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. From the late 1990s to the 2010s, through a combination of AIDS-related deaths, ’80s-era conservatism, and skyrocketing home prices, the rainbow-hued city lost its gay shine. Today only the Main Street Bar and Cabaret, a festive but small underground bar, remains from among those original venues. [...]
It is, by all appearances, an idyllic California town, the type of place people from elsewhere conjure up when they think “Southern California.” The town also has long been overwhelmingly white—84.2 percent caucasian, according to Statistical Atlas. Diversity and acceptance outside of artistic communities, while hard fought, has never been in Laguna Beach’s DNA. [...]
During the height of its popularity among the LGBTQ crowd, the city elected one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials, Bob Gentry, a former associate dean of students at University of California at Irvine, who served as mayor and councilman from 1982 to 1996. [...]
When the new millennium approached, Laguna Beach’s latest identity began to crystallize in the form of well-to-do, lovelorn teens, as seen in Laguna Beach, an MTV reality series that put the city’s privileged youth front and center. Neither the town’s gay community nor the wide swath of death caused by AIDS two decades prior was ever mentioned. But the message was clear: youthful, healthy, rich, heterosexual, unapologetically white. LC, Lo, Talen. That was the new Laguna Beach.
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