Like the Birds to Capistrano: Part I

Georgiana Starlington

In the twentieth century, we were a tribe of nomads searching for coordinates that didn’t exist on any respectable map. Long before the internet or the casual safety of a neon bar sign, our geography was built entirely on a secret telegraph of whispers—a trusted acquaintance who knew a guy, who knew another guy, who passed along a location like a coded dispatch to the front lines. If you wanted to find men like yourself, you learned to navigate this shadow network, decoding the subtle cues: a lingering glance in a flickering movie house, or the "Friend of Dorothy" shorthand dropped into a polite conversation like a velvet passport.

And then, of course, there were the tea rooms—those damp, silent cathedrals of the desperate and the brave that men only dared mention in conspiratorial undertones. A widening of the stance, a rhythmic tap of a loafer, and a symphony of unspoken intent played out in a public stall, while the rest of the world washed its hands and checked its tie in the mirror, blissfully unaware of the revolution happening six feet away.

By the mid-eighties, I was a starving student at UAB, living on a diet of academic nerves and a gas credit card tethered to my parents’ bank account. I had a car, a tiny apartment and I was always up for travel and adventure.

Just after my Spring semester finals, I ran into Billy at The Rage. 

He was the kind of beautiful that made you ache to look at. A golden-blond creature with a grin that could charm the scales off a snake. He was the architect of our "Caring Brotherhood"—the man who could organize an AIDS fundraiser with the same military precision most people reserve for a small invasion. He didn't just meet people; he recruited them into a lifelong commitment to serve.

"It’s Memorial Day Weekend," he declared, hovering over his drink like a bird of prey."And there’s a little strip of Pensacola Beach I can hear calling my name. Let’s all road-trip down tomorrow. Sun, fun, and the kind of trouble our mothers always prayed we would never find."

"Billy, I’m poor," I protested. "I barely have money for food, rent, and my bar tab."

"Oh bother…” he mocked “Come on, John. Live a little! You can sleep on our floor. There are only four of us in the room. It’ll be fun, like a little gay submarine…only with better outfits. Just contribute some to the gas.”

He paused and took a drink of his vodka tonic “I mean, if you're gonna starve and go thirsty anyway—why not do it on a beach where the scenery is better."

I said yes. 

I mean, why wouldn't I? I had a gas card, a free floor to sleep on, and the protection of my own glittering praetorian guard—even though I was still a bit pulled-up, I was definitely hungry to immerse myself and learn about this secret world of the gay.

"Six A.M. sharp tomorrow," he barked. "We have to arrive by PTH."

I blinked. "Is that the Pensacola airport code?"

"Prime Tanning Hours—10 a.m. to 2 p.m., you silly man!” He paused, then reached out, grabbed my cheeks and squeezed. “You have so much to learn, and we’re gonna take you to finishing school!"

The next morning, I arrived ten minutes late to find Billy’s 1983 Toyota Corolla humming with the energy of four grown men packed inside and another outside trying to stuff his bags into the trunk. Billy had clearly done some midnight recruiting.

"Just throw your bag in and jump on someone’s lap!" Billy chirped from the window.

My heart sank.

"I think I’m gonna pass," I said, backing away from the crowded sedan. I definitely wasn’t cut out for a five-hour drive in another man’s lap.

Billy leaned further out the window, looking at the hesitation on my face. "Well, would you want to drive, too?"

“That sounds more like it,” hardly giving it a thought, “I'll just follow you,” I said, pointing back toward 'Inga,' my road-worthy 1976 Volvo station wagon. 

After a flurry of theatrical negotiation, we split the troops. I inherited Sonny and Mark, while Billy, Stan, and Randy remained in the Corolla. Sonny raised his voice above the fray of the re-do: “I brought a cooler of Barley Pop!”

Randy, a muscly little number already settled into the back of the Corolla, looked at my Volvo like it was a garbage scow. "If they’re following us in that, can we at least make sure Mark doesn't try to bring every wig in his collection?" he shouted. "We’re going to Pensacola for the weekend, not New York for a Broadway residency! I only packed a toothbrush and a bikini—in a fanny pack!”

Mark didn’t even look up from the cooler he was trying to wedge into my way-back. "It’s called ‘packing for options,’ Randy. Something you clearly gave up on when you picked out that same old ratty tank top."

With the troops officially split and the Corolla's taillights receding into the distance, a strange, quiet peace settled over the Volvo. The chaos stayed with Billy, leaving us with nothing but the open road and a cooler of beer.

Sonny was asleep before we hit the highway, so I turned to Mark. “Are you from Birmingham, Mark?”

“Missy,” he corrected instantly, checking his reflection in the passenger-side vanity mirror. “Everyone just calls me ‘Missy.’ ‘Mark’ sounds too much like my mother—or worse, one of the nuns from my school.”

I paused to take that all in. “So, are you from here, ‘Missy’?”

“Jonesboro, Georgia, just below Atlanta.”

“Nuns? Was it a Catholic school?”

“Yes, unfortunately. My mom and dad are almost broke paying for all of us.”

“‘All of us’?” I questioned.

“There are thirteen of us.” He rattled them off like a grocery list he’d been forced to memorize under duress—no breaths, no commas, just a rhythmic purge of a past life: 

“Maria-Joseph-Lucy-Anthony-Rosa-Domenic-Francis-Peter-Elena-Vincent-Sofia…and the baby Paulie.” He added with a dry punctuation: “And then of course, me. The Martinos. Tah dah!”

“Are you all close?”

“No,” he sighed, picking at the label of a beer he was already hugging. “We all just lose touch once we leave home. We talk, I guess, but we don't really say anything. It’s all ‘How’s your job?’ and ‘Did you go to Mass?’ Out here...” he gestured to Billy’s Corolla swerving ahead of us, where I could see Randy and Billy mid-argument through the back window, “...out here, Randy can tell me I’m an over dramatic queen, and I can tell him he’s a boring gym-rat, and ten minutes later we’re sharing a vodker drink. In a way, it feels a lot more honest than Sunday dinner at home ever did.”

That honesty was tested an hour later at a Stuckey’s near Montgomery. Randy jumped out of the Corolla before it even fully stopped, marching over to my window.

"Missy, if you tell John to motion for us to slow down one more time, I'm going to unpack that boa of yours, shut it in the car door, and drag it along I-65," Randy snapped.

Mark didn't blink or even look up. As we all shuffled into the air-conditioned hum of the shop to check out the pecan rolls, Mark said out loud, as if to no one in particular, "And if ya’ll don't stop driving like escaping criminals, Randy, I will be too nauseous to even sit upright when we get to the beach. Some of us have constitutions that aren't made of iron and spite."

They stood staring each other down for a beat—the pragmatist and the drama queen—before Randy rolled his eyes, snatched up a bag of pecans, and tossed a pack of cigarettes to her. "Fine," he muttered. "But hurry up. We're losing PTH."

I just watched—fascinated.

I had become more and more distant from my own family—everyone except my mother, of course. But Mark had a point— there we all were—like boys from the land of misfit toys—off on a mis-adventure together. Little did I know that Mark, Randy —all of us would become brothers, a chosen family in which we would hold each other together years later when we began losing each other and the world seemed to be falling apart.

We tore down I-65 like we were being chased by vice. Just past Montgomery, Billy’s blinker signaled near Exit 114, as he frantically gestured out the window toward the roadside emergency lane. I pulled over, expecting a mechanical disaster or an urgent potty stop, but Sonny and Mark’s heads popped up in my mirror like jacks-in-the-box and they were out the door before the tires stopped spinning.

"Georgiana Starlington!" Mark shrieked, racing toward the highway sign.

"Who in the hell is Georgiana Starlington?" I yelled over the roar of passing semis.

"It’s the name, John! Look at the sign!" Billy beamed, striking a pose that would have made a Ziegfeld girl weep. "Georgiana Starlington. It’s only the best Southern Belle drag name EVER! Imagine her," he said, gesturing like a director framing a shot—"All dolled up on aisle 3 at the Piggly Wiggly—a legend in marabou and sequins. What a hoot!"

“She wouldn’t wear marabou at the Pig, Billy, honestly,” Mark scoffed, adjusting his sunglasses. “Georgiana is strictly daytime sequins and a sensible pump. She has standards.”

“Standards…” Randy muttered exhaustedly, leaning against the Corolla with his arms crossed. “Can we just take the picture and get this show on the road? I’m getting tan lines on my tan lines.”

After we took a few pictures, Billy turned, and walking back toward the cars he said aloud, “This is tradition, boys. We never pass this sign without a picture.” He looked lovingly at Stan, “Stan and I have a gallery of these on the mantle—they’re our family vacation photos"

After a couple of quick stops for gas and caffeine, we finally hit Pensacola around 10:15, vibrating from Vivarin, Diet Coke, and the sheer, jagged adrenaline of the high-speed chase. 

The hotel room wasn't ready.  But Billy wasn't about to let a little thing like room availability derail our dash for PTH. He flirted with the hotel desk clerk, leaning against the counter and posing. After negotiating a noon check-in, a room with a better view, and a late check-out for Monday, he flashed that devilish, high-noon grin, pointed to the horizon and chirped, "Let’s make like a baby and head out!"

We scurried into the lobby bathroom like the Rockettes on a quick-change between sets. I stood back and watched the frantic, semi-coordinated circus—two and three grown men to a stall, a chorus of giggles echoing off the tile. It was a tangled, theatrical choreography of peeling off denim and shimmying into Speedos, short-shorts, and tank tops, all while performing a mid-air ballet to avoid touching the questionable graffiti’d walls.

