12 | QSALTLAKE MAGAZINE | OBITUARY
Qsaltlake.com | ISSUE 317 | NOVEMBER, 2020
Joe Redburn was the father of Utah’s LGBTQ community 11/17/1938 – 9/6/2020
Joe Redburn, the owner of several Salt lake City LGBT clubs over the years starting with the Sun Tavern in the 70s, died of natural causes Sunday, Sept. 6. He died at the Intermountain Medical Center after being found unresponsive at the South Salt Lake Men’s Resource Center homeless shelter. He was 81 years old. Redburn bought the Railroad Exchange Saloon on the corner of 400 West and South Temple and opened the Sun Tavern as a gay bar on Feb. 20, 1973. “We opened at noon on that day in 1973. I’d never done it before. We were all scared,” Redburn said in an interview with QSaltLake Magazine‘s JoSelle Vanderhooft in 2008. “The Sun Tavern had been the Railroad Exchange, and I found it because that’s where the anti-war people hung out. It was owned by a former Pittsburgh Steeler, and they had a sign outside – it was a Pepsi sign that said Railroad Exchange. And I changed it to say The Sun Tavern. I can remember a guy who had a bar just south who said, ‘You can’t do that! The gay bars can’t have signs!’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m gonna do it, anyway.’ That’s what got me, how oppressed this community was. We were oppressing ourselves. We didn’t think we could put a sign in front of a gay bar.” “I named it after the Midnight Sun in San Francisco,” he said. “When we got the old Sun, I think we put the first sound system in for a DJ in Salt Lake,” Redburn said. “I’ve never just catered to the gay community, everyone was welcome. So we had a lot of straight people that liked it, especially when we put in the sound system.” In the next few years, he leased an adjoining space and called it the East Room, which was arguably the first LGBT community center in the state. In 1977, Redburn hosted what many call Utah’s first Gay Pride — a kegger on the shores of the Great Salt Lake known as Bare Ass Beach. The next year it was
held up City Creek Canyon. “We started having keggers up the canyon, and that kinda started everybody thinking – since Gay Pride was getting started around the country – that we should do more,” Redburn said in the interview. “And then other people kind of got involved so we started having another at Fairmont Park with a couple of hundred people. And that probably launched Pride out of the old Sun. Then it evolved into what it is today.” When the then-Delta Center was built at that location, the original Sun Tavern was relocated to 727 W. 200 South. He later started Bricks Club at the old In-Between bar when one of the owners died, and then The Trapp (now The Sun Trapp), which he owned for 20 years. Redburn was born and raised in Laramie Wyoming. He went to the University of Wyoming there and then Armed Forces Information School in Ft. Slocum, New York. “In those days you either gave yourself up to the draft — which I did — or wait ‘til they drafted you,” he said. “I just wanted to get it over with. In those days, if you checked the box that you were gay they rejected you, so I didn’t. I went in actually lying to them. I was in the U.S. Army at Fort Riley in Kansas for two years. What we did was the news on local stations. Then when I got out, I went
back to Laramie, and then I came over to Salt Lake to get a job here.” With his ultra-deep bass voice, he began a long career in radio on KTKK — one of the first all-talk stations in the country during the Vietnam era. “We started out with a program called Controversy. This was one of the first times in Salt Lake talk radio where the talk show host actually gave his own opinions,” Redburn said. “So we were different and we were probably that successful because I could give my opinions. I was a Goldwater conservative at the time.” Ultimately, Redburn gave up his conservative beliefs and, at the same time as Hillary Clinton, he began to support Democrat Eugene McCarthy and protested the Vietnam War. In time, Redburn would consider himself a Libertarian, while supporting Democratic candidates. He was on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union and ran for the Utah Legislature in 1976 in the Avenues. “I lost two-to-one to Genevieve Atwood. And then the Republican right wing got rid of her because she was too liberal,” Redburn said. “But now the Avenues are like Democrats. Salt Lake has become so Democrat, it’s amazing. I only ran for the legislature once, but it was quite an experience. Everybody ought to do it once.”
