As Charlotte Pride celebrates 25 years this weekend, we want to revisit a lesser-known chapter in Charlotte’s queer history.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, the AIDS epidemic was devastating the city’s gay and trans community — and a small gay bar in South End became ground zero in the fight against the virus.
Now, a rare trove of VHS tapes archived by UNC Charlotte offers a vivid glimpse into that bar — Oleens at 1831 South Boulevard — and it cared for its patrons in the face of staggering loss.
The footage was recorded by the bar's DJ, Mike Weant, who often set up a clunky VHS camera in the back of the bar so drag queens could rewatch their performances. The videos were filmed from 1989 through the mid-1990s, and include vivid scenes of joy, grief and a community rallying around its own.
A small bar with a big heart
One tape from 1993 opens on the bar's dimly lit stage. A disco ball spins overhead as a drag queen in florals, polka dots and a towering blonde wig steps to the microphone.
"Good evening, everyone," she says. "Welcome to Oleens!"
The crowd sits in folding chairs clustered around the stage. The night's entertainment: the sixth annual Miss Dollar '98 — Charlotte's "most ugliest" drag queen pageant.
Contestants strut across the stage in teased wigs and blacked-out teeth, with names like Helen Crabby, Sandra Rock Hard, Matilda Kangaroo and Slutsky.
In the audience sits another queen, Judy Jetson, looking thin and frail.
"She's been sick for a little while," the emcee tells the crowd, "but she's back with us kicking and ready to go."
Later in the show, Judy is invited on stage — not to perform, but to sit and hold a box for tips.
"You don't have to do anything," local drag legend Kasey King tells her. "Just sit here and look pretty, baby. That's all drag's about."
As the music plays, the entire bar lines up to drop dollars in the box. Judy hides her face as they hug and kiss her one by one.
Greg Brafford, Oleens' manager at the time, remembers Judy as a young performer in his 20s from Albemarle who had grown too sick to take the stage.
"We knew she was dying too," he says.
A rare record of queer life under AIDS
Though sometimes blurry, the videos may be the clearest picture we have of Charlotte's queer community during the AIDS crisis, when fear, stigma and secrecy kept much of it hidden.
"What you're able to see in these recordings is truly like a community — like a family of people," said Josh Burford, co-founder of Invisible Histories, which documents queer history in the South.
Burford learned of the tapes in 2023, when Brafford, the bar manager, uncovered them in a box in his attic. He contacted Burford, who had the tapes digitized and found hours of footage from inside the bar.
Among the scenes: a 1992 group performance interrupted when a speaker catches fire. The queens never stop dancing, even as staff rush to douse the flames.
"They burned the house down! Did they not?" one performer quipped into the mic.
Another tape from 1989 captured a moment of tenderness between a bedazzled queen, Veronica Lee, and a handsome man in a suit, Lynn Cantrell, who embrace in a slow dance.
Brafford also appears in the videos — often shirtless, mustachioed and weaving through the crowd with drinks.
"That's me," he says with a laugh. "At one time, I was skinny."
Now in a wheelchair, watching the footage from his home in Mount Holly, Brafford points out old friends and recalls the crowd of misfits who packed the bar on Saturday night. There were motorcycle guys, drag queen, lesbians and even straight men who wandered in out of curiosity.
On the tapes, men are dressed in leather, and women in flannel. Nearly everyone seems to have a mullet — and a cigarette.
Oleens' place in history
Oleens was Charlotte's original gay bar, Brafford says. It was founded in 1968 by a woman named Oleen Love.
"She was sweet, she was kind, and she was drunk every night," Brafford says with fondness.
He first visited as a patron in the 1970s and became manager in 1984, just as the AIDS epidemic was reaching full force. When it hit Charlotte, Brafford says, Oleens was hit hard.
"Everybody that got sick died, and at one point, I lost 20 employees over six years," he says. "It was a sad time."
Politicians offered little help. Brafford recalls North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms professing that AIDS wasn't the problem, but rather the cure. So the bar's staff and patrons had no choice but to take matters into their own hands.
They organized an annual benefit called the "Carnival of Hope." It was a blowout weekend of nonstop drag shows, car washes and yard sales that raised thousands of dollars for their friends battling the disease.
Each year, the festivities paused on the final night for a candlelight remembrance, which we can now see in grainy footage.
A legacy of love and loss
On one tape from the mid-90s, Kasey King again appears in a shimmering gold dress. She invites everyone in the bar to light a candle and speak the names of loved ones they'd lost. Nearly everyone in the bar has a name to remember.
"To Ernie and all my friends," says one man into the microphone.
"To Steve Vaughn," says another.
"Hughie Scott."
"Michael Goode."
Someone calls out Judy Jetson's name. Another remembers Brafford's best friend, Lynn Cantrell, who slow-danced with Veronica Lee in 1989.
Watching the tapes today, Brafford's eyes grow cloudy and tears streak his cheeks.
"We did it ourselves as a community," he says. "It was a pretty good thing. Even after all these years, it makes me remember. It makes me remember."
Kasey King died last November at 68. Most of the others captured on the tapes are gone too, and so is the bar. Oleens closed in 2000, and was turned into a Baskin Robbins.
But in Brafford's mind, the bar remains the way it was — the drag queens in sequins, the bikes, the misfits, filling the room with smoke, laughter and stubborn love through one of the city's darkest chapters.
And now, thanks to these tapes, they always will be.