The tiny room echoed with the sound of zippers and frantic maneuvering. “Randy, move your elbow, you’re poking me in the kidney!” Stan yelled from behind a metal door.

“If you didn’t have to bring half a pharmacy in that massive toiletry bag, we’d have room to breathe!” Randy fired back.

From the next stall, Billy’s voice rose above the din, serene and authoritative: “Now Boys! Beauty means sacrifice…and sometimes discomfort.”

I hung back, my butt against the cool marble of the sinks, feeling decidedly out of place. I was the conservative gay who wasn't yet comfortable with the constant girl-ing around or the casual ease with which they traded female names. I was still clinging to my polo shirts and my dignity, watching this explosion of camp with a mixture of awe and skepticism.

Randy stepped out of his stall, already half-changed, and caught my eye in the mirror. No one in the group knew that Randy and I had already had an encounter or two back in Birmingham. In the hierarchy of the car trip, he was the muscly pragmatist and I was the academic "good boy," but in the reflection of that lobby mirror, there was a heavy, unspoken history.

"You okay, John?" he asked, his voice lower than the theatrical chirping happening in the stalls.

"Yeah," I muttered, moving toward the only empty stall left. "Just trying to figure out how I can put on my swim trunks without touching anything."

"Good luck with that," he chuckled, as he slipped into the cramped space behind me. 

We changed together in that small, pressurized square of tile and metal. There was a brief, charged moment where our shoulders brushed—a reminder of those nights in Birmingham—then we both looked away, focused on the task of becoming beach ready.

Ten minutes later, we emerged together, walking back out to the parking lot where Billy's car was already revving. Billy leaned out the window of the Corolla, his sunglasses slid down to the tip of his nose, with a grin wide enough to catch flies. He looked at me, then at Randy, then back at me.

"What took you boys so long?" he asked, his voice trailing off with a knowing lilt that made my stomach do a slow roll. He didn't say anything else, but the glance and nod he gave Stan in the passenger seat was a silent headline. 

"I checked your bag with ours, John. Let’s make for the beach!"

I jumped into Inga and turned to find Sonny and Mark already installed in the back, smelling of coconut oil, cheap beer, and impending mischief. "Let’s roll down these windows and drink in this Florida air."

As we drove away, I heard Mark quip to Sonny, “Did Pam cut your hair? 

“Yes”

“Well honey you need to do something different next time. You look like Friar Tuck.”

Sonny snapped back, “It’s called a Caesar cut!”

Mark replied, already cracking open a fresh beer for the road, “Well, honey, you need to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's—and tell Pam you want your money back.” 

Our Gay Kingdom

We crossed the bridge into the Gulf Breeze speed trap—a town so dry and conservative they probably banned sex for fear people might think they’re dancing—and we kept on driving. Over the Sound—paid our tolls—two miles, 5 miles, and then, before we knew it, the condos vanished and there was nothing but sugar-white sand and the blue waters of the Gulf to our right, and dunes, sea grass and the shimmering Santa Rosa Sound to our left.

We finally pulled into a gravel lot by a lonely cinderblock bathhouse. It was Opal Beach near Navarre.

The beach was beautiful, quiet and pristine like a nature preserve, the sand so white and fine.  After we all walked to the cool wetness of the tide line, the water licking our feet, the waves breaking with a soft, shushing sound, without speaking a word, we all sat down just taking it all in.

Then Billy popped and shouted “Let’s unload these wagons!”

Billy’s car was a magic trick of high-camp luxury. Like a magician working a Vegas matinee, out came chairs, umbrellas, a round card table and two telescoping twenty-foot poles to fly our rainbow flags. A linen tablecloth followed, topped with a spread fit for a coronation, washed down with champagne and "barley pop.” Tucked behind a spare tire, Billy unearthed a relic from the previous October—Mark’s glitter-encrusted plastic wand topped with a star, left over from his turn as Glinda the Good Witch.

“Is that my wand?! Mark squealed. “I wondered where that went.” 

“A better question is ‘why’s it behind the tire in my trunk’” Billy said, continuing to unpack.

Randy snatched it up and ran.  “Hey!!” Mark yelled, but Randy ran off - down to the water’s edge to set up his perch, waving the wand around over the backdrop of the sea and sky. 

With the camp set up, Mark walked out into the surf to cool down, diving into the waves and surfacing like a playful seal.  All the sudden, Randy let out a theatrical shriek, 'Oh, for god's sake, Mark, bless your heart, come out of that water. You look like a drowned rat!' and playfully hurled the wand.

Mark dove into the seventh wave and the wand hit the water right on top of him. Mark emerged and grabbed it “My wand!” “You f*ckin’ little garden gnome! Why would you throw it in the water?!” as he walked out from the foam toward Randy, spluttering and indignant. 

Billy, ever the peace-maker interrupted “Ok kids. Don’t make me have to pull over this car!” They both looked up at him startled, then everyone laughed. Mark trudged back to the sand and, with a mock-solemn bow, handed the wand to Billy as he passed by to set the table.

Billy didn't skip a beat. He accepted the wand with the gravity of a monarch receiving a scepter. 'Thank you, honey,' Billy chirped, standing up and waving the glittered wand toward the horizon. 'The Lady of the Lake has spoken. Consider this beach officially consecrated.'

After we got things set up, Mark wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, turned up his empty solo cup, and shook it with a flourish. 'Honestly, Billy,' he chirped, 'who’s a girl gotta f*ck to get a drink around here!?' Billy didn't skip a beat. He popped a cork with a theatrical bang and handed Mark and the rest of us a plastic flute of bubbles.

We had a feast: chilled shrimp that Billy had somehow kept frozen in a nest of dry ice, wedges of Brie that were sweating in the Florida heat, trays of fresh cut fruit, and enough beer and champagne to float a boat.

It turns out, this was a long standing meeting place. Men who had sex with men from all over the region, from Pensacola to Navarre were drawn here to this remote, small cinderblock bathhouse in the middle of nowhere to enjoy nature and the Gulf of Mexico in the buff—and encounter other like-minded men. On this day, nude bronzed and statuesque male bodies were scattered here and there across the beach and the dunes. 

“Is this legal?” I asked Billy. But he obviously thought it was a rhetorical question, quietly staring off into the horizon.

I was shy, intimidated by the sheer 'outness' of it all. I don’t think I ever even took off my t-shirt—and I definitely avoided the public men’s room, preferring to wade waist-deep into the emerald water to 'smile' in private.

I sat there on the edge of the blanket, clutching my plastic flute of champagne like a shield. I was quietly taking it all in - watching them flit around taking in the "unseemliness" of it all with a mixture of awe and a cold, tight knot of embarrassment in my gut.  I thought to myself ‘Why are they hell bent on pretending to be something they aren't?’

And like a bolt of lightning out of nowhere, I heard “Why do you seem so uptight, John?" Randy asked, his voice losing its playful lilt and sharpening into a razor. "You’re so quiet. Whatcha thinkin’ about?"

Mark stepped in, his face tight. "He’s embarrassed, Randy. Look at him. He’s sitting there in a fetal position, fully clothed in the middle of a sunny day on a neked gay beach. We’re in the middle of nowhere and he’s still afraid somebody’s gonna see him and report him to the UAB dean’s office - or worse yet - tell his mother." He turned his gaze on me, cold and direct. "You think you’re better than us, don’t you? You think because you can pass for 'straight’ you’re better. You look at me, and you see some queen that calls himself 'Missy’ - a sissy little fag boy with a girl’s name prancing around in the sand with pumps on - and you think I’m the weak link."

"I don’t know what you mean," I stammered, but of course I knew - and he had hit a nerve.  Why couldn’t I even just live and let live. Why did I have to be so judgemental?

"Is that why you haven’t gone to dinner with me?" Randy snapped. "You’re ashamed? You’re so busy trying to act 'straight' that you’ve forgotten that your own sense of ‘straightness’ is a lie. You’re a fag, John. Just like the rest of us. You’re no different. No better. And let me tell you—your 'Mary' is just as big as any of ours, and you’re scared to death of her.”

“Just lighten up a little, John,” he said with a half smile. “You’re like Eeyore—so miserable and serious all the time."

Mark leaned down, his shadow falling over me. “You seem so afraid someone will see who you really are and judge you—that they’ll hate you. The thing is, John, you seem to hate yourself."

The silence that followed was suffocating. The waves crashed, but no one moved—no one spoke. I felt small. I just wanted to dig a deep hole in the sand and crawl in.

Then, Billy popped another cork. The bang shattered the tension like a glass brick.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Billy shrieked, throwing his hands up. "Someone get this man a fainting couch and a string of pearls to clutch! Mark, you're being so dramatic—save the soliloquy for the stage. And Randy, put that wand down before you poke someone’s eye out.”

Sonny chimed in from the cooler, not even looking up. "Anybody want another barley pop?"

“No,” Missy said, “pass me the bubbles. This undisputed champion has another game of ‘Toss the Pump’ to win.  You’re up, Sonny!"

I felt the air rush back into my lungs. It had all ended as quickly as it had started—I was still shy, still mousy, still clutching my champagne—but the boundary had been drawn. I realized then that they weren't angry with me. They were just saying what they saw—and what they saw was that I was the only person on that beach who was pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

The quiet types along the beach - those who had come for a private afternoon - gave our loud and flamboyant circus a wide berth, retreating down the shore as Billy straightened up the laundry basket and produced another pair of pumps.

'Time for another round of Toss the Pump!' he announced.

Billy walked back and sat next to me quietly for a few seconds, then leaned in, his voice a consoling but conspiratorial whisper. “You’re ok, John. You’ll come to it in your own time.” 

