Rodgers told the Spectrum that prominent Judge Claiborne testified for her.
The licensing board asked Rodgers, “Are you going to encourage homosexuals to attend your place of business?” An exasperated Rodgers asked, “What do you want me to do? Card everybody? ‘Who do you sleep with?’ I mean!”Īt her license hearing, many people came forward and spoke up for Kerin, including Grant Sawyer, Mahlon Brown and Judge Harry Claiborne.
At the time, Clark County’s liquor and gaming code read that any business that catered to homosexuals, hookers, hoodlums, and hobos could lose their license. Rodgers recalled that Liberace would often come in “with that twerpy kid (Scott Thorson) who later sued him.” The club gained an international renown. Gipsy was the place to party in the 80s, popular not just with the LGBTQ community but with local celebrities as well, like Cher, Debbie Reynolds, Rip Taylor, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Rodgers and Marge Jacques drove to pick-up the Gipsy sign from a closed club in Los Angeles and on the way back to Las Vegas the sign blew off the top of Rodgers’s Volvo into the desert. Rodgers says the club was financed on a “lick and a promise.” She modeled the club’s design on such famous discos as Madame Arthur’s in Copenhagen. The club reopened on Aprechristened from Village Station to Gipsy in homage to the “show kids,” the 80s Las Vegas euphemism for the gays and lesbians who patronized the club. It was a fight for the gay community.” She says that Gipsy legitimized the idea of a gay club. Rodgers remembers, “It wasn’t a fight to get Gipsy open. Rodgers says her home was ransacked by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police’s Privileged Investigations Bureau trying to find dirt on her, “Ever way but upside down.” She told McBride that Metro also attempted to entrap her with a $10,000 bribe. Marge and I were friends but everyone thought we were lovers. Rodgers told the Spectrum, “I honestly don’t know about the Le Cafe fire. “What I went through to get that place open was hell!” Rodgers recalled in an oral history interview with Dennis McBride in 1998. Even with Rodgers’s political “juice,” she too struggled to get a license. In desperation, Jacques turned to prominent interior designer and nationally known political advocate, Kerin Rodgers, with a bid to buy the club from Adamian. That she was responsible for the Le Café fire. Jacques could not get a license herself because the licensing board still believed Newspaper stories that ran about the party had headlines that read, “Fairies Flitting.” Adamian’s license was denied, and the club was shut down. The film featured men kissing, scantily dressed in Bob Mackie designer costumes. The footage at Adamian’s liquor license hearing. Undercover police filmed the club’s wild 1980 Halloween party and showed It was less popular with Clark County authorities because of owner George Adamian’s alleged mob involvement and a dirty tricks letter writing campaign to the County Commission from Naples Street residents, supposedly instigated by Marge’s old rival Camille Castro, complaining about noise, drug use and “homosexual acts.” Habitués included Joan Rivers and Siegfried and Roy, and the new club was a success. She blamed her business rival Camille Castro, owner of Le Bistro.Īt the Village Station, Jacques opened the Backstage Bar, a stylish 40sstyle bistro as an escape from the noisy disco up front.
Rumors flew that Jacques had set the fire herself. Le Café burned in 1978 in a mysterious arson fire that remains unsolved. Photo by Tonya Harvey/ Las Vegas Spectrum Gay historian Dennis McBride wrote that “the Las Vegas gay community first found its voice” at Le Café. 1, 1980, helmed by the colorful and controversial Marge Jacques, former owner of the popular gay restaurant club, Le Café.Jacques was a boisterous, out lesbianĪnd Le Café was the first gay bar to openly allow same-gender dancing.
Purchased by straight Armenian businessman George Adamian, “a wheeler dealer in business, but not in Vegas terms,” according to later owner Kerin Rodgers, Disco Fever reopened as the Village Station on Aug.
None holds the history of gay Vegas though quite like Gipsy, located in the heart of the “Fruit Loop” at Paradise and Naples.īorn as a series of swank Italian restaurants owned by the likes of Robert Goulet and Don Rickles, the club emerged into the gay nightclub scene in the late 1970s as Disco Fever, party central for the pre-AIDS bacchanalia of drugs, sex and disco balls. The history of Las Vegas’s LGBTQ+community can be told through the history of its lesbian and gay bars - Maxine’s, The Red Barn, Le Café, Snick’s, and many others.