From where does Las Vegas’ sense of pride emanate? Virtually everywhere. Avenues of queer expression feel downright endless in this city. LGBTQ resorts are settling into new neighborhoods, decades-old gay rights organizations are commemorating major milestones, and drag bars have become a ubiquitous rite of passage. As local LGBTQ historian Dennis McBride recently put it, “Nevada really is a wonderful place to be gay now.”

The Human Rights Campaign commended Nevada lawmakers on becoming a legislative safe space for LGBTQ rights in 2023. Everything points to a progressive way forward, and yet Nevada remains an outlier when it comes to the rest of the country. Within the last year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has tracked more than 500 anti-LGBTQ bills being introduced into state legislatures, and that discriminatory wave has shown little sign of slowing down.

“As I watch all this going down around us across the country, I’m asking myself, is it going to come to Nevada?” says McBride.

It’s tough to imagine it would. But Nevada’s LGBTQ past hasn’t always been a source of pride. The 69-year-old McBride, who has researched and archived Nevada’s gay history since the early 1970s, remembers all too well how demeaning and discouraging those early days were. In his 2016 novel, Out of the Neon Closet: Queer Community in the Silver State, he writes:

“Nevada’s great area and small population kept queer people isolated, while the state’s sodomy law kept them fearful and closeted. This has made the history of Nevada’s queer community, until the last quarter of the 20th century, a story of slow but persistent organization within a state culture unusually harsh in its repression.”

Nevada’s redemption arc has been decades in the making, and in some ways, it’s been revolutionary. But to appreciate how far we’ve come, it’s important to remember how we got here.

Prior to 1993, when we historically repealed our own anti-sodomy law (a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which determined that sodomy laws were unconstitutional), Nevadans could be jailed and fined for engaging in same-sex sexual activities. When he was younger, McBride never imagined he could be arrested for loving another man. But many in Las Vegas were.

“You would park your car in the back [of gay bars] if you could, because the police would drive up and down the streets, and if they could see your license plate, they would report it,” he says. “They caught some people that way. They’d shut down the bars. They’d raid the bars.”

Intimidation tactics like this were commonplace, bolstered by what the historian calls “a sadistic law that brought out the sadistic nature of the Metropolitan Police Department.”

The tide began to turn in the early ’70s, following the events of the 1969 Stonewall Riot in New York City. “They could still be arrested but they weren’t as coweringly afraid as they were in the ’50s and ’60s,” McBride recalls. “Even though Las Vegas completely ignored Stonewall, we knew about it and that gave us encouragement and some fortitude.”

Las Vegas’ modestly-sized gay bar scene thrived under the cover of night, anchored by Maxine’s on Nellis and Charleston boulevards, the Red Barn near UNLV, and Le Café, one of Las Vegas’ first openly gay clubs, on the southwest corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road.

Queer heroes like Marge Jacques, owner of Le Café, fought to allow same-sex couples to dance in her club. At that time, Maxine’s was closeted, and for a while the Red Barn didn’t truly operate as a gay bar until certain hours in the evening. Le Café, by comparison, had a motto that cheekily proclaimed “Glitter and Be Gay at Le Café!” and the stars loved it. Liberace hung out there, as did Joan Rivers and Debbie Reynolds. It makes sense that the same clientele flocked to Gipsy when Jacques opened it in 1981.

“It started with it being a place for the kids that didn’t have a home, which is why it’s called Gipsy,” says Garrett Pattiani, marketing coordinator of the revived club. “[Marge] came up with this brilliant plan. She went to the city board and she said, ‘Okay, well, you guys have your boys clubs. I want to have a club where if it can’t be a gay club and I can’t market it that way, it’ll be a club for the show kids.’”

Some 40 years later, Gipsy is one of the last original gay bars still standing in the Las Vegas gay district colloquially known as the Fruit Loop. And the community has yet to forget its impact or the groundwork Jacques laid. Pattiani, who co-founded the publication QVegas and served on the board for The Center, won’t let them.

“There’s something about knowing that when you’re in this space, this is a sacred space,” Pattiani says. “This is where the first HIV/AIDS fundraiser was held. This is where Cher, Liberace, Siegfried and Roy, even Janet Jackson [would go].”

Today, the nightclub’s new show Glitz: The Las Vegas Showkids Show recently paid tribute to the show kid era and other trailblazing LGBTQ Las Vegas icons like veteran drag performer Kenny Kerr, whose 1977 Strip show Boy-lesque bridged a significant gap between the straight and gay worlds. Back then, gay entertainment was more palatable to a straight audience when packaged as a female impersonator show. Kerr’s influence on drag helped usher it into the mainstream and open doors for future performers.