After we sat quietly for a few minutes, he turned and asked “What do you think of our little spot? This is our own gay Kingdom. ‘Is it legal’, you asked? Who cares? Either way, it’s ours.'

'It’s so beautiful,' I replied.

'Yes, it is,' he said with quiet contentment. Then he bolted up, snatched a size 12 stiletto from the sand, and barked, “Now—are you gonna sit there all day, or are you gonna show these girls how a gentleman handles a heel?'"

Little did I know how prophetic Billy was that day. This was a mere seed of the miracle it would become. In future years, our cars would multiply into a seemingly endless line stretching for miles down both sides of Hwy 399 as the word spread through caring brotherhoods across the South.

Soon, the Boys of Atlanta (BOA) would arrive with their own marquees; the New Orleans Boys (NOB) would bring the Mardi Gras spirit to the dunes; and the Men of Memphis (MOM) would stake their claim in the sand. But on that day, it was just us—the Men of Birmingham (MOB)—the self-appointed arbiters, jesters and knights of a court that was only just forming.

By mid-afternoon, the sun had done its work. We packed up our rainbow flags and retreated to the hotel, leaving the beach beautiful, quiet and pristine, exactly as we’d found it. It was my first pilgrimage with the Men of Birmingham. But it certainly wouldn't be my last.

And Here’s to Billy

Billy R. Cox was a force of nature—the gay Pied Piper of the Deep South. He’d play a tune, start a rhythmic march through the streets of Birmingham, New Orleans and any other city in the South, and before you knew it, we were all falling into line behind him.

I became his disciple and his friend. I watched him. I studied the way he spoke to people as if they were the only person in the room; the way he deployed a smile like a tactical weapon; and the way he organized, well, everything, but especially the fierce precision with which he led us through Pride Parades and AIDS fundraisers, showing a marrow-deep commitment to our community when few others seemed to care. 

He was in many ways the architect of the world we still inhabit in Birmingham. He helped form BAO, birthed the fundraisers that saved lives, and traveled the South teaching other men how to turn their own grief into a revolution. He was named grand marshal of the Alabama AIDS Walk, and, in the final months of his life, opened up for a series of stories in The Birmingham News that documented his fight with the disease that would rob him of his life at 37.

Billy’s health began to decline and he died on November 25th, 1994. 

But the music didn't stop—it just changed keys. Because of him, we all learned how to strap on our own armor of smiles and charm to do the work that had to be done. I learned to find my own light, my own rhythm, and eventually, I looked back and realized people had begun following me, too. 

He showed me the way out of the shadows. He taught a shy boy from Birmingham that you don't have to wait for an invitation to be fabulous—you just have to plant the flag and wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

And he was right, of course. By 1994, CNN would report a million of us swarming the shores of Pensacola Beach on Memorial Day Weekend—a great gathering of the tribes under a single sun. 

Like the Birds to Capistrano: Part II

1994

By 1994, I had my first flip phone—a plastic brick that made me feel like an international man of mystery—and the internet was still a screeching dial-up ghost in the machine. But the gay homing signal was louder than ever.

I told my Mother that Tom and I were heading to Pensacola Beach for Memorial Day weekend. She didn't blink. She just offered the standard Southern benediction: "Remember to use at least number 4 sunscreen. You don’t want to burn and get cancer." In her world, a sunburn was the greatest threat to our longevity.

On Saturday morning, we were trapped in a two-hour crawl of stop-and-go metal, inching across Pensacola bay and through the Gulf Breeze speed trap. My flip phone chirped—a voicemail from my Mom back home, so I pressed ‘callback.’

"Hellooo?" she answered, that familiar lilt stretching the word into three syllables.

"Hey Mom, it’s me—your better-looking son. Did you call?"

"Yes, I did, and well..." There was a dramatic pause—the kind only a Southern mother can deploy. "John, have you seen CNN this morning?"

"No, ma'am. We’ve been a bit busy with travel. Why?"

"Did you say you were in Pensacola?"

"Yes, ma'am. Why?"

"Well, now it’s on the news. They’re saying estimates are that up to a million gays and lesbians will be there this weekend."

I looked out at the endless sea of cars, the rainbows pinned to every antenna, and the sheer, vibrating volume of the crowd. "Mom, I told you we were coming here to meet some friends."

"Well, you didn't tell me it was a million of 'em."

"Well, of course, we don’t know all million, Mother. I hardly know any of the lesbians."

She went quiet for a moment, clearly running the logistics through her head. "Well, John, I’ve pondered on this all morning—and I just have one question."

"What’s that, Mom?"

"Well, honey... who sent out that memo?"

I sat there, the engine idling in the Florida heat, and for the first time, I realized the sheer, unadulterated magic of what we’d built. Before the internet, before smartphones, before we were connected by anything but our own survival, how did we all know where to congregate? How did a million nomads find the same coordinate on a map that didn't officially exist?

"Mother," I replied, "I don’t know what to tell you. I suppose it’s like the birds to Capistrano. Maybe there’s a little gay magnetic compass in our heads that points us to the nearest gay party."

Oh, could you please be serious, just once John Kelly!" She obviously wasn’t satisfied, but I was getting more frustrated with the traffic by the second.

"Mom, I’m gonna need to call you back," I quipped, and flipped the phone shut.

The Crossing

It took nearly three hours to cross the Sound. Eventually, we inched through Pensacola Beach and started toward Navarre, cars lining both sides of Highway 399. Less than a half-mile out, we could see what looked like a scirocco—a sand storm blowing up from the beach and across the dunes toward the Sound. As we approached, we realized it wasn't the weather. It was people.

Masses of people lined the shore from the tide line to the dunes. Umbrellas, tents, and towels were everywhere. 

"Should we turn around and park?" Tom asked.

"Dot left a message that our group would set up camp exactly 2.4 miles past the Pancake Palace sign," I said, checking the odometer. "We’re now at 3 miles."

"Ugh," he sighed. "We have a full cooler, two backpacks, and a tent, John!"

"Well, I don't know what you want me to do. We'll u-turn, park, and walk back."

Luckily, Tom and I had been building our leg strength. We unpacked, strapped the backpacks to our shoulders, and hefted the heavy cooler between us, each gripping a plastic handle as we headed down the beach like pack mules. Barefoot, the walk was a strange sensory cocktail: the squeak of white sand and the hush of breaking waves mixed with the yelps and laughs of the human mass and the thumping house music from each camp we passed. Every hundred feet or so, someone would offer us a beer, a toke, or a bottle of water.

The diversity was staggering—old gays, butch women, granola hippies, and earth mothers—stretching as far as the eye could see. Eventually, the "rainbow" began to narrow into boys, then more boys, and then finally hot men. Suddenly, a seven-foot glittery slipper appeared on the horizon—a replica of the Priscilla bus prop, complete with steps so you could slide down the instep.

"John!! Tom! You found us!" Dot ran down from a tent near the dunes. "We’re all up here. Put your things down. We’ll work you in… right... here," he said, pointing to a five-by-five patch of sovereign sand.

He gestured to our neighbors. "Atlanta is next to us," he said, his voice dropping to a theatrical whisper. "They’re cute and all, but look—no camp. Just a line of towels. No games, no creative element. I mean, really! Couldn’t they at least make an effort?"

He leaned in closer and continued, "But the New Orleans Boys are two camps down. Can you believe they stole the bust of Endymion from the Mardi Gras float and brought it out here? It’s gonna get ru-ined,” he sang.

"Memphis is a ‘Roll Tide’ football field that way," he said, pointing down the shore, then glancing at Tom with a mischievous grin. "And the funniest thing EVER. They all have 'MOM' tattooed on the back of their right thigh, just below the bikini line. Do you know why? Well, I’ll tell you why…. It’s so when their legs hit the sky, it spells 'WOW!' Get it? WOW!”

Tom and I shared a look. 

"I think I need a drink," I said. "You?"

"Yes, indeed," Tom replied. "Make mine a double."

High Court

The next morning, ever the planner, I headed to the beach at sunrise as a sentinel to stake our claim. The beach was a mess—the refuse of a thousand parties. All of us early birds spent an hour or two cleaning up our hundred-yard stretch, a quiet ritual of respect for the kingdom. By 10:00 A.M., the high-flying flags were back up—beacons making each of our camps distinct, identifiable, and easier to find.

While I was taking in the morning sun, my phone chirped again. I answered “This is John.”

"Hey, Honey, it’s your mother.”

Hi, Mom.”

“So I talked to Helen this morning. My friend in Pittsburgh…”

“Uh-huh?”

“She says her son, Allen is there."

"Uh-huh?"

"Have you met him?”

I exhaled quietly, a bit exhausted and wiped the sand from my face.

“She says he’s a nice-looking blond man—about six feet."

I paused, letting out a long audible, slow sigh. "Uh…No, Mom. I haven’t seen him. But I’ll keep an eye out."

"Allen from Pittsburgh." I repeated.

"Oh no.” she said, correcting me, “Helen says Allen lives in New York now."

"Well, that simplifies things, Mother," I said, wasting my sarcasm on the beach breeze. "I'll just check the New York blond section of the million-man lineup and report back”.

“Love you, Mom. Bye!"

I wandered over into the bleary-eyed Atlanta camp to greet some friends and check out the uninspired towel line. As I stepped over a cooler, a vaguely familiar tanned man in mirrored shades looked me up and down with the intensity of a diamond appraiser.

"John…?" he sighed. "The same swimsuit? Really?"

