Gay Pride week celebration features parade, festival

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, May 9, 2003 | 9:49 a.m.

Dennis McBride, born and raised in the Las Vegas Valley and, at 48, "older than most of the buildings here," remembers the 1980s, when bars where he and other gay men went were raided routinely by the police.

"You lived under a cloud of menace ... that was very wearing on the spirit," he said from his Boulder City home Thursday.

Rob Schlegel, one of two publishers for the Las Vegas Bugle, the valley's gay magazine, remembers when his reporters would write about "people losing jobs and being driven out of apartment complexes."

Today and Saturday, however, McBride, Schlegel and thousands of others will celebrate Gay Pride week, with a parade at 8 tonight and a festival from noon Saturday to 2 a.m. Sunday.

The event comes with several milestones -- 25 years of the Las Vegas Bugle, 20 years of the gay pride celebration and 10 years of the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Those milestones got longstanding members of the valley's gay and lesbian community thinking on Thursday afternoon about how their numbers have increased as the area has become more metropolitan, bringing with it more acceptance as well as a certain safety in numbers.

In fact, recent Census Bureau numbers showed Las Vegas tied for fourth in the nation when it came to couples of the same gender, with 1.2 percent of all couples surveyed falling in that category.

"The evolution of what's been happening over the last few decades is amazing," said Bob Bellis, executive director for the Gay and Lesbian Community Center on East Sahara Avenue.

"Twenty-five years ago the Bugle -- which was called the Vegas Gay Times then -- had the police camped outside the door. They were lucky the magazine didn't close down because of the harassment," Bellis said.

"Today, the sheriff's office has invited me to serve on Metro's multicultural advisory committee," he said. "Overall, Las Vegas has come to see the gay population as being an important part of the community."

Schlegel, who has been associated with the Bugle "since 1985 or '86," had a similar take on how time has affected the gay community and its relationship to the rest of the valley.

"When I first started running the publication, I wasn't even sure I wanted people to know I was gay," Schlegel said. At the time the magazine had a press run of 300, he said. It has 15,000 these days.

"Now I could care less. People are more open and accepting than they were then."

Schlegel said that as recently as eight or nine years ago, friends of his were turned away from clubs on the Strip.

"They had problems with two guys coming in together as a couple," he said.

"Now these clubs advertise in the paper ... and MGM MIRAGE teaches their employees how to treat gays and lesbians with respect."

In addition Las Vegas' first gay hotel, the Blue Moon Resort, recently opened its doors west of the Strip, he said.

McBride, a historian working on setting up a library and research facility for the Boulder City Museum and Historical Association, is also writing a book called "Out of the Neon Closet: A History of Gay Las Vegas."

He said the population boom of the last decade or so brought with it institutions and organizations that have helped build a gay community where once there was none -- including groups to deal with AIDS when it first became recognized in the '80s.

"As soon as there was a community, I jumped in," he said. "There's safety in numbers."

In the '90s, hotels on the Strip began recognizing the growing community. In 1996 a Gay Pride party was held at the Riviera, the historian said.

"That event was advertised on the marquee, with the word 'gay' and everything," he said. "I thought this was great and went out to take pictures."

Schlegel, of the Bugle, said his magazine reports less on employment and housing discrimination than in the past.

"We hear less of this over time," he said. "Also, nowadays if people are fired because of being gay, the employer hides it with another reason."

It hasn't been all progress, they said.

The most visible setback suffered by the gay community was the passage of Question 2 last fall, which added language to the state Constitution defining a marriage only between a man and a woman.

Like Bellis, Schlegel saw the votes cast in favor of the measure as a show of ignorance and a one-sided budgetary battle with the question's supporters.

"The way Question 2 was presented by the Mormon Church, it sounded great," he said. "Protect the family and protect marriage. Great PR and great 15-second sound bites.

"The problem was we didn't have the money to have people hear both sides of the issue. It wasn't so much about hatred but about ignorance."

"The gay community will thrive despite that," Bellis said. "They're still your next-door neighbors, your son and daughters, your business owners."

McBride was a less optimistic in his appraisal.

"Question 2 made me feel like it wasn't as safe as I thought," he said. "It made me feel like there were tens of thousands of people who hated us.

"In the end, I guess you could say that these years have brought tremendous support from parts of the straight community and great aggression from other parts."