Death of a Sweater Queen

Tooling around Palm Springs on a winter Saturday, it is impossible to avoid garage sales.  Now there are garage sales and then there are garage sales.  In resort towns with a high proportion of senior citizens, folks are checking out by the dozens every day.  Their real estate turns, and their heirs must decide what to do with a lifetime's acquisitions.  Estate sales are even better as they are usually operated by hired professionals and the whole house is accessible with every little thing tagged for sale...little thing as in ashtrays and candy dishes.  In affluent neighborhoods of gay Palm Springs, an estate sale affords the rare opportunity to enter an impressive, exclusive residence, steeped in history and style.  I'm sure this is also true of Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and the Hamptons.

After you've been to a few of these estate sales in Palm Springs, all those bits of information you've absorbed over the years of your gay life must be reconsidered, such as:

All gays have good taste.  So-o-o untrue.  Just check out the next gay estate sale.  Pity.

Palm Springs is a suburb of Los Angeles.  I will admit there is a lingering association with Hollywood, but we all have to work harder to keep it alive.  All the great things to love about Old Hollywood are getting lost amid the trashwave of Khardashians, Miley Cyrus and media types I read about yesterday whose names I've already forgotten.  Gays must keep the appreciation of Hollywood alive.  If not us, who else?  That big gross butt-ugly statue of Marilyn in the heart of downtown takes us in a wrong direction.

Palm Springs is the City of GODS, or rather Gays on Disability and Steroids.  So untrue.  Most are retirees who spent much of their gay lives hiding who they are, and are now getting to enjoy life.  Many are living off investments and savings of a lifetime, and they worked hard to get where they are.

Gays are good at real estate.  Maybe better than everybody else, but we're now spending too much money on safe real estate investments.  The pioneering spirit in real estate that basically rebuilt San Francisco, and is working its stuff in parts of Los Angeles, Oakland and Sacramento, has been put to bed in Palm Springs.  Maybe Palm Springs has already been saved by the guys who started buying up those midcentury tract houses back in the '90's.  Now people, wanting in, are paying too much.

Gays collect more sweaters than anybody else.  This must be a cultural thing.  When I was a kid there was such a thing as a sweater bar, where well-groomed professional types could meet hustlers in a safe, discreet environment.  I can't think of any such place now except for maybe the Town House in New York City.  The places were usually very dark, playing show tunes and never rock or disco, and everybody knew each other, including the hookers.  I was afraid to go into a sweater bar because everybody there was supposed to be cliquey and snotty, but then I started hitting the old Yerba Buena Village on Nob Hill and the Alta Plaza in Pacific Heights and made some friendships that have lasted to this day.  I went to Macy's and bought a black cashmere sweater...but only one and that was it.  The estate sale that brought all this back was in Palm Springs last month.  Everything the Departed had owned was up for grabs and I knew he had to have been an elderly gent, as in, old enough to be my gay uncle and frequent sweater bars. Sweaters....galore!  Sweaters not just for the Town House, but sweaters for hiking, fishing, gardening and sitting by the fire.  Italian cashmere sweaters, Scottish wool sweaters, Greek fisherman's sweaters.  Some very expensive, some not so.  In every color.  Enough sweaters to fill two department store style racks.  It was wonderful to see this...a sweater queen exiting in a blaze of glory.