It also now has a fully funded Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders program for senior gays. 300 West, Salt Lake City, 80, ), which has groups, classes and events. If you’re not a bar person, get to know the LGBT community by hanging out at Café Marmalade, in the same building as the Pride Center (361 N. Most big cities can only claim they have a “gay women’s night” at a men’s club. We still have a women’s bar in Paper Moon (3737 S. Salt Lake City remains “blessed” with many gay bars.
Salt lake city gay bars clubs windows#
Religious zealots said it was God’s way of punishing the sinners who frequented that “homo-sexshul” establishment, although the windows in front of the Christus statue on Temple Square were also cracked. After the building was demolished, it moved to 200 South and 600 West before a freak tornado blew it down in 1999. The Sun Tavern originally stood on the northwest corner of what is now EnergySolutions Arena. It was torn down 30 years ago, after Perky retired to Idaho.
In the 1970s, we had a women’s bar named Perky’s, located under what is now the new North Temple overpass. Rose was a bartender there for decades, and even I won a drag show there myself as the first “drag king” to perform there. Known as the RC, the bar opened right after the end of World War II and was the place for soldiers and, later, Leathermen to go see a drag show and meet up with other guys. Utah claimed what is said to be the oldest gay bar west of the Mississippi from 1948 to 2009: The Radio City Lounge. There are Cyber Slut drag bingo parties, too, held the second Friday of every month, from 7 to 9 p.m., at the Fraternal Order of Eagles (1104 W.
If you care to compete for crowns or just love a tucked and freshly plucked Judy Garland impersonator, the Coronation of the Emperor & Empress is held every Memorial Day weekend by the Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire ().
The drag-queen tradition lives on to this day. I was the first grand duke of the organization and was publishing Utah’s first gay newspaper, The Salt Lick. The Royal Court of the Golden Spike Empire was established in 1976 (back when RuPaul was working through puberty at Gompers Junior High School in San Diego). I was actually shoved out in the 1970s and was raised by drag queens in gay bars, where I eventually ended up being a DJ. I stayed in Utah to go to college and came out of the closet in my freshman year. I wasn’t born here, but was sent here to “reform.” I went to a boarding school in central Utah, far away from home. Anywhere else is actually the county or other towns within this 800-square-mile mountain-surrounded ancient lakebed known to some as the Great Western Jell-O Bowl. Most people say Salt Lake City proper extends from the airport up to the University of Utah and south to about 2100 South. The mayors of Salt Lake City in the past several decades have been Democrats. It is indeed a red state, but if you live in the capital city proper, you are in a lovely blue dot of liberals, “gayborhoods,” Democrats and Jews. People have told me that Salt Lake City has more gays per capita than any other city in the country. Utah is both one of the best and worst places to be an LGBT person in America. If you are an LGBT person moving to Utah or have just arrived, do not panic.