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Charlie’s looks back on more than three decades of business

Charlie’s looks back on more than three decades of business

Charlie’s Denver is celebrating 35 years this June, and the quaint Colfax cowboy bar still prides itself on a down-home atmosphere with a touch of neon.

Their anniversary weekend, which kicks off Friday, June 3, plans to bring in headliners like out country singer Ty Herndon and comedian/singer Amy Armstrong.

Herndon will be performing on Friday and Armstrong on Saturday. Both nights will feature free drinks from 6–7pm with the headliners appearing right after in the parking lot. Sunday night, as usual, will feature Kai Lee’s Kiki at 9:30pm, hosted weekly by Kai Lee Mykels. Armstrong will also be featured that evening along with Phoenix’s drag diva Pussy Le Hoot. Kai Lee’s Kiki will also feature house queens like Alyssa Love, Mile High Pinky Pie, Venus Sexton and newcomer Khloe Katz along with other performers the queens invite to share the floor.

Brendan Sullivan, general manager of Charlie’s Denver, said patrons should expect entertainment, specials, and quality service throughout the weekend. Founder John King, who’s currently based out of their Phoenix location, will be around throughout the week to commemorate three-and-a-half decades of his establishment.

King opened up at a first location in Denver in 1981 on East Colfax between Trenton and Tamarac streets. It stayed until 1989, when he was able to secure a spot closer to downtown.

“We’d always been trying to move downtown,” King recalls. They had tried to purchase the Golden Ox in 1985, but at that time, Capitol Hill United Neighborhood Inc. (CHUN) was not ready to accept Charlie’s. By 1988, CHUN reversed its stance and welcomed the gay bar a little closer west on Colfax and Emerson.

Charlie’s expanded to its Phoenix location in 1984, and locations in Chicago and more recently Las Vegas have been incorporated since. King, who’s lived in Phoenix since that location opened, decided to set up the corporate office there.

But King didn’t move away from Denver because he didn’t like it, he moved away because he’s a warm-weather person. “Denver’s always been good to me,” King explains, “but once I got to Phoenix, I couldn’t quite get the motivation to go back to Denver.”

King says get a few shots of tequila in him, and he’ll talk for hours about his bar.

Like how he named the bar for his then-boyfriend. The name was supposed to be the High Plains, since the original location was so close to Aurora, all his friends referred to it as being “out on the plains somewhere.”

Charlie’s wasn’t chosen as the official name until about a week before opening. King had noticed a lot of popular country songs had featured the name during that era, and it seemed friendly. It just worked out that his boyfriend happened to have that name, too.

“When we broke up, Charlie didn’t know I’d bought the name,” King remembers. One of the last stipulations of their divorce, per the real Charlie, was the name of the bar would have to be changed.

In what he calls classic gay style, King told him, “I own the name Charlie’s in Colorado, but you can change your name to whatever you want.”

And the legacy of Charlie’s, a fine hybrid of drag queens and stag fiends, where you can line-dance beneath the sparkle of an illustrious disco-boot, is still country strong.

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