I turned to look, lowering my sunglasses.  “Excuse me?” I said "I packed three swimsuits specifically to avoid repetition," I defended. "This is day two. This is swimsuit two."

"Oh, I didn't mean this year. I meant you wore that same swimsuit on Saturday two years ago. I remember the print."

I stood there, paralyzed. Called out, in a crowd of a million. I wasn’t sure whether to be offended—or flattered. Either way, I had been cataloged. The meekness of my youth had been replaced by a spotlight so bright it could evidently track a polyester blend across a twenty-four-month gap.  

I just shook my head and continued my mission to bum a cocktail and a bump off someone.

A Popcorn Epiphany

I settled back in next to Dot under the tent, and almost immediately, the world began to liquefy… 

The sound of the surf hitting the shore breathed—a heavy, wet inhalation that seemed to pull the oxygen deep out of my lungs. The noise of the crowd—the yelps, the whistles, the distant thud of a bassline—melded, ebbing and flowing in a strange, elastic loop that stretched until a single laugh lasted an eternity. The afternoon heat fused the sand, the sea, and my own skin into one massive, breathing organism. Sinking into the center, the horizon line blurred into a soft, glowing smudge as time unspooled like a ribbon in the wind...

"John?”

The world slammed back into focus. The sand was just sand again. I blinked a few times, the salt air sharp in my nose, and looked over at Dot.

"Do you remember," Dot asked, shielding his eyes from the glare, "which year we rented that house with the pool in Navarre?"

"God, yes," I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from a long way off. "I remember…"

That was the year we’d braved the gauntlet at the Red Garter. I remember the bible-beating preachers stationed on every corner of the Seville Quarter, shouting about hellfire and brimstone into the humid Pensacola night while we marched past them like glitter-covered infantry. Inside, we danced until the sweat pooled in our shoes. And just as the lights started to flicker for closing, the DJ’s voice boomed over the speakers:

"For anyone who isn’t quite finished, there’s an after-party at 1877 Coral Street in Navarre!"

I froze. Isn’t that where we’re staying? I looked up at the booth, and there stood Billy, sporting a Cheshire cat grin that told me sleep was officially off the menu.

By 4:00 AM, the house was a humid crush of a hundred people. Most of them had jumped into the pool fully clothed. Billy and Stella held court in the kitchen behind the bar like high priests, egging the crowd on. I finally surrendered and headed toward my bedroom, passing Missy on the way. She was on top of the bar, eyes closed, swaying in a slow, hypnotic rhythm to the bass. With every theatrical nod of her head, the bill of his baseball cap scraped the 'popcorn' texture of the low ceiling, sending a steady snow of white insulation flakes down over the bar, the floor, and the unsuspecting guests.

What a mess, I thought, shaking my head. Who’s gonna clean this up?

I got my answer at 9:00 AM.

I was in the kitchen, standing in my muscle shirt and shorts, frying a pound of bacon to soak up the sins of the previous night. The smell—or maybe the sizzle—finally stirred Missy. She’d passed out on the sofa in the dining room, just across the bar from my frying pan. He hauled himself upright, hair matted and sticking out at schizophrenic angles. With a groan that sounded like a tectonic plate shifting, she dragged a barstool over to the counter.

"What are you doing?" she croaked.

"Making breakfast. It’s after nine."

He grunted in displeasure, his eyes half-closed, until they landed on the bar. There, in the morning light, lay a fine, chunky white powder.

Her eyes snapped wide. A predatory light flickered on. "Yes, honey!" she yelped, suddenly revived. "Somebody left Mama a little party favor!"

I didn't think much of it until she disappeared into her room and returned with her wallet. She pulled out a credit card and started manically swiping the white dust into a pile, chopping it with the edge of the card with the precision of a Vegas high-roller.

"Missy," I said, pausing with the spatula. "What are you doing?"

"Shhh!" she hissed, her eyes darting around. "I don’t want to have to share!"

Swipe, chop. Swipe, chop. She arranged the dust into two formidable four-inch lines. A rolled-up dollar bill appeared from thin air.

"Missy, wait—"

Before I could get the words out, she dove in. She snorted the line on the right with a violent inhale, exhaled a cloud of dust, and immediately attacked the line on the left. She threw her head back, shaking it furiously from the sting in her nostrils.

"Woo!" she barked, her eyes watering. "That is just what Mama needed! That's the good stuff!"

I opened my mouth to tell her the truth—but then I stopped.

I’ve never seen anything like it. For the next three hours, Missy buzzed around that rental house like a Tasmanian devil. She was a whirlwind of domestic fury. She scrubbed the floors, wiped down every wall, polished the counters, and even did my breakfast dishes before I could finish my coffee. She was manically, deliriously productive.

I just sat there and watched her go. I figured if inhaling ten years of cheap ceiling insulation was enough to inspire a full house-cleaning, who am I to stop him enjoying it.

Circus McGuirkus

Back at our hotel, I stood in front of the full-length mirror for a final check. I had a sudden flashback to the boy I’d been just a decade ago—the one who had cowered in the shadows of bars, praying to be invisible. Now, I looked at Tom, adjusting his red foam nose, and then at the two of us side-by-side: a handsome gay couple, tanned and painted as sexy muscle-clowns. I realized I wasn't afraid to be seen anymore. My "Mary" had stepped out of the shadows and into the spotlight, trading my invisibility for the glorious, empowered freedom of the Big Top Party, the main event for the weekend. We each placed our “‘Piren tablets” on our tongues, chugged the last of our bottled water and we were off to the arena.

The interior of the Pensacola Bay Center was a 20,000-square-foot fever dream. Overhead, massive swaths of alternating red and white velvet draped from the ceiling like the heavy peaked roof of a massive tent. Bunting in every shade of the rainbow crisscrossed the void, vibrating with the bass of the music.

A wave of music hit me and the room began to spin in a rhythmic blur. It didn't just move; it began to rhyme. We found our way to the middle of the dance floor and found our friends. After 15 or 20 minutes of greetings, hugs and kissing cheeks, we began to dance…And on Stage Number One, here is something quite new! From a country called Birmingham, and the Birmingham zoo, come the Drum-Tummied Snubbs who can drum any tune… 

In the center of the 3 rings stood the Ringmaster, a 1920s throwback in a scarlet tailcoat and gold trim, his whip snapping in time to the beat. I closed my eyes, and the McGuirkus inside me took the whip. But if I ran the circus...Step right in! This way, ladies and gents! My Side Show starts here in the next of my tents. When you see what they do, you’ll say no other circus is— Half the great circus, Circus McGuirkus it is…

I looked around me and saw a sea of muscle and makeup—men in white breeches and tall riding boots, others in little more than a top hat and a smile. There were men on stilts dressed as golden giraffes, gymnasts in sequined unitards swinging from the rafters, and "elephants" made of two men in grey spandex balancing silver balls—no really!

Tom and I danced through the Birmingham and Atlanta families, our foam noses bobbing in the strobe lights that blurred into the colors of the banners. Every few minutes, I’d spot a familiar face in the technicolor riot. I’d dive in for a long, intimate embrace, then shuffle back to Tom.

"Who was that cute guy?" Tom yelled, wiping a streak of clown white from his forehead.

"My cousin!" I shrieked back.

Tom looked skeptical. "Your cousin? We’ve been together four years and I’ve never seen him."

I tried to explain the family tree, but the McGuirkus meter was already running back into my head again...

And on Stage Number Three, see the Wily McWoos! Who come from a lineage of cousins and shoes! With a flip of the hip and a tail of this kind, Twelve out of twenty-five are dancing behind!... 

I took Tom by the hand and dragged him across the floor to introduce him to my cousin, a handsome man in a leopard-print loincloth. Then there was another. Then a third, who looked like a Ziegfeld Follies reject. By the time the introductions were over, Tom was howling. Between my mother and her siblings, twelve of the twenty-five grandchildren had grown up to be gay or lesbian.

My head was spinning -The Circus McGuirkus! The cream of the cream! The Circus McGuirkus! The Circus Supreme! Astounding! Fantastic! Terrific! Tremendous!... 

We had all run away to the circus only to find that the circus was us. Tonight, we were the jugglers, the acrobats, and clowns. But tomorrow we would all just head back to our own towns.

From a thousand and thirty-three faraway towns To the place that you see ‘em in, ladies and gents, in the World’s Greatest Show, the Circus McGuirkus big tent!...

Tom," I whispered, trying to steady my footing and leaning heavily on his shoulder. "I think I need to get some more water. I’m feeling a little lightheaded."

I staggered away through the crowd toward the bar...

The Jailbird 

The heat of Sunday afternoon on beach, day two, usually brought the "scouts" out—the men who wandered across Highway 399 into the sea grass and mangroves of the Santa Rosa Sound for a bit of private exploration. My friend Ron was one of them. In the heat of the day, he gestured toward the Sound and vanished.

An hour later, he still hadn't returned. Eventually, Billy knelt next to my chair and whispered, "We need to go into town and bail Ron out of jail."

"Jail?!" I hissed. "What did he do?"

"Solicitation. Undercover vice cop in the bushes. Ron thought it was a roleplay—but the cop took offense."

We made the somber trek to the Escambia County jail. And after a significant dent in our collective cash, Ron emerged looking like a man who had lost a fight with a shrub.

"Ya’ll… What am I gonna do?" he muttered. "I’ll never show my face on that sand again."

"The hell you won't," Billy snapped, a spark of his tactical mischief lighting up. "We aren't going back in shame. We’re going back in costume."

