One by one, the businesses along the Central Avenue corridor in Happy Holler are falling like vanquished chess pieces, swept off the board by the conquering forces of time and gentrification.
That irascible rook piece that was Raven Records and Rarities went last month, and Richard Cameron winced when he saw it topple. He understands the reasoning behind the decision by owners Jay Nations and Jack Stiles to close up shop, but for Cameron, it’s another sign that the game is a losing one. On the rare occasion he rises above later-in-life bouts of anxiety over large crowds, he can step out the front door of his own business, Club XYZ, and look up and down a block that’s almost unrecognizable from the scruffy little thoroughfare it was 20 years ago.
Rising rent prices, unpredictable socio-political turmoil, unexpected pandemic-enforced closures … he and his team have weathered them all over the past two decades, and he still has some fight left in him, he tells BLANK Newspaper during a recent interview.
“I’m certainly not doing it to get rich, because this is the last business I would suggest to anybody that they should enter,” he says with a wry chuckle. “I have told people — and I don’t know how it comes across to them — that if I happen to die and I still have the key to this bar in my pocket, I want you to know that I’ve died pissed off!
“I would like to pass the key to somebody else eventually. That’s the hope, but that’s also counting the chickens before they hatch. So for right now, I’m going to keep going.”
And that determination, more than anything else, is what Knoxville’s LGBTQ+ community needs to believe in. For many, Club XYZ is a port in a storm, a safe harbor in which they can be their true selves, a place of drag queen extravagance or a first date icebreaker or an anniversary celebration.
Whether it’s a destination or a place they happen to drive by to and from other parts of Knoxville, the Progressive Pride flag out front and the line of customers to get in on weekend nights is reassurance that however much longer that chess match will last, the queen still stands.
Summoned by the rainbow
The club’s origin was a rather inauspicious one, but in 2004, 11 years before the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Obergfell v. Hodges would legalize gay marriage. While gay nightclubs and bars have existed on the fringes of Knoxville’s nightlife scene since the 1960s, and public reception of the LGBTQ+ community was growing more tolerant by the early ’00s, there was (and remains) a moralistic opposition to openly LGBTQ+ businesses … but the rainbow on the side of the building’s awning caught Cameron’s eye.
He was living on Scott Avenue at the time with his partner, having moved north from the Atlanta area where he’d put together a modest comedy and drag career. Doing comedy felt ghoulish after Sept. 11, he says, but in moving to Knoxville, he continued working for Starbucks at its then-flagship location on the Cumberland Avenue “Strip” and getting involved in the Knoxville club scene.
“I remember the awning was purple, and they painted a rainbow flag on the side of it, and when I stopped by, they were doing construction and digging it out from the prior business that was in there,” Cameron says. “Well, I put in a resume, and I got a job interview.”
He applied to be a bartender, but the bar manager at the time dismissed his experience as a barista as incompatible (“As a barista at Starbucks, that was insulting!” he adds), but offered him the position as the new venue’s show director. As Raz Richards, Cameron was already a well-known entity in the drag community, and so he began to organize regular drag shows at Club XYZ. It was a lot of work, but not in the conventional sense, he points out: Drag queens are selective in where they take their talent, and a small bar with no reputation was a gamble some weren’t willing to take unless Cameron personally vouched for Club XYZ. He did, and over the next couple of years, it found a place among similar venues such as the Rainbow Club West, the Carousel and Bourbon Street.
The owner, however, didn’t rely on Club XYZ to make a living, and when it became too large a drain on his time and finances, he opted to sell. Cameron and his then-partner stepped up and offered to take it over. They paid too much for it — their attorney said so at the time, Cameron jokes, and then he laughs even harder at the idea that, in the beginning, they purchased the bar to provide Cameron retirement income when he came of age.
“The idea of anybody buying anything like that for retirement doesn’t know what they’re doing!” he says.
Retirement planning may not have been Cameron’s forte, but running a bar? He had a few ideas about that.
“We kind of figured that we could bring our experiences, especially with living in Atlanta where I worked in a lot of different bars and there were a plethora of them to go to,” he says. “We traveled. We got out and went to a lot of bars in a lot of cities, and we thought if we brought a big-city vibe to a little neighborhood bar, it might make a difference.”
They hit the ground running in 2006, intent on taking Club XYZ in a new direction — including some mainstream ones. Rather than relying strictly on word-of-mouth and LGBTQ+ online bulletin boards and websites, Cameron reached out to Metro Pulse, Knoxville’s independent alt-weekly newspaper, and got the club’s entertainment listings printed. They remodeled, getting rid of some decorations, moving the deejay booth, adding a fresh vibe to a club that felt both exotic and familiar.
