Love and Loathing
in Las Vegas

Tommy Fontenot's typical day begins in the dead of night. The gay 36-year-old works the late shift as a blackjack dealer, handling $25,000 bets at one of Las Vegas's most glamorous casinos. When noon rolls around, Fontenot gets in his truck and drives to his brand-new 1,800-square foot house in southwest Vegas. The Louisiana native and former paramedic has lived in Sin City for four years, and it's finally starting to grow on him. "I didn't like Vegas at first," he says. "If you're looking for a place just to be gay, this isn't the place. But that's not why I moved here."

Thousands of gay people like Fontenot are escaping burned-out factory towns and priced-out megalopolises for a better life in America's 21st-century boomtown. Some are scooping mashed potatoes at the Stratosphere buffet, others are squeezing Cher into a bustier for her upcoming show at Caesars Palace; all are helping fuel Las Vegas's $80 billion economy and turning the formerly red state of Nevada purple.

Just like transplants proliferating in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, many people in Las Vegas are not from Las Vegas -- the city was only incorporated in 1911, when it had about 800 residents. But the gays streaming into southern Nevada have little in common with the urban pioneers who descended on the Castro or the Village 40 years ago. Seeking safety and freedom, young gays crashed these coastal cities, helping forge the identities of their neighborhoods, art scenes, and political dynasties. The gays moving to today's Las Vegas arrive with less lofty but no less valid goals -- finding a job and enjoying a decent standard of living.

"People tended to move to these gay urban meccas in order to 'become' gay," says Jay Groth, a 36-year-old Las Vegan. "It just seems the people I meet in Las Vegas are so beyond that."

Groth, a flight attendant who's lived in the city for 10 years, shares a spacious home with his partner in the Green Valley neighborhood. Groth loves his adopted city for its ethnic diversity, affordable housing, and shopping and dining options but holds no illusions about its gay community.

"People come here expecting the gay scene to be on the same level as San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, New York," he says.

"They're not going to get it. They're just not. We don't have the established community that those other cities have. It's still very much in its infancy. But [residents] are becoming less transient and are a little more willing to invest in the community."

Among U.S. cities, off-the-Strip Las Vegas most resembles Los Angeles or Phoenix -- it's a sprawling suburban-style city built in the 20th century. But while Los Angeles and Phoenix have pockets of urbanity, Vegas--with a metropolitan-area population of over 2 million -- does not. Most residents live in enormous subdivisions and drive to work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, according to author Richard Florida, who in his book The Rise of the Creative Class says successful cities are ones that attract a young, educated work force, including a healthy number of gays and lesbians. These people typically work in "creative" fields like architecture, theater, and engineering.

"A downtown core is not the key element of success in the creative economy," Florida writes in an e-mail. "The most important factor in attracting and retaining quality young talent is creating a sense of place and community."

As part of his urban studies, Florida rates American cities on indexes of creativity, tolerance, and gay-friendliness. Las Vegas scored among the lowest in creative positions but slightly better in tolerance and gay-friendliness.

"Las Vegas is significantly behind the U.S. national average in terms of creative workers," says Florida. "The creative class is the core force of economic growth in our future economy. Without a focus on all three T's -- technology, talent, and tolerance -- Las Vegas's growth will be unsustainable."

The closest thing Las Vegas has to a "gayborhood" is a forlorn intersection called the "Fruit Loop" that houses a few bars, a few clubs, and a gay bookstore in a strip mall. But that's not evidence of any deficiency, says Candice Nichols, the feisty executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center of Southern Nevada [see page 39].

"I think in the same way ethnic populations have assimilated in Vegas, so has the gay community," says Nichols. "[Gayborhoods in New York and Los Angeles] started for safety issues. We don't have that here."

While Nichols claims queers are generally free of physical danger in Clark County, she doesn't contend they're showered with support. Her community center, located in a seedy shopping plaza between a bathhouse and a straight sex club, receives zero money from the state, county, or city and instead relies on donors for much of its $350,000 2008 budget (the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, by comparison, receives substantial funding from all levels of government and has a 2008 budget of $43 million). Las Vegas's Democratic mayor, Oscar Goodman, widely seen as a jovial, liberal cheerleader for the city, didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

Nichols insists that even without bureaucratic support, Vegas gays are growing more cohesive by their own volition. It's taken a while because it's opportunity, not orientation, that brings people to Las Vegas. "Gay people come here because there are jobs -- construction, entertainment, etc.," Nichols says. "And it's more affordable than other places. So our community is everything from show kids to doctors to lawyers."

Nathan Frye and his partner, Allen McMullen, are theatrical stage managers who came to Las Vegas for work 13 years ago and never left. "We love Las Vegas," the 44-year-old Frye says. As far as Vegas's lack of a gay village, Frye backs up Nichols's assertion, saying gays and lesbians are spread throughout the city.

"We're involved in the Human Rights Campaign," Frye says. "We know a lot of [gay] people, but we don't limit ourselves to that.... It seems sometimes when you do have the West Hollywoods or the Villages, you are limiting yourself to who you socialize with and who you expose yourself to." Groth puts it more simply: "We're just comfortable here. We don't miss any of that stuff we had in the large cities."

Frye also points out that he represents the demographic of many gay Vegas transplants: settled, typically coupled, over 35, and their idea of fun is Saks Fifth Avenue and Wolfgang Puck, not Krave -- the city's preeminent gay dance club.