You'll find most nightclubs along Washington Ave, and lots of eats and historic architecture on Ocean Ave, which is the last thoroughfare before the Atlantic. If that's the stuff you're coming to Florida for, you have very little reason to leave South Beach 'til it's time to fly home. The Versace mansion, the Colony, the Art Deco, the old mob money, the outfits that cost too much while covering too little, the riots of pastels, the tables spilling out of cafes under bright umbrellas and covering the sidewalks leading to the great wide beach, the evil consumerist paradise of high-end shopping and eating and clubbing. If you've never been to Florida, South Beach is what you think about when you think about Miami. South Beach takes up its southernmost two miles. Miami Beach is a city on a barrier island, separated from Miami proper by Biscayne Bay. The gayness is no longer a matter of individual clubs and cafes it is a component of South Beach's glittery, sweaty, pansexual gestalt.
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Like Greenwich Village, Hollywood, or the strand of Parisian neighborhoods that run along the Right Bank of the Seine, South Beach has been gay enough long enough for its gayness to seep into the neighborhood's aura. Hotel Gaythering | Courtesy of Hotel Gaythering Even the gayest of the gay ghettos in SoFla lost its lone lesbian bar almost a decade ago.
#PORTLAND GAY BARS 1990 FULL#
SoFla is full of queer women, but it does not have a queer women's scene. Good rule: If the men in your immediate vicinity are all white and look like frat boys, and if the women have hairdos you last saw on Bret Michaels' Rock of Love - and, most crucially, if all of these people have been drinking - please summon a Lyft and scootch off to one of the more hospitable locales mentioned below.Ī note to lesbians: This guide is gay guy-centric. Public displays of affection are A-OK anywhere in Wilton Manors, in most of Miami Beach and much of Miami proper, and in most of the townships and municipalities around Fort Lauderdale.īut the farther west you go, and the farther north, the Dixier the landscape becomes. But on some nights, on certain streets, it can do a good impression. It's too Caribbean, too Spanish, too full of New Englanders and New Yorkers and Jews. But if you can find the roads in, I promise: It's spectacular.Ī note on staying safe: South Florida is not the Deep South. Stay on the main roads and you might miss it all - it's hiding behind Arby's and Wendy's, the abandoned Blockbuster and Target. It's present demesne is nowhere near as flashy as South Beach. The center of gay SoFla moved about 40 miles, trailing outposts here and setting up colonies there. But gentrification, which so often follows gayfolk to their ghettos, nudged much of the gay population out of Miami Beach in the 1990s. South Beach is still full of debauched nightlife, much of it gay or lavender-tinged.
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Wainwright Park, in the shadows of the seagrape and palm trees.) South Beach - the glittering, pastel-Deco apotheosis of Miami Beach flash, known 'round the world as the setting for so many excellent late-'90s music videos - had long been a prime destination for sin and decadence because of its weather and its distance from the respectable rest of America. (The illicit center, I've heard, was in the darker corners of Alice C. Back then, the center of Florida's licit gay life and nightlife was South Beach. My parents moved to Florida in 1990, when I was 7 years old. Another of the burgs might in fact be the gayest place in the whole world - and if you're not from here, you probably have never heard of it. Those burgs do not incubate much in the way of gay life.
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Some of the burgs are full of what used to be called Florida crackers - folks with sawgrass scars and intimate knowledge of gator behavior, who make their livings in and around the primeval Everglades swamp. From the red-roofed housing developments in south Homestead to the prefab luxury 'hoods north of Jupiter, SoFla is 130 miles of unbroken urban sprawl. Understand: South Florida - by which I mean Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties - is basically one big city. Hell, it's one of the great gay havens of the world. South Florida is one of the great gay havens in America.