Palm Springs Sex Hotel Goes Straight

The Camp Palm Springs is no more.  It was primed for New Year's Eve in its latest incarnation as The Skylark, renovated from its slightly louche seedy gay origins into a dressed up midcentury mainstream identity.  There'll be nobody walking around with his dick hanging out at The Skylark.  All traces of its former gayness have been obliterated with fresh paint, fresh flowers and fresh bedsheets.  I sincerely doubt that its new guests will be as fresh.

I described the Camp as a sex hotel, and it certainly wasn't the only hotel in Palm Springs where a hustler's footfalls could be heard on the concrete at any hour of the night.  But somehow it managed best to exude that certain aura: there's sex going on in every room, behind every door.

The mystique was there even at its old location on a residential street slightly removed from Warm Sands.  It was run by a salty old dog who called himself Major Dad and the play areas recalled a vague military theme.  Not a wartime combat environment, but rather a draftee's medical exam environment; there were examination tables, and stockades, decor that recalled the brig, lots of camouflage, netting, helmets and dog tags adorning the walls.  Major Dad moved the Camp to the north end of town and prominently on Palm Canyon Drive, the main drag, taking over a dumpy gay resort called the Desert Hangout.  The military theme was softened a bit, but the sexual temperature returned to sizzling when regularly scheduled sex parties started, which for the first few years were quite the thing.  I don't know exactly why the fever cooled over time, but that it most certaily did   The play areas were fucked up with some clueless remodeling, especially after the oversized tent, containing mattresses and bunk beds, was dismantled, and our fantasies of servicing the randy British troops of the North Africa campaign were quashed.

I got pissed off at the management when the staff, called in to repair a toilet, removed and tossed (?) all of my rubber toys as a 'health measure,' they said.  This was bullshit, of course, they thought they were getting my Jeff Stryker dildo, and though I raised a fuss, I never got it back.  'You don't want to go searching through the dumpster.  It's too dangerous.'  That's what they said.  Total bullshit.  But I did come back because the opportunities for sex were enticing, though, in later years, seldom realized.

There was a time when Hot Desert Knights and Barebackrt filmed there, and porn star sightings were commonplace.  Titpig fucking with a cigar hanging from his lips, ditto Cole Tucker, Tom Shannon geetting fucked, Lance Hancock pulling guys off the sidewalk into his room.  And for a while, a few years back, the staff there was actually fucking guests...that tent set-up made things happen.

But every good time must come to an end.  If only prostitution were legal in this here State of California, I'm pretty sure I would have had even more to write about the Camp Palm Springs.  As it was, we came as close we ever got.
Farewell, forever, to The Camp.