The Long History of Gay Reno Tourism

By Louis Niebur

Twenty years ago I made my first trip to Reno from Los Angeles. I knew nearly nothing about the Biggest Little City other than what gay culture taught me (via the campy 1939 movie The Women): "Marry for love, marry for money. Where does it get you? On the train for Reno!"

The weekend I spent here was fun; I met cute fellow tourists at the 5 Star, saw a great production of the drag play Greater Tuna, and went to a fantastic conference at the University of Nevada, Reno. I moved to Reno four years later for work, and I slowly began to realize just how important the experience of the "weekend away" has been for gay people ever since this city became a thing. We hear so much about Nevada's "wide open" reputation, of loose slots and easy marriage, but these stories are nearly always about good times of the heterosexual variety.

The more I've learned about Reno over the years, the more I see that my adopted hometown has always been a gay getaway, particularly for city slickers from California looking for a trip out of town with a western flair. In 1966 Dave's Westside Hotel, with the "VIP bar" in the back, opened and started welcoming the San Francisco Imperial Court for an annual drag ball, crowning the first "Queen of Reno" in 1968. In 1970, The Reno Club was described by the manager, Flo, as "an old barn, but a clean old barn," popular as the only gay bar in town with a pool table. Also in the early 1970s a "Reno Fun Train," featuring a private bar and "complimentary fun package," brought gay tourists from the Bay Area for a two-night adventure at the Sundowner Hotel. In gay magazines all over the country, Reno was marketed as a tourist destination, and no event was more popular than the National Reno Gay Rodeo. From a humble first outing in 1976 that attracted only 150 people, by 1983, the Rodeo drew around 20,000 people from all over the country.

It, like so many other aspects of gay male culture, came to a halt with the scourge of AIDS in the mid-1980s, which killed so many of the participants. Their premature deaths have enabled our history to be neglected and too often forgotten, but as a historian, I feel a real responsibility to tell the story of our people who aren’t here to remind us of the rich culture we have lost.

Louis Niebur is a music historian at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his PhD in musicology from UCLA, and his newest book, Menergy: The Gay San Francisco Dance Music Sound is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2020.

Louis Niebur will be participating in the Nevada Humanities Salon: Reno’s Gay Rodeo. Watch this page for updates on how to join in this event online.