Montebello Gay Bar Chico Is Closing. Its New Owner Plans a Reopening.

Mario Trujillo, Downey's first openly gay mayor, is the new owner and plans to rename the bar Muevelo at Chico.

Chico, the gay bar that's held a corner of Beverly and Garfield in Montebello since 1999, is closing after more than 20 years. The room has been sold, and the new owner plans to reopen it as Muevelo at Chico, L.A. Taco reported on September 3, 2026. No reopening date has been set.

Priscilla Moreno, 67, has been going to Chico for more than 30 years, first with her late gay brother and later for the friendships she built there. She told the outlet the closing feels personal, and that the bar is her second home. “I’m going to be very sad about it,” she said.

The buyer is Mario Trujillo, who served as Downey’s first openly gay mayor from 2023 to 2024 and started the party night Muevelo in Downey with his husband. Trujillo said representatives for one of the now-former owners, Marty Sokol, reached out to him and his husband about selling, and that he and investors took the deal with Sokol’s blessing. Muevelo in Downey isn’t going anywhere, he said.

What Trujillo describes isn’t a closure notice so much as a handoff, and he was explicit about the staging of it.

“There were no goodbye parties; Marty did not want to have a goodbye party because this is not a goodbye,” Trujillo told L.A. Taco. He called the sale a merger and a new chapter, and said the reopening is a month or two out.

The bar itself is small, tucked into a shopping mall next to a flower shop, east of East Los Angeles. It opened in 1999 and has hosted the punk night Club sCum and the go-go night XFridays, per L.A. Taco, which reported from the floor on an XFridays evening. PBS SoCal has named it the best Latino gay bar in Montebello.

Chico is one of the last few gay bars on the Eastside, the outlet reported, and patrons kept returning to the same point: West Hollywood, North Hollywood and Long Beach are options, and they don’t feel like this one. A 2023 census of gay bars and clubs by Greggor Mattson, a sociologist at Oberlin College, found that 6.6% of queer bars catered to people of color.

Elena Carvhaal, 56, a communication technician and a regular for three years, told the outlet the bar is where she can dress up and be herself. Jose Pacheco, 35, drove in from Riverside for XFridays and got the first night and the last one at once.

Here’s my read on the paperwork under the sentiment. A sale that keeps the name, the room and the former owner’s sign-off is the softest version of a closing a neighborhood bar can get, and it still resets everything a bar actually runs on — the door, the nights, the DJ, the regulars who decide whether to come back. Trujillo says he wants to keep the heart and elevate it. Elevating is exactly the word that worries a $7-well crowd.

Muevelo in Downey stays open while the Montebello space is dark.

Source: lataco.com, retrieved September 5, 2026.