How’s life as a hard-working girl in Atlanta?

Lily White: A lot of bars have closed up. But we are always going to have wonderful gay entertainment in Atlanta because gay people won’t accept anything less. It’s scattered more than it once was, but scattering is good because it gets different groups of people together. It won’t be long before another large place comes around, like Backstreet, and all the scatterings will come together and there will be a whole new group of entertainers.

Ruby Redd: As long as you have talent and a good personality, you can usually get a gig in the city. Atlanta has a huge gay community and the straight community here enjoys drag. Unfortunately, as progressive as the city is, it’s still very far behind the times compared to other cities. I blame it on being in the Bible Belt. But there’s still a market for us. They haven’t run us out yet. We have one of best gay festivals in the world. It’s one of the few free festivals left.

Lena Lust: Every 10 years it goes through a transitional period. It’s going through one right now. I can see it being better in the long run. The problem is we don’t have as many clubs that we used to have. Development has taken over a lot of our little watering holes. They’re trying to push us out of Midtown but maybe in the future they will have some of our businesses. We have a lot of other businesses which are gay-owned, which we didn’t have 30 years ago. But as far as the nightlife, it has tapered off.