I Will Survive

n November 8th, J-Wag's Lounge will be celebrating its 32nd year under the ownership of Tommy Stewart. And while the details of the event are being kept mum, suffice it to say, this will be for Stewart a sort of strobe-lit This Is Your Life.

In the past 32 years, Stewart's seen a lot within the walls of what could be Memphis' oldest gay bar. There was the time a woman plowed her car into the building. Then there was the fire, when the bar's patrons refused to budge from their stools, preferring instead to drink amid billowing smoke and argue about which fireman was the cutest. And lots of people remember when Ms. Hettie McDaniel earned herself a 30-day ban from performing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" because her last go-round resulted in flying ashtrays, busted beer bottles, a damaged bar, and a broken wrought-iron table ("It's just the way the song is done," explains McDaniel).

Before the property damage, before he bought the bar from Jimmy Wagner (after whom the bar is named), Stewart owned a teen club. When that venture failed, Stewart, who was married with a child on the way, was weighing his options. "I just decided I should get into something a little more stable," he recalls. "So what the hell did I do? I opened a bar -- that's real stable. But it turned out to be real stable for me. I knew nothing about the bar business when I went in. I never hung out in bars. But I looked at it and thought, `I could get up there and open beer bottles and talk to customers and be nice.' I figured that would be a good way to make a living and I did it."

When the then-30-year-old Stewart took over on November 1, 1965, J-Wag's was a college bar, attracting students from the Southern College of Optometry across the street and from the other schools, too. For the first year, Stewart says, he worked seven days a week and never took off, except for four hours on the day his son was born. He managed to get the bar paid off in a year. Yet, Stewart says that with the low prices and seasonal business associated with a college bar, J-Wag's was making only so much money. So, approximately 10 years after he bought the place, Stewart turned J-Wag's gay.

That J-Wag's conversion roughly coincided with Stewart's own coming out is, he says, mostly coincidental. "I was doing a ton of business with the college crowd, but I wasn't making a whole lot of money because I kept my prices so low," he says. "When I turned it to a gay bar, I could go with the same prices that the other gay bars had, and I made more money. Maybe, too, it was coming out for me, a way of saying who I am." While Stewart was saying who he was, he also had to tell his customers what the bar was going to be. As bartender Larry Mann describes it, the exchange went smoothly. "[Stewart] said, `As of tomorrow, it's going to be a gay bar. They said, `You can't do that.' He said, `Yes, I can.'"

Of course, it wasn't as simple as that, but it wasn't that much more complicated either. Another gay-bar owner helped Stewart with the process by sending over two of his bartenders who would help spread the word. "It went from there," says Stewart. And with the new clientele came a not-so-unexpected accessory. "When I first turned it gay," says Stewart, "I had a problem with a police officer -- one. He would come to the bar and walk through the building and pick up customers' drinks and smell of them." Stewart says he confronted the cop one evening and told him, "`I'm not going to be harassed by you or by anybody else." The officer responded by having two police cruisers appear on the scene and give every car parked at the bar a ticket. Stewart gathered all the tickets and delivered them the next day to the city attorney's office, and then he called the police department's internal-affairs unit. That evening the officer showed up at J-Wag's once again, but this time, according to Stewart, considerably more contrite.

Over the years, Stewart's crowned many Miss J-Wag's and Mr. Leathers. He also lost his 21-year-old son, Mike, who died in a car accident. He's seen the dramatic change in gay bars since the rise of AIDS, and he says that drag queens aren't what they used to be. Now the owner of the Autumn Street Pub, he gave J-Wag's II a shot for a while and ran the disco Reflections for five years, while his downtown club Zippers remained open only 45 days after clogged traffic and a gun in his face convinced him it wasn't worth it. He calls the "highlight of my life" his involvement in founding and nurturing Aid to End AIDS Committee, a predecessor of Friends for Life.

Two years ago, Stewart says he realized that he'd spent half his life at J-Wag's. And, yes, he says, he's thought about leaving: "There were times if somebody had walked up and given me $50, I think I would have sold it. I've been that disgusted." Looking back, Stewart can't help but be a little reflective and a little impressed with the longevity of J-Wag's. "I guess over the years I've either done whatever I've done right, or I've been extremely lucky."

J-Wag's 32nd Anniversary Party
10:30 p.m., November 8th
no cover charge; bartenders' and drag queens' tips to benefit Loving Arms