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.
