The Back Door (Lake Tahoe Gay Bar/70's)

The Back Door — Lake Tahoe

For generations of LGBTQ+ travelers, Lake Tahoe offered more than skiing, casinos, and weekends in the mountains. Places like The Back Door provided something harder to find—a gay gathering place tucked into one of the West's great resort destinations.

The Back Door belonged to an era when gay nightlife existed well beyond the famous neighborhoods of San Francisco and Los Angeles. Resort towns developed their own queer scenes, serving a mixture of locals, seasonal workers, weekend visitors, and vacationers who knew which establishments welcomed them.

And few gay-bar names are quite as perfectly of their time as The Back Door. The double meaning was certainly part of the fun, but it also recalled something real about earlier LGBTQ+ nightlife: gay establishments were frequently discreet, with covered windows, minimal signage, membership requirements, or entrances deliberately removed from the street. Back-door entrances could provide patrons a degree of privacy when simply being seen entering a gay bar carried consequences.