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I love my crappy little gay town!
Aug. 29th, 2009 06:40 pmPatty and I are in Ocean Grove for the weekend. This was supposed to be a fabulous beach trip, but it's raining, relentlessly.
I grew up around these parts in a way. My grandmother lived in Bradley Beach and my childhood summers were spent here, when Asbury Park was still a dying amusement park town, as some sort of counterpoint to the time we also spent in East Hampton.
The first story I ever finished was about Asbury Park, and I was never so much fond of the beach, but I loved my uncle's tomato plants, the fig tree in the backyard, and cool pantry full of apple cookies, the suspicious mushrooms that popped up constantly on the lawn, and my short, angry, racist grandmother's trays of somewhat oily baked-ziti. She came from Italy as a young, barely-married teenager, and so somehow it had to be better. When I was a baby we lived in places around here: Manesquan and Avon.
When I told my parents we were coming out here, because I'd heard it had become a bit less run-down and a bit more gay mecca, they were uncomfortable in an unclear way. Maybe it was the possibility of running into relatives, maybe it was because of how much it's all changed from my childhood, maybe it was because of the unspoken obviousness of the fact that Patty and I were going to have sex all weekend. Eventually, my mother and I got into a fight about it on the phone wherein I had to explain to her the caution it was necessary for us to take as a gay couple whenever we do any traveling and my mother said something so hideous and racist I hung up on her.
So here we are, down at the Albatross Hotel in Ocean Grove. Ocean Grove is a camp meeting town and so an auditorium with a giant cross dominates the center of town, and there's a pavilion down by the beach where prayer and praise is going on all the time. But most houses are 100 years old, and there are wonderful inns covered in gingerbread. A ridiculous number of houses have the HRC equality flag hanging from them (did they come through town and give them out to all the very privileged main-line queers?), and we giggle every time we pass one of the restored victorians and hear crappy disco music blasting from the kitchen; sometimes there will be a gaggle of men on a second-floor balcony having brunch, cocktails in hand and leaning all over each other.
We've walked into Asbury Park a few times, and it's more men than women, and while the men are sometimes young and hip, the women are dowdy and older, and it makes me angry, this eternal void I perceive in the existence of young, happy, successful and fashionable gay women. Not that it matters, except that it does. It matters to me, in part because I grew up gay with those fabulous party people boys, and I've never known where the equivalent in women are or where I could possibly fit in with either.
Patty and I have also been giggling non-stop at the sign on one of the local gay dance clubs: "less lights, more fun" and it reminds me of being 17 and hanging out at Tracks when I lived in DC. There's that and bars along the beach and it's men and men and men, who don't really care if it's raining or not, here next to the strange little town with the camp meeting and the summer residential tents in the center green and a historical importance as regards the temperance movement.
In the stores on Ocean Grove's main strip are hideous mermen Christmas ornaments with red or green glittery tails and buff torsos of cops and firemen, a leather daddy, an army guy. Patty wants to know where the lesbian icons are: the mermaid in the leather bra and the cheerleader aren't quite doing it for her.
Further down there's a store called The Scarlett Unicorn -- you'd think that would be sex toys, but you're wrong. Just another quasi-Victorian curios place, with a name that sends us into hysterics over and over and over again. There are cupcake shops everywhere, as if this is how the Jersey Shore tries to be like New York City.
We have walked all over these towns: Ocean Grove and Asbury Park and Neptune. We've seen no danger and no relatives. We've played putt-putt golf (where Patty beat me by an epic 24 strokes after I winged a ball spectacularly and irretrievably into the water) in the pouring rain on the site where the small car-track rides for the tiny kids used to be (my father used to watch me do those rides and said I would grow up to be a very good driver, but I have never learned), and looked at the schedule for a drag review at a restaurant in the space that once housed Criterion Candies. So much has changed, although, with a little work I can superimpose the dying amusement park town of my childhood over this place of struggling summers and formulaic gay gentrification; a production of The Full Monty is playing in the old carousel house; better, I suppose, than the gun shows, but I remember that carousel and the hall of mirrors and the fun house behind it, and I miss them. It is all constantly odd, neither the past nor the present reflecting, entirely, a world I'm a part of.
As for my mother's fears, I can't help but wonder how much they are based on lies (beyond the obvious racist ones) -- not about now, so much as the past; we've walked through Asbury a few times now, and it's the downtown I marvel at. It was poorer and awful when I was kid, surely, I do know that -- but was there really no downtown at all? Only a crumbling boardwalk? I don't quite believe it in the face of all these condos and "New York-style lofts," even as I see the weird wasteground with the wooden pylons in it that looks like a graveyard from across the lake along with the decayed sign for a "female review."
I love the Shore in some ways, because it is filled with these odd contradictions and legends and image-making attempts, these long strips of towns that never quite were any of the things they claimed: not resorts, not holy places, not the glorious sites of family amusements, and not even the hottest gay pick-up scene for a hundred miles around. Not pure crime either, nor the end of the world in some industrial hellscape (as Patty calls such things). Just towns, trying a little too hard -- to make money, to get by, to be something in the shadows cast between both New York City and the sea.
