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April 5, 2006
Car Culture – Southern California and the desert, II
The jetlag caught up with me on Saturday morning and I woke up exhausted. The Comfort Suites includes breakfast in the price of the room. It’s a negligible affair; cereal, packaged pastry, bagels and toast and the ubiquitous Make Your Own Belgian Waffle machine that everyone (including me) likes to play with. As I was getting cereal an older gentleman in a black t-shirt knocked into me, apologizing profusely. The hotel had about 5-6 tables only in their breakfast area, so there was no where else to sit and I ended up eating with him, and what turned out to be his partner. Though this was not a gay hotel (there are a profusion of those in Palm Springs) it was pretty obvious quickly to all concerned that this was the queer table. It may have been when he started talking about walking down the streets in Amsterdam in full leather while traveling. Turns out he was a periodontist originally from Pelham Parkway in the Bronx. He was a very nice man, but the thought of a periodontist in full leather makes me think of the dentist from Little Shop of Horrors.
I was to meet Joe and the gang to go on the aerial tramway at 11 am. I had asked him how to get there the night before. “It’s about two miles north of town on 111, the main drag. It takes about half an hour to get there. You can’t miss it.”
Ah, but you can.
I ended up going all the way to I-10 not seeing a sign for a turn off to the tram. It also takes a bit more than half an hour from Cathedral City if one is going through town (and taking pictures of the mountains through your windshield).
Turning back from I-10, there is a small sign on 111 heading towards town that indicates that the tramway is half a mile ahead on the right. For the record, the turn (left if heading west, right if heading east) is on San Rafael.
The road to the tramway wends steeply up a mountain for 2.5 miles climbing to 2,000 feet in altitude. I got to the parking lot at 11:25, where a tram takes you to the base station. I made it there at 11:40, after the ticket lines I finally made it on the 12:00 noon tram.
Some people would find a cable car with enormous glass windows (some that open slightly) and a slowly rotating floor to be exhilarating. Some of us just want to lie on the slowly rotating floor and barf. I’m not frightened in an airplane, but this has the same feeling as a Ferris wheel to me; that of stupid danger. I can't help but mentally calculate the drop when one of those 9 lb per inch super sturdy cables malfunctions. The car sways as it passes over each tower. Everyone oohed and aahed. I just wanted to slug someone.
It was about 80 degrees in Palm Springs that day; it was 52 at the top of the tram but there was still snow on the ground. Children were running around making snow angels. Southern Californians think snow is charming. I like winter, but it's not unfamiliar to me, and it wasn’t what I had flown six hours and paid $21.50 to get up to the top of the mountain to see.
A couple from North Carolina, “stsebastian” and “Bluesincenew” (I know fellow Flyertalkers better by their screen names than their given names), were coming up the hillside at the upper station just as I was heading down to explore. They had taken a lightning fast tour; that didn’t inspire much ambition in me either. I walked around for about 15 minutes, came back up and met with a few people in the group and headed down again; staying closer to the center of the car this time.
The Renaissance Faire was what had brought Grace up to Palm Springs, and as she said, “How could you possibly miss the chance to see me in garb?”
As Grace explained, Faire is a little like a sci-fi convention, only in medieval garb. Some people strove for accuracy, many more to satisfy their own fantasies, including the guy with nice pecs and a sword strolling about bare-chested in leather chaps. When I saw him later with his girlfriend I wanted to take him aside and explain that his outfit was really, well . . . gay. But in a good way. And I should know.
Grace was dressed in peasant garb, eschewing the dark heavy fabrics and feathers of the nobles walking about. “Way too hot,” she explained with her usual practicality. We walked about; she was knitting a sock – her concession to period was using double pointed needles (I don’t think that’s a concession for her; I think she uses dpns for sock making. I use Addi 12” circular needles – not everyone likes them but they’re a lot faster for me). I recognized the yarn (Lang Jawoll cotton superwash) and even the color, because I made a pair for myself in that very yarn and color.
For me, the interesting thing about Faire was the sexuality of the subculture. Part of the fun of the dressing was to wear outfits with a codpiece or revealing cleavage. Leather workers sold floggers. We sat down on a bench to talk while Grace knit. A thin gentleman with a curly carrot-colored mane came to the stage behind us and started to busk for his act that would happen in a few minutes.
Grace flinched. “I don’t like him.” We talked for a few minutes more, then tried to leave unobtrusively. He caught us.
