When he was 20, Tony Correia moved from Toronto to Vancouver. It was 1988 and he called himself bisexual, shying away from calling himself gay even though he'd never kissed a girl.

The first place he applied for a job was the Doll and Penny's Café on Davie, a riotous gathering spot for drag queens, transsexuals, gays and straights.

The storefront featured half a red convertible atop a yellow awning, often with cavorting mustachioed mannequins clad in women's clothes. Doll and Penny's operated where the Pumpjack runs now.

When told the four-year-old late-night cafe wasn't hiring, Correia soothed his disappointment with music.

"Back on Davie Street I fast-forwarded my Sony Walkman to 'Everyday is Like Sunday,'" he writes in his new print series "Foodsluts at Doll and Penny's Cafe" for the biweekly newspaper Xtra Vancouver. "Morrissey's was the only voice that was familiar to me now."

But, within a day, his luck turned around. Correia served at the former gay institution from 1988 to 1991.

He wrote two letters a week detailing his adventures to his best friend in Toronto during his tenure. For Christmas 1997, his friend gave him a compendium of the letters. As Correia transcribed them, he recognized a story arc in his tales, so he set out to write a memoir loosely based on the letters from those three years.

All these years later, Correia is chronicling the wild ride of the Doll and Penny Café online and in Xtra Vancouver with a biweekly series that started in December and continues until August. Xtra prints half of each chapter and publishes the rest online with illustrations by Ken Boesem, whose cartoons and drawings have appeared in Maclean's, Geist, Broken Pencil, Discorder and The Stranger.

"There's no narrative about the West End, about the history of it, and this is very minor, but you get a sense of how vital the neighbourhood was right up until the Gay Games [in 1990], and how the community affects businesses and vice versa," Correia said.

The café, with its Herculean gold gods that bookended the pink bar, flashing traffic lights and grand chandelier, saw party people drinking beer out of milkshake containers in the wee hours, servers comparing the size of their, um, "tools" and some of the country's first AIDS fundraisers.

Correia has changed most of the names of the real-life characters that populate his tale.

"There was a lot of salacious stuff that happened and people are still living so I'm protecting [them]," he said. "None of us want to get sued, but we want to tell the story of how the story of how this actually happened."

Doll and Penny's, which opened in 1984, closed in 1999 following a contentious fundraiser for four AIDS organizations. Correia said $8,000 was raised, but only $1,000 was meted out, or $250 to each organization.

"Foodsluts at Doll and Penny's" has a Facebook page where old employees have been reconnecting and uploading old photos.

"There's talk of a reunion," Correia said. "We'll see how far it goes. We'll see how people feel at the end."

As the series progresses, readers will learn Correia constantly covered shifts for HIV-positive co-workers who were acting as "human guinea pigs" at St. Paul's Hospital, trying experimental drugs.

"I've been deliberately looking at this through rose-coloured glasses and there is a lot of tragedy to come, so I'm trying to make it as happy and as nostalgic as I can for people because it ends with AIDS," he said.

Mixed with the heydays and the dark days are references to political battles in a time when lesbians, gay men and transsexuals enjoyed fewer rights.

Included is the tale of when the city wanted Doll and Penny's to take its audacious awning down and the café's loyal clientele collected 5,000 signatures on a petition, marched in drag on city hall and persuaded city councillors to vote unanimously to let the awning stay.

The writer, whose essays have appeared in SubTerrain, Vancouver Review and queer anthologies Second Person Queer and I Like It Like That, wanted to get "Foodsluts" out now not only because he's been drafting it for a decade, but also because he's concerned with the apathy of the younger generation.

"As I keep writing it, I do see a counterculture which doesn't seem to exist anymore," Correia said. "I see people [then] never backing down... The lesbians, the prostitutes, everyone fought back.

"[Young queers] think, 'Well we got gay marriage,' but I don't think they realize that this could all be taken away," he added. "We're looking down the face of a Harper majority--it scares the hell out of me."

crossi@vancourier.com