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. 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. 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. 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.
