What was BS West?
For thirty-five years the answer to “is there a gay bar in Scottsdale?” was one address, and it was BS West.
It opened in 1988 at 7125 E Fifth Avenue, just off Craftsman Court, on the Fifth Avenue shopping street that most visitors know for jewelry, Western wear and Native art. Upstairs and down it was a bar, a dance floor and a drag club: drag shows, go-go boys, karaoke, trans nights, club hits and Latin music, nightly drink deals, and bartenders who worked shirtless. The staff sometimes answered the phone “This is BS.” For more than thirty years it was the only LGBTQ bar in the city, and its crowd, historically mostly gay men, was open to anyone who came in friendly.
It was also, quietly, one of the longest-running bars in Old Town of any kind. It outlasted almost every club in the Entertainment District a few blocks north, several of which opened, peaked and were torn down in the time BS West just kept going.
On January 2, 2024, the owners posted that after 35 years “the time has come for this chapter to close.” The last party was Sunday, January 7. Co-owner Robb Salvato said the reason was simple: the lease and the liquor-liability insurance had soared after COVID and the bar could not catch up. Scottsdale has not had a long-running gay bar since.
What a night there was
Two floors, one party. BS West was a two-story bar, dance joint and drag club rather than a big nightclub, with live entertainment most nights, a music mix that ran from club hits to Latin, and nightly drink deals that kept it a regular’s bar.
The shows were the institution. Drag performers built careers on its stage. When it closed, Salvato said that entertainers over three decades had found their niche there and that BS West had launched them, and the drag performer Barbra Seville called it an iconic part of Scottsdale and of the LGBTQ scene. Go-go nights and karaoke filled out the week.
The welcome was the brand. In 2005 New Times called it “absolutely one of the friendliest clubs you’ll ever party at, whether you’re bi, gay, straight, or none of the above.”
It kept getting recognized. New Times put it on its list of the Valley’s best bars in 2023, months before it closed, which says something about how sudden the end felt to its regulars. The farewell post drew more than a hundred comments from people who had met partners, made lifelong friends or had their first gay-bar night there.
Thirty-five years, and what it took to stay open
Barbra Seville put the case for BS West in one sentence when it closed: before the internet, before the apps and before marriage equality, places like this were where people kept up with each other, found companionship and rallied the community. In a resort town that sold itself as the West’s Most Western Town, that meant something. Scottsdale had no gay neighborhood and no Pride parade, and the gay bars of Phoenix’s Melrose District were a drive away. BS West was the one place in the city that was unambiguously for LGBTQ people, and it held that position from the late 1980s into the 2020s.
It lasted through more than the club cycles. When it opened, it was legal in Scottsdale to fire someone for being gay; the city did not pass its nondiscrimination ordinance until April 2021, a story told in our LGBTQ Scottsdale history. BS West stayed open through all of it, run from 2008 by Salvato and Mike Fornelli.
What closed it was not the culture. It was costs. Salvato told New Times that the bar had been “slowly trying to recover since COVID,” and that both the lease and the insurance a Scottsdale bar needs for its liquor license had skyrocketed.
What the record still lacks is the beginning. The reporting on the closing gives the year, 1988, but none of it names who opened BS West or where the name came from, and the bar’s early years appear only in patrons’ memories. If you were there, those memories are the archive. Honest assessment: BS West was not the fanciest bar on Fifth Avenue, and it never tried to be. It was the most necessary one, and the city is poorer without it.