I can walk into Boxers, and it’s too loud. I can walk into Barrage, and they’re so busy. “I can walk into Hardware, and they’re cold. “There was not a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen for me,” said one regular, Brianne Demmler, who went there with her girlfriend on the day they became engaged last year. The jukebox has John Denver’s “Country Boy” and Will Smith’s “Wild, Wild West.” The room is a homage to a frontier-town saloon, or perhaps to the set of “Annie Get Your Gun”: comfortably dark, even in the daytime, with bordello-red drapes, velvety patterned wallpaper, wide-plank floors and an old-fashioned pressed-metal ceiling. Putin, Flaming Saddles changed its “midnight Stoli hour” to a “midnight Absolut hour,” with the same $8-a-drink price.) (Amid calls for a boycott of Stolichnaya to protest attacks on gay people in Russia and antigay legislation backed by President Vladimir V. The top-selling drink at Flaming Saddles is vodka and seltzer. They have two therapists on call around the clock.
And, indeed, a reality-television producer has been pitching a series that would focus not only on the bar and its customers, but also on Ms. Barnes, a songwriter and actor who appeared on “Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock,” is also working on a musical about Flaming Saddles.
Now she and her business partner and boyfriend, Chris Barnes, 54, say they are on their way to opening gay country-western bars in other cities. Jacqui Squatriglia, 48, who choreographed the moves at Coyote Ugly, does the same at Flaming Saddles, where she is an owner. There is a reason to mention Flaming Saddles in the same breath as Coyote Ugly, the raucous First Avenue saloon where female bartenders dance on the bar. And New York magazine, which named it the Best Gay Bar in New York City last year, said the bartenders “do-si-do on the bar top like an all-male version of Coyote Ugly.” The actor Jesse Tyler Ferguson and the television personality Anderson Cooper bantered about it on Mr. The bar, Flaming Saddles, at 793 Ninth Avenue, near 53rd Street, opened in 2011. “It’s high drama and high energy for sure,” declared Kris Coughlin, a bartender there. The place - improbably for Manhattan - is a country-western joint where the staff climbs on the bar and performs dance numbers. She favors off-the-shoulder tops and stiletto heels he wears leather jackets and rides a Harley.
This sounds like the premise for a sitcom or a reality TV show: A straight couple opens a gay bar.