This small Iowa town is excited for its soon-to-open gay bar

Opening a gay bar in downtown Waterloo, Iowa, was not on Darin Beck’s bingo card a few years ago.

Beck, the owner of a restaurant group with eateries and nightclubs in Cedar Falls and Iowa City, was already retired. But three years ago, as the COVID pandemic raged and the hospitality business ground to a halt in Waterloo, Beck came out as gay. He married his husband two years later.

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“This one for me is very different and it really kind of comes from more of the heart than the head, so to speak,” Beck told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “It’s just something that I feel fortunate I got to do.”

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“It’s refreshing and liberating,” Beck said of owning a gay club. “I was never, you know, ashamed or anything. I lived a straight life in the straight world. Guys like me didn’t come to places like this.”

The “place like this” is the Rail Station, a “spit-polished” version of a longtime gay mainstay that it replaced, the Kings and Queens Club.

The Rail Station opened just in time for the Waterloo Pride Fest last weekend.

Beck’s co-owner John Hayes bought Kings and Queens in 2010 and ran the rundown bar until early 2020, when he sold it. He bought it back again in late 2022 but had to close it down permanently because it was in “such disrepair.”  

Drag queen Jessi Jade-Michaels, who was a regular and a performer at the old club, said a gay outpost in Waterloo was missed.

Straight people can go into any bar and not have to worry about onlookers, she said, but it’s different for patrons like her.

“For a lot of people within the LGBT community, they can’t walk into (other bars) holding another guy’s hand or another girl’s hand without the whole bar looking,” she said. “This is the spot where they can.”

She also said the old club’s closure affected revenue during Pridefest and that other bars on town’s main drag on Fourth Street suffered because many patrons would bar-hop after drag shows wrapped.

The Rail Station marks a new era in Waterloo’s gay nightlife.

When he’s not prepping Rail Station for the club’s grand opening, co-owner Hayes runs the bar at The Broken Record across the street, saying that not a day goes by without people asking when Rail Station will open.

“I can’t pump gas without somebody asking,” he said. “The hype is definitely there. I’m excited that everybody’s excited about it.”

Hayes and Beck say the name was inspired by the multiple rail lines that run through Waterloo and acknowledges how train stations were once vibrant social hubs in their own right, a trend on the upswing with increased attention to rail transportation across the country.

Added Hayes, laughing, “Then I’ve always said, depending on how creative your mind is, you can make your own interpretation” of the name.

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