It’s Saturday night at Freddie’s Beach Bar and the place is packed. Owner Freddie Lutz moves through the standing-room-only crowd with ease, chatting with longtime friends, checking on orders and murmuring cues to staff.
He disappears downstairs and returns a few minutes later, having traded his black polo shirt for an all-white ensemble—fur coat, scarf, hat—that makes his dark mustache pop.
The stereo system blasts a herald of trumpets as Lutz, 74, makes his way to the mic, then segues to the theme from the 1970s television show “Charlie’s Angels.” Lutz tells the audience that this evening’s performers are “Freddie’s Angels,” and they’re all about “respect, kindness and compassion.”
And with that, the club’s weekly drag show is underway. The first diva, Destiny B. Childs, ascends the stage to the pounding beat of Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” The audience goes wild.
“My name is Freddie!” Lutz shouts, ceding the spotlight to her with a broad smile. “It’s time to go to work!”
If Lutz carries himself with the charisma of an industry veteran, it’s because he is one. He’s been working in restaurants along 23rd Street in South Arlington for more than 50 years—24 of them as proprietor of the colorful cantina that bears his name.
Happy hours, buffet brunches and trivia nights are part of the draw, but there’s something different about this place—and it’s not just the rainbow-clad entrance that gives way to an explosion of Barbie dolls, pink plastic flamingos and purple furnishings inside. Also notable are the military flags and portraits of uniformed soldiers lining the walls alongside posters of Judy Garland and RuPaul.
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This is Virginia’s only self-proclaimed “straight-friendly gay bar,” and for more than two decades, military personnel—straight, gay, lesbian, transgender and queer—have been counted among its regulars. Tucked amid the disco balls and feather boas are framed photos of high-ranking officers, U.S. senators and other luminaries—prize mementos reminiscent of the framed snaps of celebrity patrons so often seen at classic Italian restaurants.
It helps that the bar is located a mile from the Pentagon, making it a convenient spot for an after-work drink. Lutz, being the son of a U.S. Army colonel (both of his parents are buried at Arlington National Cemetery), has always had a soft spot for the armed services.
Born in New York, Lutz arrived in Arlington at age 3 when his family relocated for his father’s work as an officer in the U.S. Army’s ordnance division. Lutz attended local schools—Oakridge Elementary, Gunston Junior High and Wakefield High—before studying painting and illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. But the hospitality business would become his calling.
Returning home after college in the mid-1970s, he landed a job as a stockroom manager at The Portofino Restaurant, a Crystal City fixture on 23rd Street since 1970. A few years later, Portofino’s owners opened a sister establishment, Cafe Italia, across the street, where Lutz worked his way up from server to maître d’.
“And then I lost my mind and opened Freddie’s Beach Bar in 2001,” he quips. “I was starting to get a little bored and I wanted to try something on my own.”
The beach bar theme (a seemingly ironic choice in the burbs) was a nod to his love of the ocean. He had a travel trailer at the Sea Air Village mobile home trailer park in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he’d built a small, fenced courtyard with a tiki bar, an ice maker and lights. “That’s where I got the idea for Freddie’s,” he says.
The previous tenant of the Crystal City space, a fox-hunt-themed tavern called The Fox Hole, was a dim haunt marked by dark wood paneling and hunter green paint—a stark contrast to the incoming riot of tinsel and glitter.
Within a week or two of opening, Lutz hung rainbow flags and bunting outside. The flags were never a significant source of controversy, he says. “People knew me and liked me, and it’s not like I opened some sleazy bar. I wanted diversity in here and I wanted it to be all-inclusive. I wanted everybody to get along. We have not had a lot of trouble.”
The bar’s festive atmosphere and “straight-friendly” promise became a welcome invitation. Soon its clientele included service members donning shades of khaki and camo.
Lutz fondly recounts a conversation with Maj. Gen. Tammy Smith, the Army Reserve’s first openly gay flag officer to come out while serving. She popped in for a drink one day in 2012 and presented him with a framed rainbow stars-and-stripes flag that had flown at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on September 20, 2011—the day the law known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed. The gift was a thank you for providing a safe space over the years for closeted military members. The “straight-friendly” tagline, she explained, “gave us all cover to come in.”
The club’s long history has not been completely without incident. Lutz recalls bomb threats that once brought police with bomb-sniffing dogs to scour the premises and give the all-clear. And the time he raced home to check on his partner, Johnny (who was fine), after receiving an anonymous death threat via email that listed their home address. They still live in the house Lutz grew up in, not far from the bar.
They’ve been together 24 years, and while they haven’t married, Lutz says the current political climate is making him think they should.
In January, Freddie’s was one of several 23rd Street businesses to sustain damage after an arsonist set fire to its front entrance, although police reports did not categorize the attack as a hate crime. (The perpetrator, it turns out, had been kicked out of all three establishments the night before.)
But as the nation’s capital gears up to host a full lineup of WorldPride celebrations in May and June, Lutz isn’t sure what to expect. At the time of this interview, he was dismayed to see corporate sponsors withdrawing from the festivities. “That may start a whole chain of people dropping out, or being threatened and dropping out,” he says. “Hopefully the 3 to 4 million people they were expecting [to attend] will think of this as sort of a show of force.”
“I’m just very nervous right now,” he adds, “as everybody is—at least in the gay community.”
In the meantime, he has bars to stock, kitchens to manage and books to keep. In 2018, Lutz opened his own red-sauce Italian restaurant, Federico Ristorante Italiano, in the former Cafe Italia space, where he still works front of house, greeting guests. Ever the maître d’, he’s sentimental about the building’s legacy, and happiest when he can continue to say “welcome.”
“I’m very proud of what I’ve done [at Freddie’s] with the diversity and the accolades and all that stuff,” he says, “but I always felt like I left my heart at Cafe Italia. Freddie’s and Federico are two totally different atmospheres. I can come over here [to Freddie’s] to get crazy, and I go over there to calm down.”
Today he splits his time between Arlington and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he opened a second Freddie’s Beach Bar location in 2021. “I was looking around Freddie’s [in Arlington] and thinking, what is it missing? I know: the ocean and sand,” he says. “So I opened one in Rehoboth. It’s kind of like coming full circle.”
Launching the spin-off “has kind of worn me out,” he shares, citing red tape delays and an ongoing sprucing up of the interior. But he’s finally realized his dream of owning a true beach bar one block from the ocean.
At one point his ambitions included broadening his empire even further with a Freddie’s in Fort Lauderdale, but he’s not sure that’ll happen.
“I’m getting old,” he says. “I don’t know if I could take on another one.”
Anthony Lacey is a freelance journalist who has lived in Washington, D.C., for more than 20 years.