In September, developer Eduardo Cordova opened Queen Las Vegas, a bar and nightclub in the front space of the Thunderbird Hotel on Las Vegas Boulevard. Seeking to step outside the usual model for gay spaces, Cordova hopes to create a safe, inclusive space for locals and visitors.
These spaces are becoming a reality in other cities, but they don’t yet exist in Las Vegas. For example, on a recent visit to my hometown of San Francisco I stopped in at Mother, a queer bar that opened at the beginning of the year. Sitting among a few other customers, I had the feeling of utmost belonging, that we were all on solid and sure ground, that this space was offering to hold us, and we were agreeing, together, to be held.
This is what I seek in a queer space, and it’s rare that I find it. I shy away from commercialized queer experiences, including Pride, whose logoed floats and political entanglements disquiet me. Gay bars exist, but they’re predominately for men. I look instead for this gathered feeling in my home and the homes of my friends, or that one booth at a bar that, when filled with my people, feels like it changes the texture of the space within its vinyl circle.
Queen aims to do this, and to create reverberations that turn the area around it — a stretch of wedding chapels and hotels at the edge of the Arts District — into an LGBTQ+ neighborhood. Cordova, who also owns The Garden and runs Temptation Sundays, a gay pool party at the Luxor, wants to create a little gay haven on the north Strip.
He has plans to take over the Thunderbird in 2024, redecorating and rebranding it as a Queen property. “For me it means a lot having a gay hotel and a gay destination right on the Las Vegas Strip and having the representation. It means a lot for us and for the community, I hope, as well,” Cordova says.
Queen’s bar is slightly revamped from the bar that used to be there, with pink walls, colored LED lights, a gender-free bathroom, and shirtless waitstaff. Their drag brunch, which costs $65 with bottomless mimosas, has underwhelming food. But the queens are undeniably good, all energy and flexibility, dancing nonstop for 90 minutes to the drag-classic sounds of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Cyndi Lauper as yet more shirtless men with their names printed on their underwear waistbands collect the cash thrown at them, and that the queens themselves throw in the air.
Queen isn’t quite the scene I long for — a cozy corner in a city whose queer spaces are predominately geared toward men — but it’s a start. Cordova is mindful of inclusivity, and on the books, or already launched, are weekly nights for trans people, women, and customers dressed in drag. In a future hotel, all 100 rooms filled, I can imagine the little gay haven Cordova talks about, even if I can’t quite feel it yet.