“We just wanted to show the community that everyone was welcomed, and that’s still our current: ‘A place for everyone,’” he says. “We want to make sure we’re inclusive for everyone, because you can put all your eggs in the queer basket, but it ain’t gonna make no money. We knew we had to get out and show people that everyone was welcome at Club XYZ, and then make it a destination because of our drag shows.”
Since 1981, Cameron has been involved in drag, both as Raz Richards the performer, and as a behind-the-scenes organizer. Drag shows, he knew, involve so much more than a parade of queens, one after the other, onto a stage to showcase their talents. A true drag show cultivates an atmosphere that permeates the entire establishment, and that vibe is what creates a returning customer base.
“I was able to put together casts, to do shows, and I knew I was going to start doing a pageant, because that was branding. That’s how you do it,” he says. “By maintaining and doing those things, and then learning and adapting as we go, we developed something that people knew what they were going to get. They may have been going to see a certain drag queen, but they were also going to get a show, and they were going to get a bartender who was really friendly, and they were going to get the whole experience.”
Cultivating an experience
That experience continues to evolve. Security cameras were installed a few years ago, which went a long way in weeding out bar staff with a penchant for helping themselves to the till, as well as customers who wanted to use his club as a base of operations for illicit activities.
“If we catch somebody selling drugs, or hustling for something, we throw them out,” he says. “If there’s someone hustling drinks, we throw them out. Anybody who’s a detriment to business, we throw them out and don’t let them come back. They’re banned for life, and that’s one of the things I’m very proud of, because now we have a reputation with the city, the county, the state and the fire department, and they all know us as a law-abiding bar that operates with full transparency. If they need something for us, we’ll lay it out there.”
During the COVID shutdown of area businesses and bars, Cameron and his team did a deep clean of the club and decided to make it a non-smoking establishment. As recently as last week, he was there during the day to supervise cleanout of a blockage in the air conditioning drain pipe. When the technician remarked that he needs a wider pipe, Cameron could only roll his eyes. He’s overseen a lot of modifications and held on to the lease even as the property itself has changed ownership several times (Daniel Schuh, who owns the two Happy Holler event spaces Relix and Brookside, is now his landlord), but the original work was before his time, he says.
“I’m proud of what we’ve become. The fact is, it’s a business that employs over 15 people, and back when Jack (Rogers) owned it, the Knoxville Barber College was where Brookside is now,” he says. “In talking to the instructors at the school back then, I got the feeling that when they put the bar in the building next door to them that they didn’t think it would last very long.”
And it may not have, had Cameron not taken it over. Eventually, he inherited sole ownership, and as the master of ceremonies behind the scenes and the mistress of ceremonies on the stage, Club XYZ made a statement that still stands today: It’s a place for LGBTQ+ clientele, but anyone who wants a drink or a good time is welcomed to join in. Cameron compares it to a famous Reagan-era economics concept: trickle-down, he says.
“It really is a trickle-down effect, because I’m the one on stage, welcoming everybody, and that transfers to other cast members, and it transfers to our bar staff,” he says. “As you adapt over time, you realize there’s not a lot of turnover, especially when you get lucky in finding people who are nice behind the bar.”
That welcoming vibe has made Club XYZ an oasis, of sorts, for a marginalized community that often questions whether more hetero-normative presenting bars and clubs are safe for them. At Club XYZ, that’s something they don’t have to worry about, Cameron says, and for the trans community in particular, he’s proud of that.
“There are patrons who will go to other bars, but whenever they go to Club XYZ, they know they’ve got a place they can come in and be themselves,” he says. “I’ve been in the bar myself, and I’ve seen it happen. Someone comes it, let’s just say a certain type, and he looks like a truck driver. And he’ll come in and look around and walk out, and a few minutes later, he may come in with a skirt on, or a wig, or a little bit of lipstick, or high-heeled shoes, and he’ll sit down there, and he knows he’s welcomed.
“People know that if they come to the bar, they’re coming to a place where it’s safe. That’s so important, especially for a small community like the trans community, because they talk to each other. And that goes back to how we operate, because there’s a certain way everything is done there, from the way you approach the bar to the way you order a drink. New customers learn it real quick, because if they don’t, they don’t last.”
That wasn’t always the case at other LGBTQ+ establishments, at least not in Cameron’s experiences. The original Carousel was an institution for the gay community, and as a performing drag queen, he did a number of shows there after its transformation into the Carousel 2 in the early 1980s.
“But it still wasn’t the safest place to go,” he says. “I’ve seen drag queens get stabbed with a fork in the leg, and if you were sitting outside, you sometimes had to dodge Coke bottles or smoke bombs. They did what they could, but security in our bars wasn’t a big thing.”
Being removed from campus and the downtown area helped Club XYZ to avoid similar tensions with malcontents and troublemakers. Club XYZ was a destination; there wasn’t a lot of passing traffic, at least until Happy Holler began its erstwhile development as a hip neighborhood, which meant that even those who stepped out to get some air didn’t have to cringe every time a car drove past.
