He was at Olly’s to sing karaoke. “It’s my only real passion in life, to be honest,” he said. “More than anything, it’s the only thing that keeps me happy. Everything else is just trivial.” He was separated from his life partner, “until [they] can get his shit together or I can get him to go to rehab.”
“I want to be better,” he said. “God isn’t going to give me what I want if I keep making the wrong decisions, and I think I’ve had to lose everything to recognize what I have.”
Nursing a drink at the bar in the early evening, Norm Kempf said he’d been coming to Olly’s for 20 years, when he moved up from Evansville for work. (“It was either that or Chicago, and Chicago’s too big,” as he put it.)
“Things have changed — you see both male and female coming in here,” Kempf said. “Looking at sexuality, it’s entirely changed how people view things, and the younger crowd is in tune with that.” He called Downtown Olly’s his second home, and said it does great business on holidays — its Christmas decorations are too fabulous to not have been designed by a queer person, he said, all the better for patrons whose chosen families provide much-needed support around the sometimes-difficult holiday season.
“This is like ‘Cheers.’ Everybody knows everybody,” said Eddie Beagles. Nearly everyone I spoke with echoed these earnest, slightly cornpone sentiments, like Bryan, a truck driver with a thick Hoosier twang who declined to give his surname. “There’s gays, of course, and straights from the neighborhoods; great, cheap food, and cheap liquor.”
“I thought it was dying out, but Indianapolis is waking up,” he continued.
A number of straight people — not just bachelorette parties — go to Olly’s for the same reason that queer people do, to find a sense of community in a place that too often marginalizes those outside of the norm.
Heidi Ho Klum, a straight drag queen, comes every Saturday with his wife, Karen — who came up with the “Ho” in his stage name — to sing karaoke. He kept the habit from her for years until they dressed in drag one Halloween; she encouraged his involvement with the Indy Bag Ladies, a group that has, since 1982, raised money for HIV/AIDS organizations with a yearly drag Halloween gay bar crawl across the city. Heidi and Karen celebrated their 40th anniversary at Olly’s, which provided cakes, roses and balloons, with dinner and drinks on the house.
For Shelli Herald, a straight woman who has tended bar at Olly’s for ten years, working there may have been something like fate: she told me her daughter just came out, and when I ask how working in a queer space prepared her for being a straight parent to a queer child, she told me, “It was almost like I was supposed to be here to be there.” She confided that she sometimes felt like a therapist to the bar’s clientele, “but I’m a cancer and I’m a mom, and I feel like I attract drama because apparently I know how to solve problems.”
Lola Palooza, a Fort Wayne-born drag queen who was emceeing karaoke on the night I visited, was emphatic that Olly’s was “a palace of Hoosier queerdom.”
“If you are here to be kind, have a good time, spend your money and not be a dick, then you’re welcome,” he said. “You have people of the whole scale of gender expressions. A whole mix of people, and they’re interacting and engaging and learning about one another.”