We made a high-speed detour to a sporting goods store for a black-and-white striped referee shirt and a pair of toy handcuffs. When we crested the dunes back at the MOB camp, we didn't sneak in. We paraded. Billy and I acted as guards, marching a shackled, striped Ron past the miles of umbrellas.

"Make way for the Jailbird!" I shouted. "Fresh from the pokey!"

The beach erupted. The New Orleans boys cheered, the Memphis camp threw him a beer, and by the time we reached our tent, Ron wasn't a criminal—he was a legend. 

The Gay Homing Signal

By Monday morning, the adrenaline had thinned, and the ‘Piren had long since worn off. Most of us were finally sitting down to our first real meal in days, nursing sunburns and trying to remember who we arrived with and where we left our dignity.

I remember on the drive to the airport, looking out at the sugar-white dunes in the rearview mirror one last time. My mind drifted back ten years to that first trip with Billy—how quiet the sand had been, how still the water, and how small our little circle of six had felt against the vastness of the Gulf.

Back then, we were marginalized humans creeping out of dark, hidden places—the movie houses, the tea rooms, the shadows of a world that didn't want us. We were a tribe of nomads searching for coordinates that didn't exist. 

But as I looked at the shimmering, exhausted heat-haze of the present, I realized we weren't nomads anymore. We hadn’t just survived the 80s—we had evolved. We were no longer defined by what the world took from us, but by what we had the audacity to create.

The crucible of the 1980s and 1990s formed us into one strong, ironclad community…We had learned that if we plant our flag and wait long enough, the world eventually catches up. And now, we've transcended same-sex behavior and the binary of gender to build a new world: our own caring communities, our own sacred rituals, and our own chosen families.

No one sent the memo. We are the memo. As long as we keep showing up for each other, our Kingdom isn't a place on a map—it is us.

A Land of Seven Hills

Looking Beyond Borders

Over the years, I have been something of an adventurer—though my greatest discoveries haven't been of geographic places, but of the space created within me when new experiences dismantle old traditions. It is the stark, beautiful contrast between the stories I’ve been told and the complex reality I find firsthand. I’ve learned that the history and faith we inherit often serve as the mortar for the walls we build around our worldview; it takes a specific kind of courage to look past those partitions and see the vast landscape beyond.

Growing up in the Deep South, long before I held a passport, I was gifted an inheritance of vivid, two-dimensional storybook images of the Holy Land: the walls of Jericho, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem, and, of course, the holiest of holy cities, Jerusalem. It was a landscape setting for miracles and ancient parables—a simplified sketch designed to feed a child's imagination rather than reflect a modern reality layered with the heavy, jagged complexities of jihad and global politics.

As an adult, my views on the Near East were updated but not deepened, informed mostly by mainstream media stories of conflict, injustice, and suffering. So, as a son of the South, I knew this region only as a litany of Bible stories and abstract political concepts from 60 Minutes. I had never considered that I would one day have the opportunity to step through the gate, go "behind the curtain," and begin the difficult, human work of learning a region so complex from inside.

Guess Who’s Coming to Lunch

My fifth partner was born in the West Bank. His father, an eminent scholar and former editor of Arab Studies Quarterly, holds a deep, academic and experiential understanding of the region. A few months after we started dating, I was invited to my first "meet the family" lunch. As we sat with his parents and sister, the conversation began with the standard, polite sketches: travels, California weather, the safe topics of a first meeting.

Then the table went quiet. His father looked across at me, squinted slightly, and said, "So, John. I’ve reviewed your CV."

Time stood still. Where did he even get a copy of my CV? I wondered, a spike of panic hitting my chest. "I must say, it’s very impressive," he continued, his gaze steady. "You’ve had quite the education—across so many fields. And such important work you’re doing these days." I looked around the table. His mother watched intently; my partner and his sister had suddenly found a desperate interest in their phones, hands moving frantically just under the table.

I took a nervous sip of water and swallowed loudly. "Yes. Thank you. I… um, thank you..." a total betrayal of my mother and the elocution lessons she’d paid for years ago.

Recognizing my struggle, he leaned back a little, but didn't let go. "I imagine you’ve studied under some great educators... and given your background—educational, religious and professional,” he paused as if to rephrase, then said “While I don’t mean to make something so straightforward seem complicated, can you help me understand how you have informed your understanding of Israeli/Palestinian relations?" He paused, then added the clincher: "And because you’re dating my son, more specifically, I would like to understand how you have grown to understand the Palestinian condition."

My mind raced, churning through my "mind palace" for an escape. Suddenly, I saw the cover of a book I had bought after hearing a review on NPR: Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter. "Last summer," I replied, finding my wits, "I read Peace Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter and found it very interesting."

The shift was instantaneous. His mother sat back with a smile, and every bit of intensity left his father’s face as he reached for his wine. The gate had opened. But it left me wondering: What would most Americans say if they were asked that same question?

A Borderland Odyssey

In 2010, the family asked me to join them for their annual pilgrimage to Ramallah. Even though I had spent months studying the region, I realized I was still carrying that binary lens: the Israel of ‘God’s chosen’ versus the ‘brutes’ of the West Bank. In my mind, I had prepared for an adventure into a dangerous underbelly—a land of shadows that existed in the margins of that ‘land of milk and honey.’

But when I first passed through the gates of Ramallah, the "Hill of God," the simplified sketches of my youth were replaced by a kaleidoscope of color and complexity. I found myself standing in a living mosaic of humanity, beauty, and kindness—a world of profound faith that simply didn't mirror any culture or tradition I had ever known. The Levant was a textured masterpiece that far outshone the world my Alabama educators painted—a complex reality that can't be captured in a Bible story, a soundbite, or a news scroll—and I was there to be immersed.

In my travels, I had walked the inclines of other cities claiming seven hills—San Francisco, Cincinnati, and Rome—a topographic tradition said to have begun with the legend of Romulus and Remus. In the theology of my youth, however, the number seven was more than a geographic coincidence; it was a sacred shorthand. Seven was the number of creation, completion, transcendence and perfection. It was the seven days of Genesis, the seven lamps of the Menorah, and the seven times the walls of Jericho were circled before they fell.

It felt like a familiar rhyme, then, to learn that Ramallah was another of those storied cities. It was as if the ancient world and my own modern travels were finally speaking the same language. The city itself rises to an elevation of nearly 3,000 feet, etched into a series of limestone ridges. 

One morning, my partner and I sat quietly at a sidewalk cafe near Al-Manara Square. In the center of the roundabout, four stone lions stood sentinel—one accompanied by three cubs, representing the seven founding families of the city. As the sun climbed higher, the city began to glow. Nearby, the signature white Jerusalem stone of a mosque shimmered against the blue sky, its minarets topped with speakers that carried the melodic call to prayer over the hills. I sat sipping thick, cardamom-scented Turkish coffee from a small porcelain cup, watching a taxi navigate past a modern Zara storefront—the ancient and the ultra-modern colliding in a single street corner.

My partner’s family occupies a distinct place among these rolling hills. Their history is etched into the city's origin, a story of five brothers who fled their ancestral lands to find a place to worship freely. They found these seven hills and built a sanctuary. 

The family compound felt like a hidden Eden. Inside the high walls, a lush front garden overflowed with vibrant pink roses and tropical greens, watched over by a stone hawk perched among the branches. The entrance to their compound was guarded by a heavy iron gate protecting a three-story home of pale stone.

The family remains a pillar of an ancient Catholic lineage there. On Sunday, we walked to the family church, a structure of the same pale stone that seemed to grow directly out of the hillside. Inside, the air was thick with incense and the hushed, melodic Arabic of the liturgy. Arabic wasn’t a barrier for me - I don’t understand Latin either, but it’s beautiful all the same.  When the time for Eucharist arrived, the congregation surged forward in a rhythmic, practiced motion.

I knew the rules. I knew the bread was a boundary and that, as a non-Catholic, I was technically a trespasser at the rail. In the South, we are raised to respect property lines and pew positions, but some fences are just begging to be jumped. There is a certain part of me—maybe a byproduct of years spent navigating the rigid hierarchies of the South—that feels a low-simmering defiance when faced with a 'No Entry' sign. I didn't just want to watch the ritual from the safety of the pew; I wanted to experience it. So, with a bit of desire to stir the proverbial pot, I joined the queue.

As I approached the altar, the drama of my own making began to unfold. My partner’s mother turned and noticed me behind her, her eyes flickering over me. She frantically whispered to her daughter just behind her who in turn whispered to my partner behind her. “Remind him he can’t do this!  He can’t take communion.” When the word reached me, I nodded in recognition and continued moving forward as they each nervously fidgeted through the ceremony. 

When I finally reached the priest, I didn't reach for the host. Instead, I crossed my arms firmly over my chest, the universal signal that I sought only a blessing. It was a silent standoff: I was forcing the tradition to acknowledge my presence without letting them claim my soul. There was a microscopic pause, a moment where the entire architecture of the Church’s tradition stood between us, before he placed a hand on my head with the heavy, solemn weight of an ancient gavel. I recall walking back to the pew feeling both truly blessed and possessed by a quiet, rebellious satisfaction.

Because the extended family was aware of our relationship, my partner and I were told that it wouldn’t be acceptable for us to stay within the family home beyond the gates. Instead, we were positioned at a local hotel. This arrangement relied on an ironic form of gender-sorting: to maintain cultural propriety, we were paired with two female cousins to ensure every traveler was gender-matched. But the same heteronormative logic that excluded us from the compound resulted in my gay partner and me being assigned to the same hotel room. Oddly enough, tradition had, in its very rigidity, carved out a private space for our truth.