But it wasn’t until the Pulse massacre that Cameron got serious about the club’s security.
Navigating uncertain waters
On June 12, 2016, 29-year-old Omar Mateen shot and killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando, Florida. That was in the early a.m. hours on a Sunday; that entire week, Cameron racked his brain for something to say at the following Saturday’s drag show. Already, WBIR-TV, Knoxville’s NBC affiliate, had interviewed him for his take on the tragedy: “I’m watching my worst nightmare play out on the news,” they quoted him as saying.
“That Saturday, I’m just going over my head, ‘What am I going to do?’ Because we’re a happy place! When you walk through those doors, whatever’s happening outside stays outside,” he says. “I don’t think it hit me until I walked out of that curtain and did my song, and I started my monologue, and I said, ‘Something horrible has happened … so let’s do something we’ve never done before.’
“I said, ‘Let’s make a whole lot of noise, so that those 40-something people just might hear us. Let’s cheer them on. Let’s remember them by making noise!’ And that did it. The walls rattled. The floors vibrated. It was so loud, you could feel it in your body, in your heart. That was a cathartic moment, when we were all in unison, joining together, and that meant so much to me.”
Afterward, Cameron invested in those aforementioned security cameras, and he organized safety training for his staff. His regulars look out for new patrons, and new patrons are quickly acclimated to the Club XYZ way of doing things. Whether or not those security measures have prevented a similar tragedy from taking place at his club, he doesn’t know, but in 2024, as the trans community and drag queens find themselves targeted by the far right, he’s glad they’re in place.
For one thing, they protect the customers; for another, they protect his business, as they did a few years ago, when a patron at his bar left Club XYZ and caused an interstate fatality. Questions arose over whether she was overserved at Club XYZ, security camera footage was used to show that she came to the bar for a single beer, then left.
Club XYZ, he says, doesn’t overserve. Neither do their neighbors. The business occupants of Happy Holler, he says, look out for one another, and if a new business doesn’t honor that unspoken agreement, the others will speak up.
“We’ve had our share of DUIs, but we take keys. We offer rides. We do everything the state asks us to do, and if you come up in here and you’re slurring your words or you can’t walk, we’re not going to serve you,” he says. “I think that’s the other prevailing attitude of Club XYZ: We’re looking out for you, straight, gay or otherwise.”
That professionalism has earned the club a reputation that’s unparallelled. “Club XYZ” is often the response to discreet inquiries to hotel valets, Uber drivers and others in positions of service for a reputable gay club, and the value of that sort of word of mouth, he says, can’t be overstated.
That, and not getting involved in politics, especially during a time when LGBTQ+ issues are hot-button topics.
“We have to stay out of politics. If we start doing that, it’s just asking for a whole bunch of trouble,” he says. “That’s one reason why I have steered away from putting Pride flags out. I personally supported Indya Kincannon (for mayor of Knoxville), and I let her come in and do a meet-and-greet, but that’s the closest I’ve ever come to getting political.”
Still … navigating politics, personalities, personnel problems and the simple-but-Herculean task of managing a club in 2024 brings with it no small measure of frustration and regret. Cameron is clear on one thing: Yes, Club XYZ is for sale … for the right price.
“I’ve had buyers want to come in and change everything and do it their way, and I just say no,” he says. “I’ve invested a lot of time in this vision to see it to where it’s working, and I don’t want to see somebody mess it up. The last person interested (in buying) came in and said all the right things, and had some really good ideas, and with my CPA, we came up with a valuation that wasn’t much more than what we originally paid for it.
“He looked at he numbers and just said, ‘I don’t want to pay that much.’ And it’s really not that much! It’s certainly not what I think it’s worth. But one of the things I try to stress, and what you can’t put a price on, is the reputation we have for being a safe bar. A good bar.”
Twenty years. It was enough to get him emotional during the recent anniversary celebration, held Aug. 23-25, when Miss Club XYZ 2024 was crowned (Anastasia Alexander, who takes over from Miss Club XYZ 2023, Nova Jynah). Thinking back on all of the pageants under its roof, and all of the queens on its stage, and all of the clientele who one night walked out for the last time and never came back … it was a lot.
It was a “great” moment, he says with a chuckle.
“My CPA likes to say I’m on my own cycle, because every few months, or every certain time of the year, I’ll be like, ‘I’m done with it! I’m fed up! I want out!’ And then two weeks later I’m going, ‘This is great!’” he says. “It’s hard to say what my plans are, because I remember five years ago thinking, ‘We made it to 15! Maybe 20 years is attainable!’ And now that we’ve reached 20 years … who knows? When you get to those milestones in life, it makes you reflect, and we’ve got a lot to reflect on. A lot of good things that I’m very proud of.”
