Palm Springs, LGBTQ Capital

The story of how Palm Springs became the most concentrated LGBTQ resort destination in California is, at its foundation, a real estate story. And real estate stories have a way of revealing what the official history leaves out.

In the nineteen-sixties, Palm Springs was already known as a place where certain kinds of privacy were available. The desert's distance from Los Angeles, the discretion of the resort economy, the absence of the press machinery that followed celebrities everywhere else, these made the valley useful to people whose lives required concealment. The community that would eventually remake Palm Springs politically began forming quietly, under constraints that required it.

What changed the demographics was the end of the original celebrity economy. When the mid-century resort scene faded through the nineteen-seventies and into the eighties, property values dropped. The homes and bungalows that had been beyond reach became affordable. LGBTQ couples from Los Angeles began buying in. Businesses followed. The community that had been forming quietly for years began to have a visible presence, then a political one.

The accumulation of decades of community building produced, in November of twenty-seventeen, an outcome that had not happened anywhere else in the United States: Palm Springs elected an all-LGBTQ city council. The first in the country to do so. Lisa Middleton, elected to city council that same year, became the first openly transgender person elected to a non-judicial public office in California.

What the headlines reported was the election. What they underreported was the thirty years of community building, affordable real estate, and incremental political organization that made the election possible. The desert, as it often does, received the people everyone else had sent away, and gave them room to become something.