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It is, by all appearances, an idyllic California town, the type of place people from elsewhere conjure up when they think “Southern California.” The town also has long been overwhelmingly white-84.2 percent caucasian, according to Statistical Atlas. And its approximately 23,000 residents live in multimillion-dollar hill- and cliffside homes or in a smattering of apartment buildings and cottages near the town’s main artery. The famed Pacific Coast Highway runs straight through it. The town is bookended by mountainous terrain to the east and jewel-blue waters to the west. Now an effort by longtime queer residents and one forward-thinking city official is attempting to bring Laguna Beach’s gay past back to life.Įquidistant from Los Angeles and San Diego, Laguna Beach is an artistically bent coastal oasis in an otherwise conservative bacchanalia. Even the Castro, the world’s gay mainstay, has seen a decline in new LGBTQ residents.īut it might not have to stay that way. San Francisco neighborhoods like SoMa or streets like Polk, onetime gay linchpins in a city synonymous with sexuality, are more geared toward the influx of tech dollars. Queer enclaves in New York City, like Park Slope (formerly a lesbian hub) or the West Village (now more associated with celebrities, finance bros, and others who can afford its rising real estate prices), or Silver Lake in Los Angeles, aren’t as gay as they were in the ’80s and ’90s. This erosion isn’t unique to Laguna Beach. Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, a festive but small underground bar, remains from among those original venues. 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. 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.
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And I knew that the recently procured fake driver’s license in my wallet looked nothing like me. 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. I knew that AIDS/HIV affected the regulars inside the packed venue-as well as the city’s population-but not to what extent. It was an oasis for the LGBTQ residents of a county with the unfortunate tagline “ Behind the orange curtain” due to its political conservatism.
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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.
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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.