Flaming Saddles Saloon
Wild West-themed, cash-only gay bar with cowboy decor, country-&-western music & dancing barkeeps.
Where the Cowboys Roam
A Gay Bar That’s Part Coyote Ugly, Part Reality TV Fodder
By James Barron
This sounds like the premise for a sitcom or a reality TV show: A straight couple opens a gay bar.
She favors off-the-shoulder tops and stiletto heels; he wears leather jackets and rides a Harley. The place — improbably for Manhattan — is a country-western joint where the staff climbs on the bar and performs dance numbers.
“It’s high drama and high energy for sure,” declared Kris Coughlin, a bartender there.
The bar, Flaming Saddles, at 793 Ninth Avenue, near 53rd Street, opened in 2011. The actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson and the television personality Anderson Cooper bantered about it on Mr. Cooper’s daytime talk show. And New York magazine, which named it the Best Gay Bar in New York City last year, said the bartenders “do-si-do on the bar top like an all-male version of Coyote Ugly.”
