Nights of the Weird

There is no better way to begin my review of Seattle gay nightlife than at the beginning, when we walked into our first bar of the weekend to be greeted by a flash-mob brass band.

That set the tone for what has to be the quirkiest big city I've ever visited.

We all know Seattle as the place of coffee, salmon, Microsoft and grunge. But as a major American city with a well-known gayborhood (Capitol Hill, just northeast of downtown), I figured its nightlife would be pretty standard.

Not a chance.

From two different sources we heard that there were three places worth visiting: The Lobby and Purr, for drinks, and The Cuff, for dancing.

We walked into The Lobby at about 10:30 on a Friday night. The place was packed, with a mix of gay men, lesbians and straight people, most of whom seemed to have been there since the happy hour ended at 7 p.m. It's a storefront bar, the main level decorated in vaguely 19th-century style, with a mezzanine balcony on three sides that is equally vaguely South Beach-modern. We got our beers -- one nice thing about Seattle is that every bar has a good selection of local craft brews, usually priced in increments of a quarter -- and had barely settled in to take in the scene when a group of people descended from the balcony, pulled trumpets and trombones out of their clothing and proceeded to cavort wildly around, through the crowd and on the bar, for a good ten minutes.

What that was about, I have no idea, but it seemed that much of the crowd expected it -- when the band left, so did they, and the place emptied out. Ears ringing, we decided to try our luck at Purr, just around the corner.

And were greeted by more local character, in the form of the Seattle chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence ...

... a person carrying his, um, companion around with him ...

... and also an amusing sign above one of the bars ...

But at Purr we also had one of the best evenings we've ever had in a bar, falling easily into conversation with many different people: Seattleites are friendly and nice, and it seemed they just wanted to be friendly, without having an ulterior motive.

This was a youngish crowd, almost all white, and generally quite attractive. Capitol Hill seems also to be a center of straight nightlife, and in the streets around Purr, spilling out of the straight bars, were many examples of the stereotypical Seattle look (flannel shirts, shaggy hair, poor shaving habits), but the gay people looked much more conventional, at least when they weren't in drag or carrying dolls around.

We could have stayed all night, but your intrepid reporter wanted to check out The Cuff as well. Big mistake -- the place was empty on a Friday night. But with a local friend in the lead, we gave it another chance the next night.

Yet more weirdness ensued. The Cuff clearly wants, at some level, to be a leather bar, but it isn't happening. The club has essentially two rooms, a big barroom where you enter that contains people who look like they belong in a leather bar, but aren't wearing leather; and beyond that, a half-set of stairs down, a dance floor filled with people who wouldn't look out of place at New York's Club 57, or the Sip 'n Twirl on Fire Island. We naturally gravitated to the latter, despite what I'd delicately describe as music for people with a short attention span, and were having fun dancing with old acquaintances from New York and our new friends from Purr when, at 1:20a, they announced last call at the bar.

And then, at 1:35, announced that the bar had closed and that you had 15 minutes to finish your drinks.

And then, at 1:50, sent a burly barback through the dance floor, taking drinks right out of people's hands.

Our visit to Seattle had concluded as weirdly as it had begun.