Why I Hate Las Vegas
In the past few years, Las Vegas has simply exploded onto the map. It was already on the map, and the stomping grounds for the Rat Pack, Debbie Reynolds, and Siegfried & Roy. But Las Vegas is getting hotter and hotter by the day. Who can blame them? Gambling, whores, fantastic weather, campy entertainment, and affordable property. It’s a fucking paradise. And I would not be caught dead in it.
Why do I have such an aversion to this, the wildest place in all of the Americas, if not the world? Because Las Vegas does not speak to me. IT SCREAMS AT ME. Every time I turn on the television, go online, listen to the radio, or pick up a newspaper or magazine, there is always something extolling the “virtues” of Sin City. The tourism board has saw fit to send out advertisements with the most overused phrase of the 21st century: “What happens here, stays here”. No, what happens here doesn’t stay here, but is splashed on every medium of mass communication in the world.
Everyone is riding the Vegas train these days. NBC has a show called “Las Vegas”, an unimaginative title for an unimaginative and crappy excuse for a primetime serial. The original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation takes place in said city. American Idol has held pretty successful auditions there for the past two seasons (the more recent one saw gray-haired Taylor Hicks make his national television debut). The rise of Las Vegas has also made the rise of poker (many of the most prominent poker events are held in Sin City), another thing that I can’t stand. The desert oasis is also attracting more and more sports events, which is ironic because Nevada doesn’t have a major sports team. Even more than in Frank Sinatra’s heyday, celebrities from the A-list downwards are whoring themselves along the strip.
I can’t help but be cynical about this city. On a personal level, the city does not do anything for me. I am a gay man, and Las Vegas is not designed for a gay audience. Siegfried and Roy do not count. Neither does attending Celine Dion’s show at Caesar’s Palace. Neither did Liberace. Ditto for Chippendale’s, which despite its hunky men is designed for straight women. Queers don’t need to usurp heterosexual pleasures, by the way. It is ironic that for all its camp appeal, Las Vegas is the most heterosexual place in the world.
No, scratch that. Las Vegas is the most heteroSEXIST place in the world. The politicians can talk all they want about gay marriage being anathema to American society, but Sin City has done more to denigrate marriage than 4,000 gay couples marrying at City Hall in San Francisco ever could. After all, Las Vegas is the home of quickie weddings. Let’s not forget that this is the place where Britney Spears had her 54-hour marriage at the dawn of 2004 to childhood friend Jason Alexander. The swinging lifestyle that has been portrayed in many movies is virtually heterosexual at its core. The television show “Las Vegas” doesn’t have any gay people on the show. It would conflict with their “tits & ass” image. Basically, Las Vegas is a heterosexual’s wet dream come true.
Oh sure, there are over a dozen gay bars in Vegas. Yep, there’s also a gay and lesbian center. And quite a handful of businesses that are gay-friendly. But let’s face it: it’s not the Castro in the Desert. That moniker belongs to Palm Springs. And Nevada isn’t exactly one of the most progressive states in the country. Gay men can’t get married legally, but if a straight man wants a whore for Christmas, then he has nothing to worry about. The same-sex age of consent is 18. And Nevada is a Red State, don’t you know. The majority of Nevada voters cast their ballots for Dubya in that 2004 “election”.
In addition, Vegas is a very white town. 70% of the people are white. The next-largest group are Hispanics, at around 24%. And the rest are made up of African-Americans, a smidgen of Asians, and other people. A bastion of ethnic diversity it’s not. Nearby Utah is more diverse, and most of them are Mormons! As an Asian-American, I doubt that I could survive in a city like Las Vegas. Of course, the population could be mostly Asian and I still wouldn’t survive.
I do admire how the city has managed to become a major world city despite its harsh desert surroundings and some suspect circumstances in its history. But when everyone and everything is flaunting Las Vegas on an excessive basis, you have to wonder, “What the hell?” A few months ago, MAXIM celebrated its anniversary by enlarging one of its most successful covers, one with the equally-overrated Eva Longoria in a white bikini with the Mojave Desert in the background. They put this massive cover in the desert, where it could be seen from space. Like that cover and its cover subject, Vegas has become overexposed and underwhelming. “What happens here, stays here”? What happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas, and not be flaunted in front of the whole world.
