Gay bars near laguna beach

Standing on the bar 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 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.

Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, a festive but small underground bar, remains from among those original venues. San Francisco neighborhoods like SoMa or streets like Polkonetime gay linchpins in a city near with sexuality, are more geared toward the influx of tech dollars.

But it might not have to stay that way. Equidistant from Los Angeles and San Diego, Laguna Beach is an artistically bent coastal oasis in an otherwise conservative bacchanalia. The town is bookended by mountainous terrain to the east and jewel-blue waters to the west. The famed Pacific Coast Highway runs straight through it.

From the s onward, ever since the film industry took hold roughly 60 gay north in Hollywood, Laguna has also played host to fringe members of the artistic, movie, hippie, and drug communities. After the city redesigned the area along Main Beach to turn it into a public promenade, the gay establishments—and crowd—moved south to a two-block stretch along PCH between Calliope and Cress streets.

Gay-owned and gay-friendly beaches like Fleur de Lys now called Main Street Bar and Cabaretthe Boom Boom Room a multitiered nightclub with saltwater fishtanks and go-go boysand the Little Shrimp a laguna bar-slash-restaurant with a lounge singer opened.

The rise and fall of Laguna Beach, a gay California hotspot

I never participated, but it got pretty active at the beach. Instead of rallying around the community, some city officials chose to shield tourists and potential homeowners from the crisis. By the time the s hit, gay acceptance seemed up near. The political pendulum had shifted to the left with the presidential election of Bill Clintonputting an end to 12 years of Republican dominance.

Gay programming aired on major television networks. And, yep, Ellen was gay. Many queer people moved from Laguna Beach into the warmer inland desert towns. While older gay residents were heading east to gay up one of many midcentury abodes, gay businesses in Laguna Beach, like the Little Shrimp, and intellectually inclined businesses, such as Fahrenheit Booksclosed.

The laguna and last Pride festival in town was in ; the city council withdrew support for another one in It would be nearly two decades until the city hosted another Pride weekend. During his last term on the city council, Gentry says he was contacted by the beach councils of West Hollywood and Cathedral City to put together an international outreach for gay tourists.

This refusal to court LGBTQ visitors—and, in turn, new residents—and a dearth of affordable housing helped Laguna Beach morph into another version of Newport Beach, its tony, antiseptic, and unabashedly homogeneous neighbor city to the north. A few turns on the dance floor where I studied how to approach another man—and learned to handle rejection and a few rounds of cheap vodka were obligatory at the Boom Boom Room, whose hallowed halls I could—at last—legally enter.

But the message was clear: youthful, healthy, rich, heterosexual, unapologetically white. LC, Lo, Talen. That was the new Laguna Beach. During the bars, another blow happened: the Boom Boom Room, the queer nightlife mainstay and destination spot for the county, closed in after Beverly Hills billionaire Steven Udvar-Hazy, owner of Emerald Financial, bought the property and the adjoining Coast Inn.