Barnes owns Flaming Saddles with Jacqui Squatriglia, who he describes as his partner “in business and romance for six years.” In 2011, the couple opened the first Flaming Saddles on Ninth Avenue in New York City on the northern edge of the city’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood.

Those are the questions being asked by observers of life in West Hollywood’s Boystown with the news that Eleven Bar & Nightclub is being replaced by Flaming Saddles, the city’s first Country / Western bar.Ĭhris Barnes says we should have an answer soon. Will the gay guys walking along Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood’s Boystown give up their Nikes, Adidas’s and Vans for Tony Lamas’s, Fryes and Luccheses? Will those baseball caps worn bill-backwards give way to Stetsons? Will a Country / Western bar make it in a gay neighborhood now dominated by clubs that offer only DJs and go go boys, making them relatively indistinguishable from one another?