Is Sedona LGBTQ-friendly?

For a same-sex couple, Sedona is a place for sunsets and sleeping in, not for nightlife. Airport Mesa Viewpoint is the obvious first-evening choice, and also the most crowded overlook in town: on an October evening, 200-odd people pack the saddle by 5pm, and the small parking lot fills an hour before that. Skip Airport Mesa. Posse Grounds Vista sits above the West Sedona ball fields and looks out over the same red buttes with a fraction of the crowd, and once the sandstone loses the afternoon heat the juniper smell gets sharper. Nobody at Posse Grounds will look twice at two women sharing a blanket. It was 15.9°C at 10pm on 19 October and felt closer to 13°C, so pack a fleece for the walk back to the car.

Stay inside Sedona city limits, where the local ordinance protects you, rather than in a Cottonwood motel 25 minutes down 89A. The resort casitas in Boynton Canyon and along Oak Creek see same-sex anniversary bookings all the time, and a casita with its own patio and a kiva fireplace beats a standard king room on 89A that sleeps two but feels like a cell, with traffic noise through the wall. For a split day, the history lover can spend the morning at the Chapel of the Holy Cross, a working Catholic chapel built into the rock and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Inside it is cool and smells faintly of candle wax. Meanwhile the hiker takes the Cathedral Rock trail before the trailhead lot fills around 8am. Then meet back in Uptown Sedona for a late lunch on a shaded patio.

Evenings are the real downside. Most Sedona kitchens stop serving around 9pm, and the Uptown rooftop bars draw hikers still in trail runners and the odd bachelorette group up from Scottsdale, so none of them works as a queer room. If you want a drag brunch or a dance floor, put Phoenix at the end of the trip, book the last night near Sky Harbor and spend it on the queer strip covered in the scene notes. Jerome is closer: a former copper town on Cleopatra Hill about 50 minutes west, where the crowd is artsy, odd and mixed and the tasting rooms pour Verde Valley reds that taste of dust and dark cherry. Jerome's switchbacks are narrow and unlit, so whoever drives back should stick to one glass.