LAS VEGAS: EXCESS ALL AREAS
Want to win your fortune? Maybe get gay married? How about a lap dance from go-go boy? It’s all possible in Las Vegas, writes Steve Pafford, although conditions may apply!
Vegas. Sin City. Stripper central. A garish neon streak of gambling ghettos and go-go dancers. And the cheesiest place I’ve ever been.
As my plane arced over the barren Mojave Desert and began its descent into McCarran International Airport, I could already feel the aura of kitsch emanating up from this notorious Nevada hotspot.
Just a few hundred metres from where our plane touched down was the imposing pyramid of The Luxor Hotel. In the blink of an eye there’s the replica of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel, and then the Campanile Tower at the Venetian Hotel. Between them are the Statue Of Liberty and a replica selection of Manhattan’s skyline, while other giant hotels claim to be nothing less than Monte Carlo or Mandalay Bay.
The city of Las Vegas is bigger than I’d imagined, housing over a million residents in squashed, grey suburbs. The lengthy backbone of Las Vegas, known as The Strip, is the reason 37 million tourists make the pilgrimage to the city every year. Las Vegas Boulevard, to give The Strip its official name, is home to no fewer than 12 of the world’s biggest hotels. They simultaneously embody grandeur and prestige along with monstrous, monolithic proportions of sleaze and cheese.
It’s not enough to simply design a huge, beautiful hotel in Vegas. Nevada’s gaming capital is all about being flashy, trashy and showy. Nothing less than recreating the famous bits of other cities will do. The results are pristine, anodyne, Disneyesque versions of the originals. In the Venetian Quarter you can take a romantic ride on a gondola without having to endure the stale sewer smells and rain that actual Venice often conjures up. New York, New York offers towering views of Manhattan and the Statue Of Liberty without the Big Apple’s pollution, attitude or gridlock. And who needs to deal with tout le monde crowding under the Eiffel Tower when Vegas has its own amid a complex of pools, restaurants and luxury suites?
With the elegant fountain displays outside the Bellagio, who needs fireworks? Well, The Mirage actually. They have an exploding volcano out front. Yes, the hills are alive with the sound of that cheddar barrel being scraped.
Hotels on The Strip make downtown Vegas more or less redundant. They dominate the city, attracting the lion’s share of the tourist lifeblood. The hotels are clean, offer extreme luxury, serve up veritable oceans of alcohol and endless buffets and scream, “Eat, drink, gamble, indulge.” They’re ever-running taps of joy in the middle of a harsh and desolate desert.
But the champion of all Las Vegas digs has to be the legendary Caesar’s Palace, newly improved, with a massive shopping centre called The Forum and decorated with eccentric statues throughout.
Precious little in Vegas is authentic but what is real is the endless opportunity to part with your hard-earned cash. Attempting to win a fortune is a fabulously futile endeavor. Roulette wheels spin 24/7. There are literally
Drag fans head to Divas Las Vegas, in which femalei mpersonator Frank Marino portrays a convincing Joan Rivers, along with a huge cast channeling everyone from Cher to Celine.
kilometres of dazzling and distracting slot machines pumping out optimistic tunes like Kylie’s I Should Be So Lucky and the occasional ker-ching of a win-win-win-win winner. The serious gamblers head to the poker and blackjack tables but the average visitor loses somewhere in the region of $750 with very few people coming out ahead of the casinos. And if you do, Andy Garcia may track you down and give you what for. But that’s another story.
While the gambling is the real moneymaker, it’s the entertainment that lures the punters. Many people visit Las Vegas just to experience the nightlife and, like the architecture, much of it is OTT. Clubbing is fast becoming such an attraction that it may surpass gaming as a major source of revenue for the casino hotels before long. During the American spring break, hoards of young people pour in from all around the country to party. On any night on The Strip you’ll observe dozens of scantily dressed females scurrying off to places like Pure, Jet, Tryst or XS. Amorous horny hetero males follow, and pay hefty cover fees just to get inside and outrageous bottle service prices in the hope of getting lucky.
But what about the tourists who prefer people of the same gender? Tourism Las Vegas has worked hard to attract the gay and lesbian visitor. Go to www.vegas.com/lgbt-travel to see how seriously they take our “market segment”.
Meanwhile on The Strip, card flappers, hawkers and pimps will pester you to meet their “lovely ladies” but do not have pictures of scantily clad muscle boys in seductive poses with offers to have them “to your room in 20 minutes”. The strip clubs that Las Vegas is infamous for may be somewhat disappointing for the gay traveller. Only a few feature male strippers and, often, male patrons are barred from entering the male section of the strip clubs. The all-male revue Thunder From Down Under, for example, is not intended for the gay male visitor. The show is pitched to straight women and focuses solely on the muscular body of the performer. If the act was intended for the gay tourist the show would be much more erotic. Erotic is not what you’ll get in a room full of champagne sozzled, screaming brides-to-be and their entourages on their girls’ night out.
