Hiking on top of San Jacinto, above Palm Springs

Me and PS, continued…

My recollection is that the early 90s is when the area around Warm Sands in Palm Springs became the destination for gay guys. Cathedral City revamped their old (and decaying) downtown, and places like Daddy Warbucks were razed. They built the little racetrack and Target and Trader Joe’s and all the other stuff in front of the Villas and Desert (Desperate) Palms, and last I looked (a couple of months ago) both properties appeared like they had been abandoned (The DP was actually for sale).

I spent much of the time in PS during the late 80s early 90s with my sometimes-boyfriend sometimes-frenemy Jeff King, who had lived there for a time in the late 70s or early 80s. He had been a waiter at places like Jeremiah’s and Hamburger Hamlet (now, both long gone) and he knew people, he knew where things were. More importantly, he knew the social rules, such as they were, about where to go at what time on what day. Complicated. Good to have a guide.

He told me he’d been a member of something called the D.O.D., which stood for Daughters of the Desert, a loose (in many ways I’m sure) group of gay dining/partying buddies. His friend David was a bartender at Daddy Warbuck’s so for anything Jeff didn’t know about, David would.

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We stayed most often either at the Villas in their declining years (read: cheap rates) or at the new hip place over on Warm Sands, which was the Atrium/Vista Grande. My best memory of those years is sunbathing with Enigma playing over the sound system at Vista Grande while the misters kept me fairly cool in the 100+ heat. The place is still very much there, and expanded, though I know the shitty economy has taken a huge toll on those resorts.

My friend Jeff died there in Palm Springs, in a horrible car crash in 1992. His friend David died a couple of weeks later from AIDS. That was a horrible time, obviously, for so many in our community and also those early 90s years saw a crash of housing prices in Palm Springs, due to a recession and L.A. riots and PS riots (remember, the students used to go there for Spring Break!).

There had always been a lot of gay people in Palm Springs, but more of an influx with guys who had HIV and were looking for a peaceful and cheap place to spend what days they had left. And guess what – there were many, many days left, that continue to go on, because the retro-viral therapies for HIV, launched in the mid-90s, have made the infection mostly manageable. So those guys stayed, bought up cheap houses and helped build a gay infrastructure. And more followed, as well as other older men and lesbians who were now going to make this place a retirement destination – as had the straight population for years and years.

To be continued, the 2000s…