By the ’80s, Las Vegas had three significant gay organizations that stepped up: Nevadans for Human Rights, created by two transplants from Rochester, New York; the Metropolitan Community Church; and UNLV’s Gay Academic Union. Vegas’ first Gay Pride Week, held at the Moyer Student Union at UNLV in 1983, was sponsored by that trio. The following year’s Pride celebration took place at Sunset Park, which “by today’s standards, it was very, very small,” McBride remembers. “But it was more people than we’d ever had together in one place before.”

“We were starting to make really serious inroads politically, getting recognition by legislators, local and state, and beginning to build a political base—and then that just all got destroyed,” McBride says.

The AIDS crisis hit Las Vegas particularly hard in 1983, rolling back years of LGBTQ progress as homophobes started labeling gay people as diseased and dangerous. The public, they believed, needed to be protected from them.

“Many times, people used to think that I was infected, and I was contagious because I just worked with people with HIV,” says Antioco Carrillo, executive director for Aid for AIDS of Nevada (AFAN), a 40-year-old institution in the gay community.

“You don’t come back from it easily,” McBride says of the era. “We turned inward and started learning self-reliance, and how to fight. Really fight. We didn’t really have to fight so much right before then. But this time, we were fighting for our lives.”

Carrillo arrived at the frontlines of that fight, originally working at a community counseling center, facilitating support groups for people living with HIV, before he became AFAN’s executive director. It was 1994 at this point, and “I slowly got myself involved in the whole process where people were just dying left and right,” he says.

The AIDS crisis brought out the absolute worst in people in Las Vegas. Carrillo remembers seeing people propose that HIV-positive people should be branded with a tattoo. And before Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations,newspapers could print stigmatizing photos of recently diagnosed people, like a sort of screwed-up mugshot.

But as all that was happening, “we were quietly building our foundation,” McBride says. Once AIDS became less of a death sentence and medication became more readily available, the conditions were right to turn attention back to legislation.

In 1993, with the swift help of straight ally, politician and human rights activist Lori Lipman Brown, Nevada overturned its anti-sodomy law without a court order. And David Parks, an openly gay Democratic lawmaker who served in the Nevada Legislature for 23 years, helped move even more queer-friendly legislation into place.

“His enabling enabled more enabling. It gave the community more confidence. It gave the Legislature and particular legislators more confidence. That’s really where that momentum really started building,” McBride says.

Las Vegas has certainly become a more progressive town. But there’s still more work to be done.

Similar to the past, transplants from other states have come to Las Vegas looking to make changes for the better. Mark Hunter and Greg Kafka, owners of the new 33-room Bent Inn LGBTQ hotel, left their boutique resort in Palm Springs to create a larger, more inclusive space in Downtown Las Vegas.

“Las Vegas is the No. 2 destination for the LGBTQ travelers and yet there wasn’t a single hotel. It just kind of blew us away,” Hunter says. “There are ones in Phoenix, there’s one in San Francisco. It made sense to us that there was a need here.”

Due to the transient nature of the city, Kafka says the gay community here can feel “fractured,” but he’s hopeful Bent Inn can become “an anchor to a gayborhood.”

That pursuit of community and connection is more important than ever. Safe spaces will always be needed, Gipsy’s Pattiani says. “And I think they’re going to get more popular. I’ve been to many clubs in my life. I’ve worked in straight nightlife and mainstream places, and there is nothing like the energy and the freedom of a gay or queer space,” he says.

Judgment-free zones like Gipsy attract just as many straight people, he adds. 

“That’s how we’ve earned our gay rights, through resilience. It’s through practicing love, it’s through practicing joy. And when people experience that space, no matter what they were afraid of, or what they thought before, it’s undeniable,” Pattiani says. “It changes people’s minds and changes people’s hearts.”

Though the LGBTQ community enjoys the freedoms it does now, McBride and Carrillo remind us to stay vigilant, stay engaged and stay vocal. Carrillo was one of the first Clark County residents to obtain a same-sex marriage certificate with his husband Theo in 2014. That privilege isn’t lost on him today.

“Just because right now I have the ability to call my husband ‘husband’ because we’re legally married, and the entire f**king world knew about it … does not mean that it will be guaranteed for the future,” he says. “That’s the challenge. You have to keep at it.”

“We’re learning that we’re safer than a lot of the country. That’s something we need to be very, very aware of maintaining,” McBride says. “We have to keep our eye on who’s running for office because as swiftly as things have changed here for the better, they can change that fast for the worse.”

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