Sanctuary

The Mövenpick Hotel stood as a monument to wealth and global standards—a self-contained world of luxury intentionally disconnected from the dust and friction outside. The outdoor pool was a shimmering blue crescent, its water perfectly still and clear, reflecting the high, sun-drenched walls of the hotel and the rows of green lounge chairs waiting in the heat. It felt like an oasis of manufactured calm, a pristine fortress of pale stone and glass.

But, even in this modern sanctuary, tradition and cultural norms remained absolute. To maintain our cover, we performed a daily ritual: pushing our two single beds together under the cover of night and meticulously separating them every morning—a preemptive defense against the possibility that friends of my partner's family might be on the hotel staff. It was my first lesson in how to maneuver through the friction of the region.

As the sun set that first day, the gilded palace gave way to a different kind of sanctuary. We traveled across Ramallah into the absolute chromatic opposite of the Mövenpick: a refugee camp on the city’s periphery. Here, the shimmering silver of the olive trees and cool, blue water of the hotel pool vanished, replaced by the ashen geometry of raw cinderblock. The camp is a vertical labyrinth of gray; buildings are stacked precariously atop one another, draped in a tangled web of overhead wires. Narrow alleys are choked with the shadows of lean-tos and corrugated metal. Children darted through the narrow alleys, their laughter ringing out as they kicked a tattered soccer ball across the dusty pavement, seemingly indifferent to the shanties and porch-front washing machines that framed their playground.

We were led through the dark into a small, box-like home, its walls a patchwork of weathered asbestos tile. Within this cramped space, every luxury had been stripped away, leaving only the warmth of a humble hearth and a staggering depth of hospitality. The matriarch of a family shared their story—a heart-wrenching legacy of an olive grove lost in 1948 and a displacement from an ancestral village that now lived only in the useless, yellowed deeds they held in their hands like sacred relics.

After they spoke, my partner’s mother offered a bridge across the sectarian divide. With a simple, quiet communal grace, she presented her offerings—gifts and food that seemed to momentarily mend the air between us all—before embracing them as kin.

As we walked back to our van, I felt deep gratitude for my own home and everything my upbringing had afforded me; it was a weight I felt in the very soles of my shoes. I looked back at the dim light of the cinderblock home and realized the cruelest irony of our itinerary: the family we had just visited, the very people whose ancestral stories were etched into these hills, were barred by an invisible gate from the luxury where I would sleep that night. They lived in the shadow of a sanctuary that was as inaccessible to them as the olive groves they had lost.

I thought of the marble floors of the Mövenpick, cool and indifferent, and compared them to the rough, unforgiving concrete of the camp. It occurred to me that maybe both were sanctuaries—one built to keep the world out, and the other built to keep the spirit in. 

Oases and Walls

The descent from the Judean hills toward the Dead Sea basin is a transition into a landscape of extremes. We traveled through the Jordan Valley, where the environment shifts abruptly from scorched, lunar whites to the prehistoric green of Gan HaShlosha, or Sahne. The sensory experience is defined by the play of shadows against high canyon walls and the sound of water—cool, clear springs that have flowed since the time of the kings. It was a startling, translucent turquoise—a sharp, revitalizing contrast to the heavy, salt-laden air of the basin. We bathed in those pools, the water cool against the desert heat. It was a natural oasis, a place of ancient stillness that seemed to exist entirely outside the world of gates and walls etched into the maps above it. 

Nearby, the Monastery of the Temptation clung defiantly to the sheer, 350-meter-high cliffs of Mount Quarantal. It is a vertical fortress of pale stone carved directly into the rock face—a silent witness to centuries of seekers looking for their own version of sanctuary on the site where Jesus traditionally spent forty days fasting.

The Greek Orthodox monks maintained a strict code of 'appropriate attire' so because my partner had insisted on wearing shorts, he was barred from the interior. I watched him waiting in the stagnant shade of the cable car station, another victim of a rigid 'Status Quo' of tradition.

As I climbed the final steps alone, the irony of our presence there wasn't lost on me. Here we were: two gay men, one invited to enter; another barred, but both descendants of a different, but invisible kind of temptation according to the theology of these hills, standing at the very spot where Christ was said to have looked out over the Jordan Valley and resisted the devil’s lure. There was a quiet, cosmic humor in it. 

I looked out from the cliffside at the panoramic view of the Jordan Valley and the mountains of Moab. It was a natural oasis of ancient stillness, half-sanctuary, half-fortress, in a land accustomed to defining and dividing who was 'in' and who was 'out'."

On the return to Ramallah, the topographic rhythm of those rolling hills was interrupted by the reality of another checkpoint. As we waited in a long, idling line, a young boy approached the window of our van. He couldn't have been more than eight, his face sun-darkened, wearing a smile that felt heartbreakingly out of place against the looming shadow of the 26-foot wall. He held up small trinkets, his eyes searching ours through the glass for any sign of hope.

I remember I was so consumed by the checkpoint nonsense—the heat, the delays, and my own bone-deep exhaustion. But as he stood there, his eyes bright with an anticipation that transcended all time and tradition, my annoyance faded away. He was the personification of a struggle I was only beginning to understand, yet his hope was so universally good that it momentarily dissolved the barrier of the glass between us. 

When our van finally reached the gate, armed officers flagged us to the roadside. Our driver’s only guidance was a hushed command: be agreeable and do not speak. They took the bags from the van and from our hands, disappearing with them into a nearby tent. For ninety minutes, we stood in silence on the radiating asphalt. As I wiped my brow with my bandana, I looked across a fallow field toward the grey concrete of the barrier. There, painted onto the wall, was the Banksy stencil of a young girl clutching a cluster of balloons, her feet just leaving the ground as if the sheer lightness of her hope might lift her over the obstruction.

Eventually, our bags were returned one by one, delivered with the calculated, heavy pauses of those who hold the monopoly on time. When we were finally waved on, the van was quiet, the exhaustion of the sun settling over us like a shroud. As I drifted in and out of sleep, I thought of my life as a young gay man in Alabama. I had spent years searching for the source of my own boost of courage to carry me over the barriers set by the conservative religious nationalism of my upbringing. I realized that sometimes the hardest walls to rise above aren’t the ones made of stone and rebar, but the ones we carry with us, mortared by the stories and traditions we are too afraid to unlearn.

The Mosaic of the Old City

Our journey into Old Jerusalem truly helped me understand the multi-layered complexity I had heard so much about. It was the absolute antithesis of the placid, welcoming scenes from my Sunday School picture books. In those stories, the Holy City was a backdrop for everyone's faith, a universal stage for the divine. But in reality it was a bustling riot of sensory overload—stalls overflowing with pyramids of vibrant red cherries and towers of aromatic spices that filled the air with a heavy, earthy scent. The limestone streets were slick with the footfalls of millennia, a labyrinth where a taxi might push through a crowd of vendors and a woman in a dark abaya might carry her child past a shop selling the latest Western fashions.

I realized then how little my upbringing and education had prepared me for this. In the South, I was taught a version of the world where Islam didn't exist and the Jewish tradition was merely a historical prologue to my own. I hadn't expected that in modern times, these ancient stories would be guarded by such rigid partitions. I found that in the City of Peace, the gates weren't just historical landmarks, they were literal boundaries of faith and tradition.

In the Jewish Quarter, we stood before the Western Wall, its massive, weathered stones stuffed with the paper prayers of thousands—a silent wall of longing. Even here, tradition held firm. Because I was not part of the tribe, I stood at the edge of the plaza, a spectator to a conversation with the divine that I was not invited to join. I watched others lean their foreheads against the cool stone, but for me, the Wall remained a barrier I could not approach and a prayer I was not welcome to speak.

In contrast, we found a momentary respite in the dim, ancient silence of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. There, a single, magnificent shaft of light pierced the dome, cutting through the shadows with divine light from above.

At the Temple Mount, we approached the sanctuary looking out over the Old Jerusalem city walls, and the air grew heavy with the presence of authorities. I was instructed to stand aside; as a non-Muslim, I was strictly forbidden from entering the sanctuary itself. Security was so absolute that even moving your lips in silent prayer or carrying a religious text could get you escorted out. It was the ultimate irony: I had traveled thousands of miles to the source of much of the world’s faith and tradition, only to find that even here, faith is sorted by walls that dictate not just what you believe, but exactly where you are permitted to believe it.

The Art of Living

On our last full day in Ramallah, we visited the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. The flyer for the event, Picasso in Palestine, was a vibrant explosion of color—a testament to a culture that refuses to be defined solely by its struggle. Inside, the space was an architectural masterpiece of modern Palestinian identity: clean lines and a hushed atmosphere of intellectual pursuit.

It was here that I encountered one of the most absurd scenes of the trip. Stationed within the gallery was a young Israeli soldier brandishing a high-powered rifle. He stood directly next to a priceless Picasso - the cubist features of a woman distorted and fractured on the canvas. Just over his right shoulder hung a sign that read: "No Flash Photography." I felt a pang of localized discomfort. Was it the jagged, cubist face on the canvas? Or was it the sight of this boyish man with his finger resting on a trigger in a room meant for quiet contemplation? I found myself thinking: Wow. They are really serious about enforcing their rules here.

Afterward, I recalled clearly that the only moments I had felt a genuine sense of unease on our trip, were those involving the presence of authorities brandishing weapons—a part of a ubiquitous pantomime performed in the name of 'safety.’

I left the Levant realizing that the geography of faith and geopolitics I had been given as a young man was a simplified sketch—a child’s drawing of a world that is, in reality, a terrifying, complex masterpiece. In an age of fifteen-second clips, relentless chumming for outrage, it is tempting to settle for a version of history and faith that is cleaner and easier to digest. We retreat into the black-and-white because the gray scale of 2,000 years is simply too heavy for the human heart to carry.

