At the Flamingo, Las Vegas oldest casino, founded by mobster Bugsy Siegel in 1946, topless showgirls once strutted their stuff. Since 2020, it’s where the queens of RuPaul’s Drag Race Live now sashay the night away.
As the pandemic recedes, Las Vegas is betting on an explosive return of domestic travel fueled by a spate of new attractions that will raise the city’s cred with gender-fluid post-Boomer generations and send the Rat Pack crowd scurrying. From louche resorts, to overtly inclusive stage spectacles, to the immersively trippy new Area 15 entertainment complex with its oddball art and virtual reality experiences, the party is back on, with more youthful queer appeal than ever before.
Where to Stay
After a full-year’s closure and a down-to-the-studs renovation, the once bro-dacious Hard Rock Hotel is now the stylish, LGBTQ-welcoming Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. Wrapped around more than five acres of al frescodining, a Mykonos-themed dayclub, and a spacious green lawn, the resort is a soothing remove from the thronged Vegas sidewalks. Dining highlights include an outpost of Los Angeles’ Thai sensation Night + Market, which pulls no punches when it comes to spice. Spicy too is the Shag Room, a luxe ‘70s-inspired lounge tucked away from the casino floor.
What to See
Cirque du Soleil? So passé! The sticky-fingered new kid on the block is Atomic Saloon at the Venetian, which premiered in late 2019 prior to a 14-month pandemic hiatus. The acrobats and variety performers are very much in the vein of Cirque, but instead of New Age music and kid-friendly clowns there’s raunchy pansexual humor and an adults-only policy. In the very first number, a singing cowboy encourages audiences to sing along with a ditty extolling the joys of analingus. And they do—with impressive gusto.
Where to Eat
At the new “Italian American Psychedelic” restaurant Superfrico in the Cosmopolitan, your senses will be as overloaded as your pesto-pistachio-stracciatiella-mortadella pizza. In an amiably chaotic dining room with walls encrusted in funky contemporary art, your dinner will be occasionally interrupted by impromptu entertainments, from tableside magic act to a dance routine that erupts atop the bar.
Where to “Shop”
OmegaMart, part of the Area 15 complex, at first appears to be a run-of-the-mill grocery store. But wait…the chickens are covered in tattoos and a featured Lacroix flavor is Mashed Potato. Now open the refrigerator case to step through a portal into a sinister world of industrial conspiracy. Its all part of a conceptual funhouse which simultaneously celebrates and skewers mass consumption. Across a day-glo indoor park from the market you can pick up some award-winning booze at the Lost Spirits Distillery where tasting rooms are designed to evoke submarine travel and a candlelit forest.
The Takeaway
Las Vegas has long been a favorite LGBTQ+ getaway destination thanks to gay-centric offerings like the Luxor’s Temptation Sundays pool party and the city’s famous Fruit Loop, a cluster of off-Strip gay bars along Naples Drive. But its exciting to see a contemporary queer sensibility taking hold in some of the city’s newest mainstream attractions.
