The owners of Cheer Up Charlies thanked supporters for sticking with them through the fallout over a now-canceled sale that landed them in hot water last year.
At a town hall last week, Maggie Lea and Tamara Hoover said they were grateful the Austin community helped pay the bar’s rent through a GoFundMe last summer. They also addressed the controversy over the scrapped sale and said they’re planning to stay at the Red River Street venue that’s hosted them for more than 10 years.
“We listened,” Lea said at the event hosted by Prosper XO. “We’ve been processing a lot of it.”
Lea and Hoover nearly sold the beloved LGBTQ+ bar in October after almost defaulting on their rent. That prompted backlash from Austinites who questioned where their crowdfunding money had gone and why Cheer Ups aligned itself with a Florida-based corporation.
Lea said they’d run out of options.
“We were actually not doing well enough at the time to pay the rent,” she said. “And we were exploring some other options for capital and at the time, it felt like we had no choice.”
The sale quietly fell through, but Lea told the audience she and Hoover had “learned” from the experience.
Lea said the bar has made strides to better coordinate how it pays performers and staff. After news of the potential sale broke, former employees and performers called out the deal, arguing the bar didn’t pay them — or that checks often bounced — in recent years.
Lea said the venue operates on razor-thin margins and needs $160,000 in a given month to break even. She said she’d been promising artists too much of the covers and bar sales.
“It sucked that my staff, our hospitality staff had to struggle and suffer and feel unsure about their paychecks,” she said. “Because I was divvying out too much of the door covers or too much of our bar percentages way beyond what we were able to sustain.”
The bar has struggled since the controversy. The month after the sale was announced, it cleared nearly $50,000 in alcohol sales, compared to more than $117,000 in November 2024, according to receipts from the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. The most recent TABC receipts show Cheer Ups made just under $36,000 in alcohol sales in January.
Lea said she and Hoover have committed to more oversight of bar operations, including setting up a committee with staffers. She said she understands the bar “sort of shut down” amid the fallout from the potential sale, but said she and Hoover wanted to thank those who supported them in the fundraiser — and over the years.
“It is a labor of love. Every dollar, every dollar that we have is reinvested. … We were really grateful,” she said. “We didn’t want to ruffle anymore feathers, but we are really thankful and we’re forever thankful because it saved our bar.”