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 …