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Dejuan Brundage (left) and Cory Cooper look their best as they prepare to people-watch at Lenox Square mall.
(Photo by Bo Shell)
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HOME > SOVO SCENE > ON THE TOWN
By: RYAN LEE
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Exiting the Guess? store inside Lenox Square mall on a recent Saturday night, Cory Cooper and Dejuan Brundage command attention as they begin their stroll down the mall’s main concourse.
Wearing fabulously color-coded outfits complimented by chic accessories like a Gucci backpack, the two 18-year-olds pass a group of older black men who cease talking in order to exchange telling glances with one another.
Do you see how those boys are dressed, the men seem to say without words, bulging their eyes and nodding their heads in Cooper and Brundage’s direction. They must be gay!
It’s a sequence that repeats itself countless times every Saturday afternoon and evening — heterosexual shoppers at Lenox stopping dead in their tracks to watch (or gawk at) a group of impeccably dressed gay black men.
It’s just before 7 p.m. when Cooper and Brundage exit the Guess? store, just about the time Lenox mall turns into one long, multi-story fashion runway featuring more types of black gay men than most people ever knew existed.
“It’s just a good place to relax, and you know, during the weekend, have a good time and look good,” says Brundage, adding that he and Cooper come people-watching at Lenox at least every other weekend.
On this particular Saturday evening, the boys are already out in full force — groups of muscle queens showing off their massive arms, middle-aged men who actually mix a little shopping in with their mall cruising, and younger gay men like Cooper and Brundage who are eager to experience a part of Atlanta’s gay social scene.
Besides being black and gay, most of the men who frequent Lenox on Saturdays have another thing in common.
“You gotta look good when you go here,” Cooper says with a devilish teenage chuckle. “Because, like, they look at you and stuff, and, like, you know how boys are when they be looking at you!”
Corie Seay moved to Atlanta from Maryville, Tenn., four months ago and works in Lenox’s American Eagle store. He stopped by the mall on his first day in Atlanta — a Saturday — and was blown away by what he saw.
“It’s something extremely different,” says Seay, 20. “Honestly, I was not expecting [the gay population] to be as much as it is, especially in the black community — I didn’t realize that they had such a large pool here.”
Seay, who lives south of the city in College Park, now regularly works on weekends, but he is still amazed at how the mall transforms on Saturday afternoon.
“It’s crazy, it’s like another world — this place really comes to life,” he says. “You know there’s a heavy gay population out there [where I live], but you don’t see it — and it’s like, ‘Oh, this is where they’re at.”
Robert Guy makes the trip to Lenox just about every weekend with his fellow members of the House of Devereaux, a black gay house in Atlanta that is about 12 deep on this trip to Lenox.
“It’s something to do to socialize and meet people, something positive where we won’t get in trouble,” says Guy, an 18-year-old student at Morehouse College. “It can be like a nightclub — a gay nightclub, I guess.”
The Saturday scene at Lenox mall can be as empowering as it is fashionable, particularly the way it showcases a demographic — black gay men — that regularly struggles for visibility. But heterosexual shoppers aren’t the only folks benefiting from the exposure to new types of people.
“I have such a respect for people because they can pull that [flamboyant fashion] off, and wear it, and be so confident, and have a really, ‘I just don’t give a fuck’ attitude,” Seay says. “It’s kind of helping me to develop into the person I want to be, to be more comfortable with myself.
“Because I did grow up in a small town, I was the only person that was out in my high school, actually the only gay person that I knew about, so it’s just opening my eyes,” he adds.
As gay as Lenox mall becomes every Saturday, it’s far from the only place where young gay people like Cooper and Brundage can express and explore their sexual orientation in Atlanta locales that aren’t typically intended for, or thought of, as “gay places.”
Asked what other locations allow him to be openly gay and find community with others, Cooper again chuckles before answering: “Basically, everywhere in Atlanta now.”
The city with a longtime reputation as a mecca for gay men and lesbians is at a point where the gay social scene is no ...
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