Laguna Beach's Boom Boom Room to Reopen for One Night Only as Part of OC Pride

If you had told me nearly three decades ago when I was briefly living in Orange County, Calif. -- still longing for the big city lights of New York City, or at least L.A. -- that I would be wishing I could spend this Pride weekend in suburbia instead of Manhattan I'd have laughed at you. But that's just how I'm feeling right now after finding out the famed Boom Boom Room in Laguna Beach, where I spent many fun and drunken nights in my early 20s, is reopening for a one-night-only party this weekend!  

Info HERE.

As I just mentioned yesterday, I landed in Huntington Beach when I left Phoenix after graduating from Arizona State in 1989. I first crashed in the Windjammer apartments on Warner -- we called the complex the butt-jammer -- and then in a condo in the Sea Spray development on Brookhurst and Adams with Paul and Ken. My goal was to live in L.A., but after getting a job at The Orange County Register, I decided it made sense to live closer to work and "commute" to my play. But with that predictably unpredictable L.A. traffic, West Hollywood was an hour-plus drive from our apartment. So my roommates and I had our "local" bars in the OC that included Newport Station (Thursdays were the best!), the Lion's Den (where the hilarious Polyesters performed; Stan also worked at The Register), the Frat House (if you didn't mind watching people chain smoke near the "sandwich area") and, of course, the Boom Boom Room, a breezy dive tucked away behind the Coast Inn on Pacific Coast Highway. (Woody's and the Little Shrimp were nearby.) 

While the city's wealth has completely changed it in the past 20 years, Laguna Beach was a quaint boys town of sorts when I lived there, that had a gay friendly reputation dating back to 1930s when Los Angeles crowds headed south to escape the raids on gay and lesbian bars in Los Angeles. (Laguna Beach magazine called it "a prime gay playground.") Of course, it was still in Republican Land, so it didn't come as much of a surprise to my roommate Paul and me when a car full of frat boys drove past us one night on the street and screamed "Turd burglars!" as we walked to the bar. (We gave them an A+ for originality!) But like the rest of Orange County, the area seemed to get less queer over time, with the Boom Boom Room shutting its doors in 2007. (My friend in Anaheim says the Frat House is pretty much the only bar left in the entire area.) 

The Blair Warner years

Shortly after my 1990 debut, my 23rd birthday rolled around and my friends and I wound up at the Boom Boom Room. And it what must have been a gift from God after spending my adolescence the closet longing for the hot boys at Dobson High, I felt like the belle of the ball that night as two very cute guys spent the evening vying for my affections -- each promising to make my birthday "unforgettable" if I went home with him. I was such a tease -- I was going through a bit of a Blair Warner phase, complete with blond highlights -- flitting from one side of the bar to other to flirt with each of them (and their friends!) in between music breaks on the small dance floor. At one point I slipped down to the beach to make out with one of my suitors, then sluttily ended up leaving with the other guy, who it turned out was crashing at a friend's mansion in Newport Harbor. (Despite his promises, the sex turned out to be most forgettable .., but that house!) A few years ago I started getting emails from a reader who very coyly tried to jog my memory about an encountered we'd had back in Laguna Beach. Nothing he said rang a bell, so he eventually sent a photo. That still didn't do anything, so finally got so frustrated he just wrote: "We fucked on the beach." Well, I'm a lot of things. But above all I'm a prude with an elephantlike memory, so I was 100 percent confident this was not the case. To this day I'm not sure what his emails were all about. But it later crossed my mind that he may have been mistaking me for my Orange County doppelgänger that people were constantly telling me I looked just like, a guy named Christian Ornelius (spelling?) whom I finally met one night at Studio One and was so stunned my the resemblance I had to lean against the wall to compose myself. Sadly, I later heard he had passed away from cancer or else I might be able to solve this sex-on-a-beach caper once and for all.

I never had a camera back in those days. But luckily Alan Light was leading a more glamorous version of my life at the exact same time, so all of his pictures make nice stand-ins! More Laguna Beach 1990 photos HERE.

An mid-aughts effort to save the Boom Boom Room was unsuccessful 

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