I saw that both the U.S. South and the Near East are places where tribal affiliations offer the seductive comfort of a binary: the "good-guy" and the "bad-guy." It is a marvelous, ugly trick—taking the anxiety born of systemic failures and channeling it into the cheap, satisfying hatred of a neighbor. But in a landscape this old and this scarred, I found no simple heroes and no pure martyrs. There are no villains in this story, only millions of people caught in the friction of an unresolved map, layered so thick with grief and claim that it has become nearly impossible to navigate without walls and gates.

Though inherited traditions often serve as the mortar for our walls, the true art of living is in the courage to expand our horizons - open our minds - until those walls are no longer the boundaries of our world, but merely part of a much vaster, and infinitely more textured, complicated, landscape.

A Shining White City

In the early 20th century, Carl Fisher imagined the streets to be an all-white city—a sanitary, geometrical dream carved out of a mangrove swamp. The Art Deco district of South Miami Beach was built with an almost obsessive precision, but also with a specific social blueprint in mind. Fisher envisioned these buildings occupied by men in crisp linen suits and women in silk day-dresses, perhaps playing a quiet hand of bridge or sipping highballs while the Atlantic breeze stirred the palms.

But since the decaying, grit-slicked streets of 1970s New York and the Mariel boatlift, Fisher’s intent had been hijacked by a more vibrant, chaotic energy. The white canvas had been reclaimed by colorful "Birds of Paradise." The buildings—as well as their inhabitants—were no longer white; they were shades of bronze and mahogany, draped in lavender, turquoise, and dusty rose. It was a canvas painted by a community that didn't care so much about the geometry of shadows, but rather a celebration of the history of their cultures.

As I began my walk from the Swissvale toward the beach that morning, the air wasn't just humid; it was heavy with a barrage of new scents and sounds—o barista making espressos on the corner from his stainless steel cart, shielded by an umbrella, and the sweet, flaky crust of guava pastries wafting from the corner ventanitas. The light sea breeze was diminishing, the palm fronds were still rustling, and I could hear the soul-stirring brass of a Cuban radio station drifting from a second-story window as I passed.

When I walked by one of Fisher’s dreams—now painted pink with emerald trim—I saw a now-familiar "family" side by side on the porch: a mid-70s Bronx housewife sharing a nod with a "toasted honey" mixed-race model sipping café con leche and a brooding, muscled Latin man. Each occasionally, in turn, would close their eyes, looking up to bask in the early morning rising sun.

They were a living spectrum of human history—one fleeing the cold and crush of the North, another the heat of a revolution, a third searching for fame on the cover of a magazine—but all finding common sanctuary in the curve of an Art Deco, canvas-covered porch. To a boy from the Deep South, where the lines between people were often drawn in indelible ink and guarded by tradition, this friendly cultural integration was revolutionary—almost subversive.

Ahead of me, a car jerked to the curb, the window rolling down to release a yell: "¡Maria!" The man shouted at a pastel facade, pausing just long enough for the echo to hit before he peaked: "¡Vamos! ¡Llegaremos tarde al trabajo otra vez!" To my Southern ears, tuned to the slow, measured drawls of home, this staccato, pressured speech was an induction—a reminder that I was no longer an accidental tourist here, but a new wide-eyed white boy settling into the rhythms of this vibrant, other-worldly city that was finally, loudly, waking.

As I crossed Washington Avenue, the clock tower caught my eye. Rising high above 17th Street and Lincoln Road, the tower loomed as a landmark, but this particular morning the irony of it struck me. In any other city, it would be a beckoning authority, a reminder of schedules supporting well-structured and efficient lives. But here, in a culture with a famously loose relationship with time, the tower was merely a handsome ornament. It was a vertical ghost of Fisher’s orderly dream, standing watch over a neighborhood that moved only when the music changed, the ventanitas opened, or it hit 10, 2, and 4—the sacred ritual for café. The South Beach clock tower measured time only for tourists with mad itineraries.

As I reached the dunes, I paused at the edge of the sea grass to kick off my flip-flops, my toes sinking into the sand. It was a ritual I’d grown fond of: the surface was sun-toasted, dry, and forgiving, but just an inch beneath lay the cool, firm, and saturated layer that refused to stay dry. I trekked through the grass, feeling that shift from the warmth of the morning to the bracing wetness of the tide line.

I walked until the water licked at my feet, the waves breaking with a soft, shushing sound that seemed to clear the last of the clutter from my mind. Standing there in the 8:00 AM light, I felt a freedom I had never been permitted during my years in the South. I thought back to the countless mornings I had walked onto the sugar-white sands of Pensacola or Panama City Beach. Back then, the Gulf of Mexico felt like a comfortable, closed loop—a vast, salt-water lake where the horizon was a decorative border, not a destination. In those younger years, my imagination stopped at the water’s edge; I couldn't conceive of what or who lay beyond, and frankly, the culture of the South never required me to try.

But this was no lake—it was the Atlantic Ocean; it was a deep, blue-green engine of history. I wondered as I wandered, my mind leaping across years of history and lines of longitude and latitude. I began to calculate the distances I had memorized—235 miles to Cuba, 1,284 to the New York design district, and thousands more to Portugal, the Mediterranean and South America -- and the lives people lead there.

I looked at that sharp blue horizon and, for the first time, I didn't see a boundary; I saw a bridge. I found myself pondering nature and the state of society. Like Thoreau, I pondered a choice to live deliberately by simplifying my life to its essential needs and fostering independence from societal pressures—but then I reconsidered. I preferred jumping into the messiness of it - with both feet - and enjoying it!

South Beach, in those years, felt like a revolutionary experiment in global community and cooperation—a rare, sun-drenched moment where the frictions of language, class, history, and sexual orientation were being sanded down by the sheer force of shared experience and a common sun. And I felt a profound, deep gratitude for the global promise I was standing within. I was no longer just a boy from Alabama standing at the quiet edge of familiar waters; I was a man standing at the vibrant center of the world, watching the sun rise over the origins of everything my community—and I—were becoming.

So Be Gay

We lived at the Swissvale, but for the Winter Party weekend, our apartment felt less like a home and more like a backstage drag-queen dressing room. Little did I know I would soon learn that the real center of it was at the corner of Collins and Española Way - The Warsaw Ballroom. Our friends from New York—men who had seen it all in Manhattan, yet still found themselves seduced by this tropical, decaying glamour—were staying at one of the newly renovated boutique hotels diagonally across the street from this landmark.

Entering the lobby of those early renovated Art Deco gems was an experience in sensory overload. South Beach was renowned for the architecture of illusion. The 1930s elegance had chipped and rounded with age, but the icons were being spruced up with a frantic, fabulous urgency. Inside, minimalist furniture—too fragile to bear weight—sat against defiant, electric teal walls and trompe l’oeil murals. An overriding scent of cheap lavender soap and expensive European cologne competed with the sharp tang of industrial floor wax on marble and terrazzo. This was an era where everything was about the senses, illusion and performance, and the stage was being set for the night. The corner of Collins and Espanõla Way was center stage.

The main event on Saturday night was the Warsaw Ballroom. The building was a billboard of Miami history. By the time I walked through those doors in the early 90s, the interior of this historic landmark had been completely draped in the fresh black paint, strobe lights, and neon of a premier gay destination.

The signature Saturday of Winter Party Weekend was less of a club night and more of a tribal gathering. Our friends knew someone who told someone to list us, so we skirted the long line and headed straight to the front. We were greeted by a towering, beautiful, Black drag queen—bald and bejeweled—backed by a jacked, menacing bouncer in a black t-shirt and jeans. One of our friends gave our hostess the secret word and we were waved in, one by one, only to have the glamour halted by reality: someone’s grandmother was seated at a counter with a register. Without looking up, she simply muttered, "That’ll be thirty." From three people back in the line, I raised my voice in Southern disbelief. "Thirty? Dollars?!" She didn’t even turn her head, but Tom shot me a glare that said everything. I begrudgingly pulled out my money clip and paid my way into the underworld.

I walked into this iconic space as a wide-eyed Southern spectator, emerging from the crisp, beautiful South Florida spring night and into a dark, hell-like world of theater. The humidity and heat struck me like a brick wall. The air was suddenly thick, smothering me with the scent of musk and pheromones, while the muffled thump-thump-thumping of the music pulled me deeper in.

We emerged into a cavernous room, a massive dance floor pulsing with the most extraordinarily—shockingly—good-looking men that anyone would ever see anywhere. It was like a global (gay) micro-state, a sea of tanned and muscled perfection. I scanned the room to gauge which of the bars looked the least mobbed and caught the eye of a bartender who was just setting up his register. He was a clean-cut, corn-fed Midwestern-looking man, and he gave me a wholesome "up-nod" as if we were back in the heartland. But when he spoke, the illusion of the farm boy dissolved into a slightly sweet, high-pitched, 'Hey Baby. What can I getcha?” 

Pleased to have bypassed the surge, I placed my order and moved down the bar as a long, impatient line immediately materialized behind me. Standing at the bar, looking out over that sea of bronze, my mind drifted to the friends I’d reconnected with earlier that day. On the beach, under a relentless sun, I had spoken to men who—years earlier—simply vanished from Birmingham, Atlanta, and New Orleans. They had performed a silent 'Irish exit' from their old lives, leaving behind no forwarding addresses and no explanations.

