that politicians work for us and that we have power and that we have a responsibility to each other to get informed and to show up.”
After Fryar died in 2006, Scandals lost some of its political charge, but it remained a place where people could dance, enjoy drag and be themselves.
While it was identified as a gay club, the influence of Scandals stretched beyond the LGBTQ community.
“It was a safe place,” Asheville resident Jeff Tipton, who has been going to the club since the 80s, recalled. “I'm straight, but I've got a lot of gay friends and this culture embraces the power of vulnerability. And everyone, everyone needs that.”
Preserving the legacy
For Knowles, the magic of Scandals didn’t disappear when the doors closed for the final time.
“It was truly a magical, powerful place,” she said. Knowles is working with Amanda Wray, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at UNC-Asheville, to preserve the night club’s history.
Wray, who runs a regional LGBTQ+ archive, is collecting trophies, plaques, memorials, flyers and other pieces of memorabilia from Scandals.
She plans to photograph the chandelier that hung in the center of the night club for decades.
The chandelier was installed by the club’s owners in memory of Fryar whose drag name was Crystal Chandelier.
“After he passed away, the current owners, I think, were trying to let a whole bunch of very sad and angry folks know that they weren't going to erase Art, and they bought a chandelier to honor him,” Knowles said.
The work of archiving historically queer spaces feels especially important to Wray in the current political environment where some history is being erased at the state and federal level.
“We are in a time where marginalized identities, their histories are really vulnerable,” she said. “Our archive is working directly to counter that sort of thing, that sort of erasure. We're trying really hard to make things as public and open and safe for exploration as possible.”
With Scandals now closed, Knowles said she also hopes that people will remember the joy that the night club brought for so many.
“I hope that's what we carry forward as the building itself closes, that we can hold on to that joy and celebrating ourselves as a way of staying alive.”
Jose Sandoval contributed to this report.