“Where are you going?” He shouted after us.
Not wishing to be heckled by someone Grace did not like, I said the one thing I knew he wouldn’t have a comeback for.
“I’m going to poop.” I said cheerily.
We left him sputtering.
Palm Springs and the desert cities (Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Indio, et al.) are built on one long spine – Route 111. The weekend felt like endless trips back and forth on that road: to dinner in Palm Springs, then Back to Cathedral City for the martini party, then back to Palm Springs to the tram, then back to Cathedral City to rest, then back to Palm Springs for dinner . . . Everything seems to move on that main drag, and it does not move all that quickly.
Saturday night dinner is the apex of the Gayla and Joe worked like a dog to plan this one. It took place at Wang’s in the Desert, a Westernized "pan-Asian" place that most importantly had a back patio that we could commandeer. The food and drinks were just fine, but the entertainment made the meal. Tommi Rose, a grande dame of the Palm Beach drag scene, had helped Joe put together a brief but lovely evening. Tommi is of the sequined gown school of drag; she worked three separate costume changes including a turn as Mae West. She brought as her associates one tall skinny black queen in a brassiere and bananas who did a Josephine Baker number. It seemed to confuse the audience, but we learned later that was the point – as Joe said later, “to throw you off the scent” before the pièce de résistance of the evening.
Beefcake.
We got two. Leo and Michelangelo. Cryptically, Leo seemed to spend more of his time with the women. We wondered why – it was reported later he said that he went to some of the men at first and they didn’t seem interested.
Go figure.
Michelangelo came out; a little fellow with a big chest in an ill-fitting pinstripe suit. The poor tailoring was soon forgiven; Michelangelo may not have been the best dressed gangster on the block, but he knew his trade very well. And in the words of Ren, “huuuuuge pectoral muscles”.
I’m not going to try and describe Michelangelo; I’ll let the pictures talk. What they don’t show is when he took one lucky man, upended him in front of all of us and all but impregnated him. The things some people will do for a buck. In a fit of singularly bad timing, I had visited another table right before the show began and couldn’t get back to my wallet to tip, so no pony rides for me.
From Wang’s, we were to embark on a bar crawl, led by “Olafman”. He suggested that we could go to a piano bar first, then the Hotel Zoso, then Hunter’s. After chatting for a while, three of us walked up the street to find the piano bar, needless to say without quite knowing its name. The search was fruitless, and after a few blocks of back and forth aimless walking we simply went to the Hotel Zoso.
The most eventful thing about Hotel Zoso, besides drinks that were as expensive as in New York City, was the sudden appearance of Kevin Nealon and a very pregnant Brooke Shields. Shields was wearing an Empire waisted gown and Elvira Mistress of the Dark hair. One hopes that Tom Cruise was not anywhere around.
Hunter’s is the sort of big catch-all gay bar that doesn’t exist in Manhattan because land costs too much. I saw two rooms; a main bar area and a discotheque and had a great time dancing with several Flyertalkers. “Fanoftravel” is simply adorable when he dances; he’s all club kid except that he’s from Des Moines and as wholesome as fresh milk. The most interesting thing about the time at Hunter’s was a long conversation with “Missydarlin”, who had been president of the Talkboard, the governing body of Flyertalkers. If that sounds like a silly or overblown job, keep in mind there are 80,000 people on Flyertalk. The dynamics of the group are fascinating to me because of all the years I helped to run Ballet Talk.
The Gaylas and the GLBT forum presents its own series of problems for Flyertalk. The most complicated is splintering. When the forum was formed (before I joined Flyertalk) the worry of the Talkboard was that it would drain off conversation and exchange from the community at large. It could be argued that has in fact happened and it was interesting to hear Missy’s point of view on this (she’s a “friend of” rather than GLBT). Because I got to Flyertalk after several special interest forums had been established, I regarded them as a valuable feature in a forum too large and unwieldy to view as a whole. 80,000 members is a lot of talk and information. I only read five of the forums (there are probably over 50, devoted mostly to different airlines or destinations). To me, splintering into smaller groups is a by-product of the success of the community, and the only way to keep it together is to give the smaller sub-cultures some autonomy. Weirdly enough, besides the GLBT forum, one of the most vibrant groups at Flyertalk is one devoted to a single airline – the British Airways forum.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at April 5, 2006 11:49 PM
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