It turned out they had emptied their savings accounts and moved to South Florida with a mission: to party and die on the dance floor. As we lay in our lounges on the sand, catching up on old times, one of them looked at me and said, "You know, John - the secret of life is just knowing when to stop." It struck me as unexpectedly profound - a confession of dark truth cutting through the light, celebratory mood of the weekend. Looking back now, I realize the true irony: little did we know that many of them wouldn't die on schedule. They would remain, surviving into a future they hadn’t budgeted for, living as beautiful, unplanned relics of a war that has never truly ended.

Back in the club, the urge to explore took hold. I wanted to navigate the map of my new surroundings, to understand the geography of this celestial, other-worldly space. Three of the walls were anchored by massive bars, their lighted glass shelves towering ten feet high like illuminated altars, stocked with every libation imaginable that shimmered like liquid jewels in the dark.

In one corner, tucked behind a thick red velvet drape, I discovered a staircase leading up to a narrow, dimly lit mezzanine that hung over the dance floor like a private gallery. From that vantage point, the "darkness" of the club transformed; I looked down into a luminous sea of men and caught a glimpse of Tom in the center of the fray, his face upturned, waving for me to join the congregation.

As I descended and began to push through the crush of the dance floor, the crowd moved with a shared, singular and soaring hive-mind. They were no longer just men; they were a synchronized constellation rising and falling in rhythmic waves, perfectly mirroring the tide of the music. The further I pressed into the heart of the dance floor, the clearer the music became, so...I danced. And all the cares of the world outside fell away, replaced by the transcendent clarity of the joyful dance anthem raining down from above.

So many men… And all donning carefully curated costumes. They were tanned and muscled, a sea of bronze flesh draped in denim and lycra, cinched in leather, or floating in translucent, flowing blouses. Every man was a dedicated participant in their performance, having arrived in South Beach from every corner of the globe to parade like peacocks in search of a mate.

I stepped off the dance floor and found my way to the line for the men’s room. Once inside, a dozen of us were queued against the back wall like an audience in a darkened theater. After the roar of the club, the room was strikingly quiet, forcing my senses to recalibrate. Harsh pin-spots shone from the soffit, illuminating each urinal like a solo stage.

The only break in the silence came from the stalls to the right. They were packed tight—couples and small groups of guys pressed together in a frantic, giggling huddle. There was a constant soundtrack of hushed chatting punctuated by a rhythmic, communal sniffing of runny noses.

Under the pin-lights, the rest of the men stood in a row of self-conscious frozen poses, caught in the universal internal monologue of the public restroom: Can I look at the guy next to me? Should I say hello? No, that’s weird. To compensate, they’d gazed with a desperate, monastic intensity at a spot on the wall inches in front of their faces. 

Everyone, that is, except for one.

At the center urinal, a young blond man approached his "mark." Rather than simply opening his fly and staring forward like the others, he unbuttoned his 501s and dropped them completely to the floor around his ankles to expose his entire smooth backside to the room. The guy next to me let out a,"Woof!"

As if fully aware of the spectacle he had created, the young man turned his head over his shoulder. He looked back at his "audience" with a perfectly curated, innocent "surprised" face—wide eyes, pursed lips, and a hand half-covering his mouth like the little girl in the old Coppertone ads caught by the spaniel pulling at her trunks. It was a masterpiece of curated vulnerability, a playful subversion of modesty. Only in South Beach could a urinal break become a moment of performative art.

I grabbed another drink and retreated to the mezzanine to watch the tide of the room. But soon the high-energy NYC house beat suddenly cut, replaced by a slow, soulful Cuban brass line that swelled into a cinematic crescendo. The club lights plunged into darkness, and a single theater spot found a bare-chested performer clutching a stage drape in one hand and a microphone in the other.

The crowd pivoted. All at once, the sea of men turned from the dance floor to a grand, elevated stage that had been invisible only moments before. A striking, scantily-clad Spanish siren stepped into the light.  Her performance was mad and mesmerizing, with a flair that felt like a decadent tip of the hat to the Cuban big bands of Desi Arnaz. She moved with an artistry that entranced the room, her hair pulled back into a tight bun under a red lace cap, her long legs draped in black fishnets with stilettos -  and a g-string with draped red satin panels on each side. She vamped with a seductive, sweat-drenched power that left me gobsmacked; from my perch in the mezzanine, all of my Southern pre-conceived notions of gender evaporated in the heat.

As the song reached its finale, her dance shifted as she rushed to the edge of the stage. The sea of men instinctively pushed back, unsure if she was about to leap into their midst. The roar of the room shifted into a tense, collective silence as she sat at the very lip of the stage, still singing and dangling her feet. Then on the final, crashing beat of the music, she snapped her head back and threw her legs into a perfect, high-arching spread-eagle.

As two or three men awkwardly attempted to applaud, the music began again and a second spotlight cut through the dark, illuminating a commanding Latin man on the opposite side of the dance floor. In response, the crowd of men parted and there he stood, in a classic bullfighter’s stance, one hand raised, eyes fixed on the floor. Our siren pointed at him, slowly turned her hand over to perform an unmistakable "come-hither" curl with her index finger, making the gesture into a private, irresistible invitation.

The Matador moved with theatrical gravity toward her, his eyes locked on the apex of her parted legs. As he reached her, a drum roll exploded from the speakers. He pressed his face into the center of her legs, and for a few profound seconds, gasps and uncomfortable twitters engulfed the crowd.

Then, the real suspense began.

He started to back away—one step, then two, then five. At fifteen feet, the whispers of disbelief grew into a roar. From the mezzanine, I could see that he had taken a tail of red yarn from between her legs into his teeth. As he backed away, bowing deeply with his arms outstretched and fingers waving in a flamenco flourish, he began unfurling the string from her.

As the realization hit, these paragons of masculinity—the "buff and the brave"—began squealing and retching, the sounds of genuine disgust intensifying by the second. The Matador continued his retreat until the yarn finally grew taut. At the peak of the tension, with the room teetering on the edge of collective panic, he gave one sharp, theatrical tug of his head - and a small, red ball popped from between the siren’s legs, hitting the dance floor five feet below and bouncing in the silent spotlight.

The music flared back into a frantic, triumphant crescendo, and for three minutes, the room erupted in a frenzy of ovations—a celebration of the theatrical genius of the performance - and a collective release of tension. It was the sound of a thousand men exhaling in unison, relieved that this "grotesque" hetero pantomime had ended.

Sunday morning, I sat at the Front Porch in the 10:00 AM sun, nursing a coffee while the bacchanalia of the night before attempted to recalibrate. At the table across from me sat four men, their shirts off, their speech quick and pressured by forty-eight hours of indulgence and sleep deprivation.

When my waiter set down my breakfast plate, one of the men at the table recoiled, pointing a manicured finger as if I’d brought a plague to the porch.

"Oh my God!" he shouted, his eyes wide as saucers. "Is that bacon? Bad Gay! Don’t you know?! That's so unhealthy for you!"

It was one of the ultimate, glittering ironies of South Beach: Heavenly bodies sustained by little more than chemicals and sheer willpower, yet absolutely terrified of the "impurity" of a cured meat.

Drama Latino

On Monday afternoons, around 5:00 PM, we often sat outside at News Café, perched above the promenade to watch the daily ritual: the strut of the gym-goers. Each day, under the roar of low-flying jets that shook the cracked pavement, a literal manifestation of the complex Latin caste system would unfurl—a silent hierarchy that existed almost without thought in the very heart of the "loving diversity" we believed we had created. Even in our little utopia, the old-world ghosts of beauty and status were still walking the line.

The Cubans seemed to lead, as self-anointed royalty of Miami, followed by a vibrant, rhythmic surge of Brazilians, Colombians, Venezuelans, and the occasional Puerto Rican Papi. But the most fascinating to me were the Argentines. Not wanting to be left out of the aesthetic arms race, they would join the parade in their finest designer gym wear—a high-priced costume for a workout they had no intention of performing.

They would stop to talk and pose - their proportions always slightly off, like clay statues that hadn’t quite cured before being wheeled out of the studio. There were plenty of impressive pecs and glutes, but they were often "purchased" additions rather than products of the iron. As one friend explained with a shrug of absolute certainty, "You know, Yohn," he said, "a gay Argentinian man of my status would never actually darken the door of a gym to sweat. We simply arrive already built." 

I often walked up and down to the gym among them - not as a native or a Latino, but as the new, "Poppito blanco" To most of my latin friends, I was a welcome, albeit incidental, interloper, a witness to a human drama I wasn’t quite cast in. I realized very early on that in this gilded parade—from the bars like Twist to the high theater of the Warsaw Ballroom—everything in South Beach was a living, breathing Latin telenovela. The plot was secondary; it was always, relentlessly, about the performance.

Even now, decades removed, the wonder of those years remains. Whenever the soul-stirring brass and dusty, rhythmic grace of the Buena Vista Social Club drifts through my speakers, the world slows to that sacred, sauntering South Beach pace. I am instantly transported back to the feeling of the water on my feet, the shushing sound of the waves, the scent of those guava pastries and the vibrant, kaleidoscopic 'Birds of Paradise' who taught a boy from Alabama that the lines drawn between us could be erased by something as simple as a shared love for the warmth of a rising sun.

My fondness for this era isn't a memory of the parties; it is a lingering, undying belief in new experience and expanding horizons. It is a hope that we might once again find ourselves in a similar period of revolution: subversively dedicated to diversity and inclusion—a place where every race, nationality, and sexual orientation will find sanctuary. All of us basking in the rising sun - looking out at the same horizon in a shared state of wonder.