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We've compiled the best of the best in Paradise Road and the East Side - browse our top choices for the top things to see or do during your stay.
The Badlands saloon in Commercial Center is acknowledged to be Las Vegas's oldest surviving gay bar, a 24-hour haven for local gay cowboys and city-slickers alike. It's decorated with a mock-log-cabin facade and offers cubbyholes in which regulars can store their beer steins. After national exposure when Badlands was featured on the reality show Bar Rescue in 2021, it has expanded upon its cowboy theme to be more versatile, with weekly trivia, karaoke, and drag show nights.
Call it a self-aware dive bar—the Double D sits a short walk between the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas and the Thomas & Mack Center and a long, long way from the upscale casino hotels. A sign inside says it nicely: "Shut Up and Drink." Delicious decadence prevails here 24 hours a day; no wonder it was a favorite of the late food celebrity Anthony Bourdain and anyone else adventurous enough to enjoy a bacon martini. While it has been impacted by outside forces—namely the downtown migration of college students and the boho crowd—not a thing has changed within: this deliberately downscale bar awash in cleverly obscene graffiti has everything from great local bands to a truly eclectic jukebox. Our advice: go late, choke back the cigarette smoke, and try the (fabled) Ass Juice cocktail. A sister property, the Triple Down, has opened just west of the Strip as part of the Punk Rock Museum.
One of Las Vegas's longest-running gay bars closed its longtime home on West Charleston Boulevard in late 2022 so that it could move to the East Side, in what's become an expanded area of Las Vegas's gay district along Twain Avenue, right next door to another alternative favorite, Fun Hog Ranch.
