Laguna Beach, The Art Colony That Became a Queer Refuge

By nineteen oh-three, half of Laguna Beach's three hundred permanent residents were working artists. That is not a metaphor for the town's aesthetic sensibility. It is a census observation. Artists had been coming to this coast since the eighteen nineties, drawn by the quality of light on the water, the specific way the afternoon sun at this latitude fell on the sandstone cliffs and the cove beaches below them. The California Impressionists made Laguna their primary subject. The paintings are in museums across the country. The light that produced them is still here.

By nineteen twenty-seven, the bar at the Coast Inn had become an established gathering place for gay men, making it one of the oldest continuously operating gay bars in the western United States. The two histories are related, though not obviously so: communities of artists, from the nineteenth century onward, tended to create zones of relative social tolerance, places where unconventional lives were easier to live in part because the community's organizing principle was something other than conformity to mainstream norms. Laguna Beach developed that tolerance, and it drew people for whom tolerance was not abstract.

By the nineteen seventies, Laguna Beach had a developed gay social geography. West Street Beach had an unofficial Mayor, a title of pure social authority, who cut a pink ribbon at a Grand Opening ceremony each Memorial Day weekend. The Boom Boom Room at the Coast Inn hosted disco and drag. A performer named Rudy de la Mor, a Mexican American chanteuse from Anaheim, was a fixture there. Orange County, the most Republican county in California at the time, had, on its own coast, one of the most vital gay communities in the state.

Then came the AIDS epidemic. By the mid-nineteen eighties, the bar's owner, Michael Martenay, had built a memorial garden in the grounds of the Coast Inn where the cremated remains of more than fifty men who died of AIDS were interred. In many cases, these were men whose families had refused to acknowledge their deaths, their relationships, or the lives they had built here. The garden was an unofficial columbarium, maintained by a bar, for a community that the broader institutions of Orange County were not yet prepared to mourn.