Go ahead and blame me because it's all my fault. I moved to San Francisco's Hayes Valley in the early 1990s and it has since become ridiculously gentrified. We bought a condo in sleepy Palm Springs 12 years ago and the small city has gradually become the subject of a trend piece in every travel publication in the world.
What those articles don't mention is that the main reason Palm Springs is so vibrant these days is because just about every interesting old gay man in the country who didn't die of AIDS has moved to town during the last three years.
The migration has also shifted the political makeup of Riverside County which was always staunchly conservative Republican, and now looks set to elect Joy Silver above to the California State Senate.
Thankfully, the town has not turned into a complete gay ghetto, as evidenced by my hetero friends Heidi from Santa Barbara and Corey from British Columbia above...
...which makes for some entertainingly odd juxtapositions at VillageFest where the main drag of Palm Canyon Drive downtown is closed for a pedestrian street fair every Thursday evening.
During VillageFest, the astonishingly good Palm Springs Art Museum offers free admission.
A group of us attended the final week of an Andy Warhol print exhibition that had been collected by Jordan D. Schnitzer, a Portland, Oregon real estate heir.
I am not a big Warhol fan and the prints felt like a lazy collection...
...but the museum's installation was characteristically creative and beautiful...
...and it was fun posing handsome Canadian hetero dudes...
...in front of all the iconic characters...
...and taking photos of a tired museumgoer who looked like a Duane Hanson sculpture.
No comments:
Post a Comment