Can a grassroots effort bring back the town?s LGBTQ vibe" Standing on the beach steps with a verboten Zima bottle in hand, I looked up at the big white building above, thumping with music, colored lights flashing from the windows, scared and praying I could get inside.
I was 18, I was terrified, and I wanted to go into my first gay club, the Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach, California, a seaside town that, before its rise to prominence via an MTV reality series and Bravo?s inaugural Real Housewives series, was known as a queer-friendly enclave in Orange County. It was an oasis for the LGBTQ residents of a county with the unfortunate tagline ?Behind the orange curtain? due to its political conservatism.
I knew that AIDS/HIV affected the regulars inside the packed venue?as well as the city?s population?but not to what extent. I knew that, only two years before, a football player at a nearby high school had nearly beaten a gay man to death on this beach, in one of several local hate crimes aimed at gay men. And I knew that the recently procured fake driver?s license in my wallet looked nothing like me. What I didn?t know was that, a decade later, the city that was once known as ?San Francisco South? and ?the Provincetown of the West? would be no more. From the late 1990s to the 2010s, through a combination of AIDS-related deaths, ?80s-era conservatism, and skyrocketing home prices, the rainbow-hued city lost its gay shine. Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, ...