Salt lake city gay bars
Salt Lake City’s Rainbow Colors Fly Year Round
Don’t yearn out on everything that this vibrant city has to offer.
Written By Matcha
Salt Lake City | Austen Diamond/Visit Salt Lake
Utah's capital is among the uppermost 10 U.S. metro areas with the largest lgbtq+ populations, according to Gallup. In fact, Salt Lake City has a higher percentage of people self-identifying as gay than Los Angeles. If you're surprised, it might be that you haven’t spent much time lately in this gay-friendly town, which over the past two decades has become a destination for those who relax both a hip urban atmosphere and easy access to the great outdoors.
Known for its epic self-acceptance parade held every June, Salt Lake City is welcoming to the gay community year-round. In 2015, the city elected its first openly gay mayor, and in 2016, 20 city blocks were renamed Harvey Milk Boulevard, in honor of the known gay rights activist and politician. While it has its share of LGBTQ-owned and operated businesses, Salt Lake City is also known for its bars and restaurants that are welcoming to everyone.
The anchor of the LGBTQ+ community is the Marmalade dist
The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide to Salt Lake City
What makes this queerness exciting is that it’s unexpected. After Mormon leader Brigham Young led his band of religious misfits to Ensign Apex and proclaimed the Salt Lake Valley their promised land in 1847, the Mormon population exploded. For a long time after, the conservative values of Mormonism dominated local customs. In recent years, much of that has changed. The city’s LDS population slipped to 48 percent in 2018, and while the rest of Utah is still overwhelmingly Mormon, the counterculture has finally laid claim to the state’s capital.
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Community in gay Salt Lake City
Nowhere is this change more pronounced than in Salt Lake’s flourishing LGBTQ+ community. In 2015, Jackie Biskupski became the city’s first openly same-sex attracted mayor. She currently serves with three openly same-sex attracted city council members: Amy Fowler, Derek Kitchen, and Chris Wharton. SLC is so queer-friendly that officials renamed a street in honor of the pol
Drink it In:
Salt Lake’s Male lover Bar Scene Is Growing, Thriving, and Never Looking Back
In a state recognizable for its religious zeal, Salt Lake City serves as a bastion of progressiveness, playfulness, and lgbtq+ fest. In fact, the city’s been listed by Advocate magazine as one of the Ten Queerest Cities in America. The city holds one of the biggest and best-attended Pride parades and festivals around, with Pride Week festivities attracting tens of thousands of participants who light up the downtown scene in full rainbow-hued regalia. (There’s even a Utah Male lover Ski Week—real thing, utahgayskiweek.com, see you there.)
Of course, it doesn’t have to be a parade to celebrate pride and inclusivity. It’s pretty easy for everyone of every orientation to jump in on the incredible fun that is Salt Lake on a hot city evening and the regular rotation of drag shows maintain the city sizzling all through the winter.
Check out a few of our favorite “officially” gay bars and gay-friendly bars—keeping in mind that, in this town, it needn’t be a “gay bar” for everyone to fit right in.
Club Try-Angles
Try-Angles is kn
Salt Lake West Side Stories: Post Thirty-Two
by Brad Westwood
Although the LGBTQ+ community had many prior informal political and social gathering spots elsewhere in Salt Lake City, a number of bars and taverns located in the Pioneer Park neighborhood served as a place to gather for Salt Lake City’s emerging LGBTQ+ communities.
In 1970, just one year after Modern York City’s Stonewall Riots sparked national gay and lesbian movements, Perky’s, which advertised as a lock for women but discreetly served Salt Lake City’s lesbian population, opened its doors on North Temple Street. Perky’s was eventually torn down to produce way for the rebuilding of the I-15 North Temple overpass. The elderly west Salt Lake Urban area was also the residence of other LGBTQ+ gathering places, including the Rose Tavern opened in the early 1970s and whose name was eventually changed to the Rail; the Uptown opened in 1976 at 1500 South and 400 West; Studio 8 opened during the mid-1970s at 800 West and 200 South; and the Comeback Club opened in 1977, located at 551 South and 300 West, which also became a popular gathering place for members of Salt Lake’s LGBTQ+.
Like other established communities, the Pioneer Park LGB
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