The Beginning and the End

Back in the summer of 1985, a friend and I drove up to Quebec, the long way, through Maine. And we passed through Fort Kent, the place where U.S. 1 begins. The actual highway sign, in typical Maine style, is understated, with no real indication that this is a landmark. You just come off the border bridge from Canada and see this (apologies for the poor quality of these 25-year-old photos):


The other end of Route 1 is at an ordinary intersection in a residential neighborhood of Key West. The Florida highway department has given it just a little bit more drama:




But while the Maine highway department doesn't get excited about the beginning of this famous highway, the local chamber of commerce did feel inspired to mark the spot thusly:



By contrast, no one in Key West seems to show the slightest interest in the distance to Fort Kent, Maine. Hmm, I wonder why not?

Anyway, on that note, thanks for riding along with me to Key West. Next chapter in my travels coming in several more weeks ...

Island Cuisine

We ate well in the Keys, including the two local specialties: conch and shrimp. Conch, a chewy white shellfish with little natural flavor, comes many ways, including in fritters and ceviche, but the best we found was "cracked conch" in which they cut and flatten it into a schnitzel, fry it in bread crumbs and put it on a sandwich.

Key West "pink shrimp" are everywhere and are, indeed, fresh and sweet. But you do have to make sure to ask if they're local.

Among the restaurants we visited, this was probably our favorite, but nearly every meal we had was good.

The local dessert, key lime pie, comes in many different textures (from soft custard to more flan-like) and with many different toppings (meringue, whipped cream, plain). But the local favorite, and one which we actually decided was surprisingly good, was this:

Key West: The Tourist Sites

You can see the tourist sights of Key West in half a day. Here's a quick rundown.

There's Harry S. Truman's Winter White House, on the grounds of the old Navy Base:


A half-mile down the street is Ernest Hemingway's house, where he lived through most of the 1930s and wrote many of his major works. It's exotic architecture by Key West standards:


Hemingway's house is, of course, famous for its family of six-toed cats, which the museum operators carefully nurture:


There is the "southernmost point in the continental United States," which is neither actually the southernmost point (that's on the grounds of a nearby estate) nor 90 miles from Cuba (it's more like 94). But people line up to have their picture taken there anyway, much as they do at the Cape of Good Hope:



And, finally and most famously, the sunset ceremony. People line up along a promenade at the northwestern end of town to watch the sun set into the ocean:


The sun sets much as it does everywhere else:


And people clap. (One wonders if these are the same people who applaud routine landings on an airliner.) It's cute. But definitely in the "do-once" category.

Not P'town with Palm Trees

After looking around for a few hours, though, it was clear something was missing. Where were the gay people? Provincetown is wonderfully mixed during the day, with something for everyone, from the party boy or summer sharer from Boston to the old, straight couples off the tourist bus looking for where the Pilgrims landed.

Although a few businesses sported rainbow flags, Key West's crowd seemed much more homogeneous: plain, Midwestern, upper-middle-age straight couples, looking around off a cruise ship or in between trips on a fishing boat. There was neither the verve of a P-town summer crowd nor the louche decadence one would expect from Margaritaville. And we saw virtually no identifiable gay people at all.

(Edmund White, in his recent Guardian piece about Key West, posits that surging real estate prices are the problem, that only the elderly who bought long ago can afford to live there anymore. Maybe.)

Along Duval Street we saw four gay bars. Granted, it was a Monday and so not a fair test. But two of the bars were completely empty. The third, called Aqua, was having a drag show and seemed to have a crowd, so we paid our $15 and went in.

And discovered that the crowd was almost completely straight. We thought of leaving, but decided to get our money's worth, and gradually discovered that it was quite amusing watching these middle American straight people experience what was probably their very first drag show. Seeing a retired businessman fumble to put a dollar down the drag queen's dress while his wife tittered, or watching some guy on a date with his new girlfriend blush when the drag queen offered her cheek, was actually quite amusing.


I would be willing to go back on a weekend to give it a fair test, but judging by this trip, a gay vacation in Key West is one spent by the pool of your guesthouse, and not much more.

P'Town with Palm Trees?

My first, and very strong, impression of Key West was that it was a larger, tropical version of Provincetown. Like P'town, it has a main commercial street (Duval St.) lined with open-air restaurants, art galleries, T-shirt shops, some interesting commercial buildings, and very few chain stores:




Away from Duval Street, the town is full of 19th-century wooden houses, oddly reminiscent of New England even though they're done up in tropical styles, with verandahs, overhanging eaves, etc.

There may have been some maritime influence in this mixing of styles; Key West was one of Florida's major towns during the heyday of New England sea commerce, at a time when Fort Lauderdale was still run by the Army and Miami was a farm.

These pictures don't quite do the New England resemblance justice -- or maybe it wasn't as obvious as I thought it was -- but here are some of the houses that struck my eye:

The Overseas Highway

For as long as I can remember, I had fantasized about driving down to Key West. This started long before I became aware that I was gay, or that Key West was a well-known gay destination at the time. As best I recall, it stemmed from a childhood fascination with roads, bridges, tropical islands and remote places at the end of the world.