Still, Las Vegas has about 15 gay bars, many of them clustered together in a small quadrant along Paradise Road just north of the airport and south of the gay-popular Hard Rock Hotel. It’s an area often dubbed “the Fruit Loop”. A slightly less enticing little posse of neighborhood-y gay bars is situated in a large and rather bland shopping complex called, appropriately, The Commercial Center, a short drive east of the northern (icky) section of The Strip. This area has been rundown for some time but is undergoing a resurgence with new and interesting developments. The Commercial Center should be noted, however, for one wonderful asset – it’s home to legendary Thai restaurant, Lotus Of Siam, which also >>
Gay marriage is illegal in Nevada. That hasn’t stopped the hotels cashing in though. Caesars promotes their Paris Hotel as a destination offering samesex commitment ceremonies.
>> happens to be extremely homo-friendly. To its credit, the MGM seems to be catching up, hosting a Sunday gay-themed pool party at The Luxor. Cheese lovers, however, should stick to The Strip – especially when it comes to big name entertainers. In recent years the city has hosted residencies of Cher, Celine Dion, Barry Manilow, Elton John, Tom Jones and Rod Stewart to name but a few. Having said that, Aussie man-band Human Nature are in residence for a whopping two year stint of their hit Motown tribute show. In 2005, the quartet recorded an album of Motown covers called Reach Out and it caught the attention of none other than label legend Smokey Robinson. They impressed him so much that he collaborated with them on their follow-up album Get Ready and now introduces them via video screen five nights a week at The Venetian. The boys are backed by a sumptuous six-piece band and cover classics by The Temptations, The Four Tops and even The Supremes.
With many of the city’s top casinos presenting marquee shows and musicals, the city’s gay bars have plenty of competition. De rigueur among fans of drag is Frank Marino’s Divas Las Vegas, in which female-impersonator Marino portrays a scarily convincing Joan Rivers along with a huge cast of femaleimpersonator all-stars channeling everyone from Cher to Celine – no surprises there.
When the curtain comes down, Vegas is perhaps best known for its hastily arranged marriages. Most of the hotels offer ceremonies in stylishly decorated “chapels”. As with everything here, weddings are dealt with quickly, with as little emotion as possible and with an eye on the catering bill. A staggering 124,000 marriages are “blessed” here every year. These range from lavish, months-in-theplanning and massively expensive affairs, to spur-of-the-moment knock-up jobs. Bruce Willis and Demi Moore were married in Vegas, as were Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra. And do the words “Britney” and “Spears” ring a bell? In 2004, on an alcohol-fuelled Vegas blowout, Britney married her childhood chum, Jason Alexander. After a big night of clubbing, the pair went back to her room, watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and decided, at 4.30am, to wed. They hired a lime green limo to The Little White Chapel and the bride wore torn denim jeans and a baseball cap. The union was annulled 55 hours later. Perhaps for penance, Britney now plays in residence in Las Vegas.
The sky is pretty much the limit for tacky weddings, whether you want Elvis singing Love Me Tender, a fire-breathing dragon as a witness, repeating your vows in a helicopter or plunging off an 18-storey building on a bungee rope after saying, “I do”.
Gay marriage is officially and resolutely illegal in Nevada. That hasn’t stopped the hotel chains cashing in though. Caesars Corporation prides itself on promoting their Paris Hotel as a gay destination offering same-sex commitment ceremonies. The Bellagio also offers gay partnership ceremonies even though, at the present time, the ceremonies lack comprehensive legal force either in Nevada or anywhere else. Although, since 2009, the state does offer legal unions for same-sex couples that offer varying subsets of the rights and responsibilities of marriage.
Regardless of sexuality, plenty of newly married couples stroll down The Strip after their big moment. This, perversely, doesn’t seem to make them out-ofbounds to card flappers who still approach them to spruik the services of prostitutes. Only in Sin City.
Dozens of casual workers push the sleazier side of Las Vegas as darkness falls, handing out calling cards to anybody who’ll take them. Including me. “No obligation,” one told me. “If you don’t like her, send her back.” Another offered a special of $49, with two girls costing $80 and a foursome for just $99. Bargain! Scratch beneath the effervescence and bright lights and you’ll find a murky world that’s far from glamorous.
What makes this smiley, happy city even more notable is that all major development has taken place within the space of a single human lifespan. In one century, LV has grown from a dusty ranch into a gargantuan, sprawling urban monster with a lovable neon heart at its centre, pumping life into the drab, uninspiring suburbs. It’s a place where the casino hotels don’t put clocks on their walls and where their windows don’t open so that debt-ridden gamblers can’t jump. Everybody has one thing in common: they’re on the lookout for fun and they’re determined to get it, even it does cost them a packet.
“If I wind up broke,” sang Elvis, “at least I’ll remember that I had a swinging time.” Viva Las Vegas indeed.