It’s Friday night at Trails Gentlemen’s Club in Salt Lake City. Typically, this would be one of the busiest weekends for residents of Utah’s largest city to be patronizing local entertainment venues and establishments. Historically speaking, May 1 marks the unofficial end of winter while the scorching desert summer nights remain at least a month away.
Yet this Friday night also marks another important milestone. On May 1, the state of Utah, Salt Lake County, and Salt Lake City all lifted many of their pandemic restrictions in the same arbitrary and haphazard manner that they implemented them. Since many of the area’s adult entertainment establishments are classified as bars under state law, Salt Lake County became one of the first regions in the country to explicitly allow its collective half dozen strip clubs to open.
VICE visited three Utah strip clubs in their first week of reopening to get a sense of what the new normal looks like.