We'll go to dinner in a bit and stroll on the beach at night, looking at the surfers and the hurricane waves as if this were a Brigadoon smelling of salt and wood that can never be bothered to pass back into mists.
I grew up around these parts in a way. My grandmother lived in Bradley Beach and my childhood summers were spent here, when Asbury Park was still a dying amusement park town, as some sort of counterpoint to the time we also spent in East Hampton.
The first story I ever finished was about Asbury Park, and I was never so much fond of the beach, but I loved my uncle's tomato plants, the fig tree in the backyard, and cool pantry full of apple cookies, the suspicious mushrooms that popped up constantly on the lawn, and my short, angry, racist grandmother's trays of somewhat oily baked-ziti. She came from Italy as a young, barely-married teenager, and so somehow it had to be better. When I was a baby we lived in places around here: Manesquan and Avon.
When I told my parents we were coming out here, because I'd heard it had become a bit less run-down and a bit more gay mecca, they were uncomfortable in an unclear way. Maybe it was the possibility of running into relatives, maybe it was because of how much it's all changed from my childhood, maybe it was because of the unspoken obviousness of the fact that Patty and I were going to have sex all weekend. Eventually, my mother and I got into a fight about it on the phone wherein I had to explain to her the caution it was necessary for us to take as a gay couple whenever we do any traveling and my mother said something so hideous and racist I hung up on her.
So here we are, down at the Albatross Hotel in Ocean Grove. Ocean Grove is a camp meeting town and so an auditorium with a giant cross dominates the center of town, and there's a pavilion down by the beach where prayer and praise is going on all the time. But most houses are 100 years old, and there are wonderful inns covered in gingerbread. A ridiculous number of houses have the HRC equality flag hanging from them (did they come through town and give them out to all the very privileged main-line queers?), and we giggle every time we pass one of the restored victorians and hear crappy disco music blasting from the kitchen; sometimes there will be a gaggle of men on a second-floor balcony having brunch, cocktails in hand and leaning all over each other.
We've walked into Asbury Park a few times, and it's more men than women, and while the men are sometimes young and hip, the women are dowdy and older, and it makes me angry, this eternal void I perceive in the existence of young, happy, successful and fashionable gay women. Not that it matters, except that it does. It matters to me, in part because I grew up gay with those fabulous party people boys, and I've never known where the equivalent in women are or where I could possibly fit in with either.
Patty and I have also been giggling non-stop at the sign on one of the local gay dance clubs: "less lights, more fun" and it reminds me of being 17 and hanging out at Tracks when I lived in DC. There's that and bars along the beach and it's men and men and men, who don't really care if it's raining or not, here next to the strange little town with the camp meeting and the summer residential tents in the center green and a historical importance as regards the temperance movement.
In the stores on Ocean Grove's main strip are hideous mermen Christmas ornaments with red or green glittery tails and buff torsos of cops and firemen, a leather daddy, an army guy. Patty wants to know where the lesbian icons are: the mermaid in the leather bra and the cheerleader aren't quite doing it for her.
Further down there's a store called The Scarlett Unicorn -- you'd think that would be sex toys, but you're wrong. Just another quasi-Victorian curios place, with a name that sends us into hysterics over and over and over again. There are cupcake shops everywhere, as if this is how the Jersey Shore tries to be like New York City.
We have walked all over these towns: Ocean Grove and Asbury Park and Neptune. We've seen no danger and no relatives. We've played putt-putt golf (where Patty beat me by an epic 24 strokes after I winged a ball spectacularly and irretrievably into the water) in the pouring rain on the site where the small car-track rides for the tiny kids used to be (my father used to watch me do those rides and said I would grow up to be a very good driver, but I have never learned), and looked at the schedule for a drag review at a restaurant in the space that once housed Criterion Candies. So much has changed, although, with a little work I can superimpose the dying amusement park town of my childhood over this place of struggling summers and formulaic gay gentrification; a production of The Full Monty is playing in the old carousel house; better, I suppose, than the gun shows, but I remember that carousel and the hall of mirrors and the fun house behind it, and I miss them. It is all constantly odd, neither the past nor the present reflecting, entirely, a world I'm a part of.
As for my mother's fears, I can't help but wonder how much they are based on lies (beyond the obvious racist ones) -- not about now, so much as the past; we've walked through Asbury a few times now, and it's the downtown I marvel at. It was poorer and awful when I was kid, surely, I do know that -- but was there really no downtown at all? Only a crumbling boardwalk? I don't quite believe it in the face of all these condos and "New York-style lofts," even as I see the weird wasteground with the wooden pylons in it that looks like a graveyard from across the lake along with the decayed sign for a "female review."
I love the Shore in some ways, because it is filled with these odd contradictions and legends and image-making attempts, these long strips of towns that never quite were any of the things they claimed: not resorts, not holy places, not the glorious sites of family amusements, and not even the hottest gay pick-up scene for a hundred miles around. Not pure crime either, nor the end of the world in some industrial hellscape (as Patty calls such things). Just towns, trying a little too hard -- to make money, to get by, to be something in the shadows cast between both New York City and the sea.
We'll go to dinner in a bit and stroll on the beach at night, looking at the surfers and the hurricane waves as if this were a Brigadoon smelling of salt and wood that can never be bothered to pass back into mists.
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