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Hurles (aka Old Reliable) picked up hustlers for his photography (you can read more about this at his site The Old Crow was just the beginning of a string of gay and trans haunts in the neighborhood, including the Club Turk Baths and Bulldog Baths at 130 Turk Street, the Blue and Gold, a piano bar which was next door to Aunt Charlie's at 136 Turk Street, the Sound of Music at 162 Turk (which started as a drag bar and became a punk club) and Gene Compton's Cafeteria (where the transgender riots occurred in 1966) at the corner of Turk and Taylor. Jack Fritscher pointed out to me that the Old Crow was a "hustler dive" where David R. The roots of this community go very far back, at least to 1935 when the Old Crow (at 962 Market Street) opened two blocks from where Aunt Charlie's is today. It's no surprise that Aunt Charlie's would be involved in these sort of community events and would be interested in preserving history, because the bar has been active in community work, and was part of a larger gay community in the Tenderloin which has become much smaller in the last decade. Aunt Charlie's hosted parties both in celebration of the street naming and the exhibition, and Felicia's work is readily noticeable as you walk in the bar, with the Transgender flag flying proudly at the door. Both the street naming and the exhibit were due in large part to the work of Felicia Elizondo, who performed with Vicki at Aunt Charlie's as Felicia Flames. On June 26, the block the bar sits on was re-named "Vicki Mar Lane" in honor of the longtime performer Vicki Marlane, who ended her 50-year performance career at Aunt Charlie's.Įarlier this year, the GLBT Historical Museum hosted the exhibition Vicki Marlane: I'm Your Lady, which celebrated Vicki's life and performance career. This has been something of a banner year for the bar. From then on, it was our joke that we knew where the name of the Tenderloin came from. After a fun show, we were leaving, and this being the Tenderloin a guy approached us with steaks that look like they had "fallen off a truck." He asked us if we wanted to buy some. One night early last decade, I took a friend from Minnesota to Aunt Charlie's. I've been coming here since the late 1990s, and it has always functioned as something of a litmus test: if I bring my out-of-town guests here and they have a good time, then I know they're my kind of people. Aunt Charlie's has always been kind of an iconic bar for me.