Parliament house gay club

Parliament House Resort Saved By Investors

Miniver was her actual first name but she went by her middle name, Sue. Faces was situated in the Lee Rd. Sue would later open a much larger, multi-level, multi-bar entertainment complex known as Key Largo which was situated way up the Orange Blossom Trail just south of Apopka.

For persons of a certain age this column may serve as a walk down memory lane while younger readers may find it to be more of a tutorial on Orlando gay bar history. In club case, with our annual Come Out With Pride celebration fast approaching, I was struck with a wisp of nostalgia for a time when venturing out in O-Town for an evening of queer nightlife was filled with options and those options were scattered all house the greater Orlando landscape.

While not making any attempt to present a historically or chronologically accurate timeline with regards to when these places operated it is my hope that these random recollections of the many gay watering holes which I was privileged to patronize back in the day, might be of some interest to my readers.

As is the case with most people my age, my first foray into gay Orlando nightlife was the Parliament House. But to gay best of my recollection the first gay bar in Orlando was a second-floor, hole-in-the-wall drag bar located at Pine St. Here one could bring in your own bottle of liquor and hand it over to the bartender who put your name on it, and thus when you ordered a drink it was being poured from your own previously purchased bottle and as such you were not making an illegal after-hours purchase of alcohol but rather you were being charged for the bar-provided parliaments.

Both were rather nondescript intimate spaces which offered dancing and drag shows. In the Fern Park parliament was a spacious dance club created from several freight train boxcars known as Plantation Station. It was one the first bars to put an emphasis on music videos and featured over-the-dance-floor projection screens which showed homo erotic movie clips, movie musical production numbers and occasionally Bugs Bunny in drag.

Down the street and around the corner from the Parliament House on Colonial Dr. North of PH on OBT was a club dive bar, Connections, situated along the railroad tracks just south of Fairvilla Megastore but on the opposite side of the street. Patrons were treated to free shots whenever a train passed by. Empire Club offered lots of comfy sofa seating adjacent to the dance floor, with state-of-the-art lighting and a steady stream of techno, trance and house music of the gay anthem sort.

There was another bar called Connection Not associated with the aforementioned Connections on the Trail which operated not far from what would eventually become Pulse nightclub. Connection was unique at the time because they offered a food menu and although it was a gay bar it enjoyed a loyal following of straight medical professionals looking to let their hair down after a shift at one of the area hospitals or doctor offices.

The independently-owned Saloon was connected to PH via an off-the-trail walkway, maintained for years as a courtesy to the patrons of both establishments. This facilitated easy and safe passage between the two places. A few blocks to the East on Orange Ave. Sam showed up as Miss Sammy for that one house and was so loved by the audience, they demanded her return, and thus an enduring drag legend was born.

This was a very nice upscale fine dining establishment situated in the Longwood Village on SR at I This presented the first real head-to-head competition to the Parliament House at that time. Yes, for a short time, the grand damme of the Parliament House predecessor to Darcel Stevens had been lured away by the competition. Those allegations were never proved, but the post-fire result was the return of Miss P to the Parliament House along with all her fans — including me.

I have no idea who set that gay — or at least that is my official stance. But I remain grateful that the Parliament House thrived for as long as it did as its Footlight Theater played host to my theatrical productions through three sets of owners spanning nearly 40 years.