I finally got to make the drive on this trip, maybe 40 years after I first started thinking about it. It is every bit as beautiful as I imagined. For long stretches, it's just you, the ocean and the next little island off in the distance:



But there was one thing different from what I had read as a child. The original bridges were built about a century ago for Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway, and then rebuilt into highway bridges after the railroad was wrecked in a 1935 hurricane. Sometime in the last couple of decades, however, the state seems to have built an entirely new roadway, leaving the old bridges abandoned nearby:



You can still see them from the new highway, including details of how they were constructed. Because the water around the Keys is so shallow (the Keys are basically one giant coral reef) many of the bridges are stone archwork, converting to steel beams in the deeper areas.



One of the old bridges, at Bahia Honda in the lower Keys, is even a truss span with the highway overlaid on top, since the trusses weren't wide enough to contain two lanes of highway traffic within them:


The new bridges, all swooping prestressed concrete, aren't nearly as atmospheric. But take a closer look at one of the old bridges and you'll see why they were abandoned:


What happened here was basically that they laid a two-lane highway on what had been a one-track railroad structure, so they had to jam it in as tightly as they could, leaving no room for breakdown lanes, never mind enough width for SUVs and modern tractor-trailers. So driving these old spans must have been perilous, if atmospheric.

Today some of the old spans have been refurbished, at railroad width again, into hiking/biking trails or fishing piers:


And I understand there are plans to reconnect all the old spans into a continuous trail running the length of the Keys. When that's done, it will definitely be worth another visit.

A Quick Tour of Fort Lauderdale

Despite not being a prime candidate to host one of the country's major gay ghettos, Fort Lauderdale is a nice town in some ways. The beach is lined with gigantic hotels that look like beached cruise ships, unlike the Art Deco gems of South Beach, but the beach itself is nice (if more than a bit cold the day I was there, not even 60 degrees):


Behind these huge beach hotels are a cluster of midcentury modern motels, some of which have been made over into nice-looking gay guesthouses (unfortunately I didn't think to take pictures of any). And just inland from there are the famous canals; as in Venice they were basically built from sandbars in the lagoon behind a barrier beach:


Further inland is Las Olas Boulevard, a nice walkable shopping strip although the goods on offer seemed to be mainly desserts and women's clothing:


In the area I visited there was really only one discordant note, evidence that the real estate crash is not yet over in this part of the world:


The one drawback to Fort Lauderdale as a tourist destination is that it's more spread out than Miami and there's less public transportation. The beach area where the hotels are is about a 40-minute walk to Las Olas -- doable if you're a New Yorker and it's not too hot out -- but to get to Wilton Manors is a 20-minute drive or $20+ cab ride, and the best restaurants are spread out even further around the area.

Oh well; welcome to the United States of America.

Dessert and Dancing

Like any good gay neighborhood, Wilton Manors has an array of nightlife offerings. I went to three of the bars along the main strip.

Georgie's Alibi is a sprawling video bar, sort of like the first floor of Sidetracks in Chicago but with lower ceilings. It felt like the type of small-town bar that by necessity attracts all types, but the main clientele seemed to be Chelsea boys gone to seed -- 40-and-up white gay men who clearly look like they used to party and take care of themselves but who can't quite keep up the appearance anymore. (Yes, I freely admit it: that describes me too.)

Around the corner, in the same strip mall, is Boom, a small smoky room about the size of the new Pavilion that appears to be a dance club but was pretty empty at 11p on a Saturday night. So I walked down the block to the third and main venue of Wilton Manors, The Manor.

It's a remarkable place. You walk in and the first thing you see is a bakery counter full of desserts for sale. There is a cabaret room for drag shows, a small dance room in the corner playing Latin music and an open-air lounge area in the back. Once you've passed through two or more of these spaces, you can make your way to the main dance floor, which is in a brick building that looks like it might once have been a church, but larger and of much more modern design than the Limelight. There are balconies at either end of the dance floor, and a long outdoor balcony on this level as well.

The crowd was quite mixed, including a fair number of lesbians, but overall was much closer to what you'd expect at a big-city nightclub than the Georgie's Alibi crowd. (In other words, it included a fair number of young hotties.) The music was upbeat, vocals/keyboards, fun if not profound. I liked it, even if it didn't seem to be going to those deep places we rarely visit anymore.

The one incongruous part of the dance room was the video screens on the walls advertising upcoming events. It seems the Manor is a restaurant as well as a nightclub, and so you had non sequiturs like this sequence, all from the same screen:

But do you know what that means? They're using the space more thoroughly than nightclubs of a previous generation did, and that means the place is more likely to last. With Friday and Saturday night dance parties and maybe a midweek roller skate, the Roxy was closed for 148 hours or so each week. That's not tenable in today's economy. So we may be seeing more of that in the future.

The Future of Gay Life?

It used to be that gay ghettos formed in large, cosmopolitan cities with many cultural options and attractive if decayed housing stock. But that was back in the 20th century.

The nation's newest gay ghetto is in a flat, ugly, strip-mall suburb of Fort Lauderdale called Wilton Manors, Fla. Exactly how this happened I'm not sure, but I suspect it had something to do with people getting priced out of South Beach around the turn of the century. Anyway, it fulfills none of the conditions above: the housing stock is typical '50s suburban, Fort Lauderdale is not unusually cultured or cosmopolitan for a city of its size, and Wilton Manors isn't even on any body of water.

But we've made it our own nonetheless.

The first thing you notice when you park your car is that there aren't many pedestrians; of course not, this is Florida suburbia. But those who are there tend to be same-sex couples, holding hands. And when you walk down to the strip mall in the center of town, this is what you see:





Classically gay, it isn't. But gay, it certainly is.