In Montebello, Producer Puts Down Roots at New Breed of Gay Bar

It’s midnight in Montebello. The four-lane boulevard that looks like any other in this flat, sprawling landscape is empty. But in an anonymous strip mall on West Beverly Boulevard, walk through a black door, wedged between a cleaners and a flower shop, and you enter another world.

The dark neighborhood saloon is jammed with gangbanger-looking toughs. Bald Latino guys with pierced ears, baggy pants, and hard faces. Tattoos peek out from collars and sleeves. Even the stripper gyrating on the billiard table in his jockstrap looks like a tough. “People walk in and see this and they think there’s gonna be a gang fight,” says go-go boy Rich Obregon from backstage, as he waits his turn to climb on the table and dance.

But this is just another Friday night at Chico, a gay bar in Montebello with the homey feeling of la familia. With imagination and chutzpah born out of a career producing wacky TV shows, owner Marty Sokol, 32, has thrown together a crazy cocktail of cultures deriving from gay, Latin, Jewish and Hollywood influences.

The bar has filled a niche so obscure, no one knew it was there. Bartender Julio Licon describes the clientele as a mix of homeboys, ex-gangbangers, cops and guys who trek out from West Hollywood, the desert and the San Fernando Valley in search of something edgier, more urban. “Tough, masculine-looking guys. Rough, bald guys. That’s Chico,” says Licon. “Straight people come in and they still don’t know it is a gay bar.” And, even when they do, some stay for the party.

Chico is one of 10 or so Latino-oriented clubs in Los Angeles County that’s listed weekly in Odyssey, a twice-monthly publication of gay club listings.

Sokol tries to explain what differentiates Chico. “It appeals to more of a homeboy type,” Sokol says. “People come from West Hollywood because we offer them something they can’t get there . . . an experience they won’t get in a more homogeneous mainstream club.”

And Sokol himself is part of what makes it different. He dresses like “a young Latino thug,” says his friend and business partner Licon. Sokol shaves his head smooth. He has silky skin, the faint trace of a chin strap sprouting along his jawline, a chain of twisted gold draped around his neck, and heavy gold rings on his fingers. He drives a sleek, black Lincoln Town Car.

Like the bar, looks don’t tell the whole story.

Behind his shades his eyes are hazel. And his hair would be curly if he had any. In fact, Sokol is a Philly-raised, Boston-educated Jewish guy who was bar mitzvahed in Israel. The rings he wears are from his father; the necklace is a family heirloom. He works as a producer in Hollywood, lives in Silver Lake.

A couple of years ago, Licon, Sokol’s friend and now right-hand man, proposed opening a bar and said he knew just the place. Sokol barely knew where Montebello was, but they drove over to take a look. The old bar was a grim place--dark, dank, dirty and slow--with a tired string of Christmas lights running along the wall. There were two girls playing pool, and a guy drinking a beer.

Trusting the instincts of Licon--who knew the neighborhood inside and out--Sokol invested. Why take the chance on a bar? “I didn’t always want to be answering to some network, or some D-girl,” Sokol recalled recently over lunch.

Now, a year and a half after its November 1999 opening, Chico is packed.

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Sokol is a an eclectic guy with eclectic interests. He’s distributed far-out movies like “Vegas in Space,” the first all-drag sci-fi musical extravaganza, and “Chopper Chicks of Zombie Town.” He’s produced “Reel Wild Cinema” with Sandra Bernhardt, and “Crashpad,” a reality-based show, among others. He collects retro vacuum cleaners in his spare time.

Here at Chico, he produces real life six nights a week--the bar is closed Mondays.

There is a dance-off on Wednesday nights--five strippers climb on the table and battle it out for the approval of the crowd, “being as naughty as they can be within the realm of the law,” Sokol says. A calavera--or skull--reminiscent of Dia de los Muertos sits atop a T-shirt behind the bar. The men ooze Latin machismo, but a lot of it is style and attitude.

Obregon, the stripper waiting to take his turn on stage, has his name tattooed across his shoulder, “Chicano” tattooed over his heart, and his mother’s name inked into his biceps. “Papi” is embroidered on the fly of his boxers. “This is all looks,” said Obregon, who is gay and has never been in a gang. He’s third-generation Mexican American, descended from a onetime presidential candidate in Mexico, and until recently, he worked days in an upscale hotel in Bel-Air.

On a recent Friday night, the men in Chico are tossing back beers and dancing to throbbing hip-hop music under endlessly looping videos of motorcycle dare-devilry and erotic movie clips. A succession of male strippers climbs on the billiard table in boots and boxers, dancing suggestively until the crowd slips bills into their G-strings.

Sokol moves easily through the crowd. He doesn’t speak Spanish, but he throws out warm Spanglish greetings to his customers. They seem to love him, but don’t know what to make of him. “There are people who say, ‘He’s not Latino? Not even mixed?’ ” Licon said.

Oscar, a 31-year-old regular who declined to give his last name, said the mere existence of a place like Chico in Montebello is remarkable. A first-generation Mexican American, he said he is out to his sisters, but not to any of the men in his family. “Mexicans are so macho,” he said. “To have something like this is so taboo.”

David Moya, 28, grew up gay in Montebello and lives blocks away from the bar. He only recently came out to his father. He said he didn’t even know a place like West Hollywood existed until he was 21. For him, Chico is a godsend--local, familiar, filled with people like the ones he grew up with.

“You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of [gay] closet cases here. I like this because it’s up the street,” Moya said. “I don’t have to go all the way to West Hollywood, which is mostly white guys anyway.”

In the wee hours of the morning, the men pour out into the empty night in pairs or alone.

Reflecting, Sokol confesses he may get more joy from Chico than from his production work. “There are nights,” Sokol says, “after the last person has been pushed out the door, and the lights go up, when Julio and I will stand there and start to laugh, because we are having such a great time.”