Salt Lake City has put up a historical marker for the Sun Tavern, the bar Joe Redburn opened in 1973 at 400 West and South Temple. “It’s pretty hard to tell the story of queer Utah without talking about the Sun Tavern,” said Randell Hoffman, a co-founder of the Mildred Berryman Institute for LGBTIQ2S+ Utah History, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.
The plaque stands across the street from the bar’s old corner, which the Delta Center now covers, the Tribune reported Sunday. “Utah’s first openly gay bar, Sun Tavern, opened its doors in 1973,” says a history of the neighborhood from Utah’s Department of Cultural & Community Engagement.
The city formally unveiled the marker Aug. 25, along with one for Thomas Coleman, a Black man lynched in Salt Lake City in 1866, KSL reported. “The Sun Tavern is an important reminder that gay, lesbian and bisexual Utahns were building community,” Hoffman said, according to KSL.
The institute, which proposed the plaque, held a public dedication near 41 S. 400 W. on Sunday, Oct. 4, its event calendar shows. “Opened by Joe Redburn in 1973, the Sun Tavern quickly became more than a neighborhood bar,” the listing said.
How Salt Lake City’s Marker Pilot Chose the Sun Tavern
City Council member Chris Wharton came up with the $30,000 pilot program, which the city launched in 2025, KSL reported. Stories of Utah’s settlement “are well represented in our existing monuments around the city,” he said, according to the station. “But there are other really compelling and interesting stories that exist, too.”
The mayor’s office gathered proposals, and the city’s Human Rights Commission made the picks, according to KSL. One of the 11 criteria in the city’s program FAQ reads: “The submission commemorates Salt Lake City under-told history.” The FAQ adds, “Salt Lake City Corporation will pay for and install the historical marker plaque.”
“There’s just a general thirst for getting to know these kinds of lesser-known parts of history,” Wharton, a sixth-generation Salt Laker who represents District 3, said in the Tribune’s story. He also said, “Those stories should be celebrated.”
In Atlanta, the owners of Michael Hardwick’s former house, whose demolition plan cleared a zoning board Nov. 5, are open to a marker about the Supreme Court case, their attorney said, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. A 2007 plaque at the old New Orleans site of Charlene’s, a lesbian bar, reads, “Let the work I have done speak for me.”
Joe Redburn’s Bar Moved From South Temple to 700 West
The Sun’s first home faced the Union Pacific station, the Tribune reported when Redburn died in 2020. Nikki Boyer, a friend who worked at The Sun off and on for more than 20 years, said then that The Sun “was like the first disco in Utah.”
The photos of the bar used most often are Mike Evertsen’s, the Tribune reported. He was a regular at the Sun. “It didn’t matter if you were very masculine, very feminine, if you wanted to dress in drag, if you didn’t,” he said.
The Sun moved to 200 South and 700 West in 1983, the Tribune reported in 2020, and Salt Lake Magazine says the first building was razed for what became the Delta Center. Redburn often joked that the bar was “in the shadow of the temple,” the Tribune reported Sunday.
Redburn also hosted on talk station KTKK from the late 1960s until 1993, the paper reported in 2020. Former state Sen. Jim Dabakis said then that listening to Redburn “is really where I learned politics.”
Kegs in City Creek Canyon and the Roots of Utah Pride
Redburn organized “Utah’s first gay festival and public gathering, which took place in 1974,” timed to Stonewall’s fifth anniversary, according to the state’s neighborhood history. The Tribune puts Utah’s first pride celebration in 1975. Its 2020 obituary of Redburn says he brought kegs from the bar for “what became the first Utah Pride celebration.” That was a 1975 gathering of roughly 300 gay and lesbian guests in City Creek Canyon, organized by Redburn, Boyer and others.
At the time, Boyer said in 2020, “we didn’t dare call it ‘Pride,’ or nobody would have come.”
“We were dancing our rights, so to speak. You know, we got loose in the ’60s, and it was time to party and celebrate,” Boyer said of her memories of the Sun Tavern in Sunday’s Tribune story.
“For our little community that we had, it was a place where we could go, where we could be ourselves,” Evertsen said of the bar in the Tribune’s story.
The 1999 Tornado, The SunTrapp and Redburn’s Last Years
On Aug. 11, 1999, an F2 tornado stayed on the ground in Salt Lake City for about 10 minutes, killing one person and injuring more than 80, according to the National Weather Service. The agency says it caused “widespread damage at the Delta Center,” the arena on the Sun’s first corner.
Redburn had opened The Trapp, a country-western bar at 600 West and 100 South, in 1991. “If you weren’t there by 6:30 or 7 o’clock, there wasn’t a bar stool to be had,” Johnny Harris, a longtime bartender there known as Johnny Disco, said in the Tribune’s 2020 story.
The 1999 storm damaged the Sun’s building on 700 West, the Tribune reported, and The Trapp’s new owners renamed their bar The Sun Trapp in its honor. That bar closed in January 2024, and Mary Peterson, an accountant who had worked for its owners, reopened it that June as The SunTrapp, according to Salt Lake Magazine and SLUG Magazine.
“My main priority was making sure it remained true to what it was always intended to be,” Peterson said in SLUG’s 2025 profile of the bar, at 102 S. 600 W.
Redburn died Sept. 22, 2020, at 82, at the Men’s Resource Center, a homeless shelter in South Salt Lake, the Tribune reported. “He wasn’t just a bar owner. He built our community and kept us safe,” said Roy Li Zhang, then chairperson of the Utah Queer Historical Society.
The Sun Tavern and Coleman plaques are the only markers the $30,000 pilot will install, KSL reported. “I don’t know when the next opportunity will come up to find additional funding,” Wharton said, according to the station. “But I am going to be looking for that opportunity going forward.”
