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.

On Openness and Curiosity

 

“ In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice