Making Room for Alternatives : Clubs: Metropolis in Irvine offers gays an upscale, classy place to party on Sundays.

A line of 20 people has formed outside Metropolis in Irvine, despite rain that drums the pavement. Inside the club, the tyrannical disco beats force every conversation to be animated by gestures, and words are mouthed in exaggeration, like big yawns.

The club is filling up fast on this Sunday, perhaps because of the repressive rain, which has ended the last three weekends on a similar soggy note. From the restless crowd, someone approaches, a guy with dark hair and a big smile. He is a perfect cross between Ricky Nelson and Ricky Ricardo--clean-cut and boyish, masking an urbane Latin gregariousness. He denies his outgoing manner is the result of the Pink Triangle beer being hawked at the bar.

“This is the nicest gay bar I’ve ever been to,” says John, a twentysomething who gave only his first name. “And I mean I’ve been to a lot of clubs, a lot of clubs.”

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John’s attention drifts to the dance floor, which is beginning to swell beyond capacity. “In my teens, I went to a lot of seedy clubs because that’s all there were. But now, it’s like, they aren’t so seedy anymore. You can come here and not feel like you are banished to the seedy part of town and have to use the back door, or feel like someone is waiting to beat you up.”

He pulls the straw from his drink with clean white teeth, sets the glass down and heads for the catwalk that straddles the air above the landscape of mostly male bodies. He figures he can better survey the Metropolis from that vantage point.

Since it opened in a prosaic shopping plaza across from UC Irvine in September, 1992, Metropolis has been a pillar of Orange County night life six nights a week. It’s known for its diversity: an 18-and-older “Thrive” crowd on Tuesday, hip-hop night on Wednesday, progressive house music featuring deejays revered on the international scene on Thursday, a “Pop-Rock n Espanol” that blasts “baby rock” on Friday, and mainstream on Saturday night. And on Sunday, Metropolis becomes “Magazine: The Club” for gay and lesbians interested in an upscale, eclectic alternative.

Magazine producer Joe Mozdzen says the club razes the stereotype of the gay bar as a sticky, beery place haunted by lonely, aging men.

Metropolis offers a main dance floor flanked by seven pool tables and a full sushi bar. There is the Venus Room, which has another bar and an intimate stage where the Fetish Boys strip in front of its mammoth mirror, and in the Back Room--a disco-within-a-disco--deejays pump music from the ‘70s and ‘80s under a wisp of laser lights and “massage boys” occasionally offer free rubdowns.

A narrow stairway in a very dark corner leads to a voyeuristic seating area above the main dance floor, and the catwalk, a relic of a former occupant, provides an unapologetic view of the entire scene, including, on this Sunday, live tribal drumming by Shaheen.

The look is a mixture of the old and new, a blend of soft and hard concrete, metal and molded, curvaceous plywood surfaces. “We wanted it to be sort of ‘Blade Runner’-esque,” says Mozdzen, 33, a marketing designer who specializes in restaurants.

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“Gay night” has found its niche in clubland, says Mozdzen, who was hired to promote the club just before the December holidays when it was nearly a year old. He says the name comes from its penchant for ever-changing moods, much like a magazine has varying themes and sections from one issue to the next. He promises no two Sundays will ever be the same.

“In Europe, they’ve been doing a gay night forever,” he says. “It started here just after Clinton was elected, when his Administration was bringing some optimism to the country. The political correctness of it all really made it possible.”

Metropolis seemed a likely place to host a gay night. It’s owned by brothers Jon and Gregg Hanour, who created the Shark Club in Costa Mesa in 1990, a classy billiard hall that bucks another stereotype--that of the pool hall as a dingy, smoky, vacuous asylum for society’s dark side.

Since Metropolis is across the street from UCI, it predictably tends to draw the student population. Two of them sit quietly together away from the dance floor, as near the quieter billiard area as they can get without getting cued. “You can’t talk at most clubs,” says one, a 23-year-old drama student.

“I’ve met one person at a bar, and it was quite disappointing,” he says.

The club has a Tim Burton-like atmosphere--sort of industrial-Gothic-modern--that varies throughout, he says. “Most gay bars are little more than empty rooms,” he asserts.

Magazine attracts its share of women, too, both straight and lesbian, Mozdzen says.

He notes the club will begin devoting the Back Room to them on Feb. 5. It will be called Centerfold, playing off the magazine theme, a club-within-a-club featuring female deejays and dancers. Centerfold will take over the Back Room on the first Sunday of every month, says Mozdzen, and if it’s popular, it may get its own night.

“This sort of marks a new era in gay clubs,” says Chris Vollentine, 28, of Tustin, who drops by Magazine about every other week. “It’s interesting to have a mostly heterosexual staff at a gay club and that they are so friendly.”

Vollentine is producer of “Gay Radio,” an hourlong weekly broadcast out of Santa Ana that offers a variety of talk and music.

“Gays leave better tips because they have more disposable income because they don’t have children,” he offers, risking the perpetuation of yet another stereotype.

He says the club is the classiest in Southern California, a digression from the typical bars often banished to industrial neighborhoods, where even the police would hassle patrons. In fact, says co-owner Gregg Hanour, “the police say they wish every night was gay night at Metropolis, because it’s so mellow.” A portion of the night’s proceeds go to the Gay and Lesbian Services Center of Orange County, he says.

“We try to give people a place to go that is legitimate, like what we did at the Shark Club,” he says. “Focusing attention on a group of people or a cause that is usually ignored makes it more acceptable, makes it not scary anymore. It gives people a broader perspective.

“We feel like we can help elevate the culture--that in a very small way we’re doing something positive for populations that don’t get much attention,” Hanour says.