This post was submitted by Zack Rosen

The Indie Rock Fag is Zack’s Thursday music and culture column. Please be kind to it.

I’m the kind of guy who always wants something else. When I’m eating pizza I’m thinking about Burgers. I’ll wake up in a guys bed and wonder what his friend’s body was like. So logically I want to eventually live someplace besides DC. What does this town have going for it besides natural and architectural beauty, my job, my boyfriend, and everyone I know and love? Nothing! Since I have too much family in New York and I grew up in Chicago, the only general area of the country that still has any mystique to me is the West Coast.

Like a transformer toy in briefs and an American Apparel henley, the Californian resources of a massive gay population and readily accessible alternative culture combine to create something intoxicating: The West Coast Homo. I’ve been in search of this pot-smoking, Granddaddy-loving, flannel wearing, dog-owning, chest-hair-having laidback adonis for the better part of four years. Not because I want him (in fact, I doubt he actually exists) but because I someday want to be him. I See California as the simultaneous home and endpoint of gay culture, like life as we know it was born when an LA beach party fucked a seedy San Francisco sex lounge and the offspring is just trying to claw its way back home.

So I used a recent ten day trip through Long Beach and San Francisco as a chance to figure out what alternative culture does or doesn’t exist in these places, and to evaluate if this supposed West Coast homo is something I might actually ever be interested in becoming.

The first thing I learned is that Long Beach is not actually in LA proper. So, to be honest, that shot the intended arc of this story to hell. So while I would love to write about excess and overly manicured people and places you can only drive to, I didn’t spend a lot of time in Los Angeles itself. The extent of my visit was spent at a place in Silverlake called Akbar, where I neither got a chance to hit on with Zachary “Sylar” Quinto (who is rumored to be a regular on days when I’m not there) nor was extremely impressed with the music selection. The first hour of perfection, where the DJ spun bands like Hot Chip, Animal Collective and CSS, died an inglorious death as soon as the night picked up. Oh well. Two disapointments in one evening, what can you do.

But I did learn that Long Beach seemed like a much more interesting place to live. Discounting the usual universal types like twink, muscle daddies and “your sequined back pockets are making me dizzy,” the sodomites I encountered appeared to be split equally two camps: First, a gay rockabilly revolution that would give Morrissey a four-day boner and secondly a tragic lot of wannabe showbiz fags whose proximity to Hollywood created some sincere (and sincerely blush-worthy) moments at a karaoke bar.

The latter were like a live version of the worst American idol episode you’ve ever seen. I’ve seen dedication to Karaoke before, but it somehow seems different when you’re a stones throw from the place where such shower-singing-dreams come true. The former were a group of guys I would’ve checked out on Chicago’s punky Belmont St. when I was 12. If horizontal stripes, long shorts and bowler hats are your turn-ons I can tell you now that your Mecca might not be as far as you think.

And in between those two poles were that thing called “normal gay life” that most of us are more a part of then we want to admit. Within it I happened to find a group of guys that were into things like The Raveonettes and tofu scrambles. Does it mean that the culture is more divergent from DC’s staples of Lady Gaga and crab ravioli, or that I chanced upon a group of people that suited me? I prefer to think its the former, as it means there is one more city out there that I can daydream about moving to on bad or boring days. Either way, these guys were as close to “The West Coast Homo” as I will probably ever find and I’m happy to know they’re out there.

San Francisco, however, is a whole different ball game. I’ve only been there three different times and I’ve gotten a completely different view of the city everytime. First, when I was 22, it seemed like a paradise of potent weed and equally potent blowjobs, and I came away smitten because I wasn’t there long enough for a single objectionable thing to happen. My second time, last year, found me instead in a beautiful waiting room. The most interesting people you could ever meet sat frozen in time at a coffee shop or in the park, living life to the narrowest while brewing amazing ideas that would never see the light of day.

This time, though, I don’t know what to think. On one end, I love the city. The food, the parks, the weather, all seem designed to lure me in like a fog in a mousetrap. But on the other hand, its jarring to realize just how many California cliches are alive and well there. If I had taken a shot for every time I heard the phrases “Prius,” “Sustainable Agriculture” and “bikram yoga” I would make John Bonham look like Miley Cyrus. I often can’t tell if I’m talking to people or collections of interests. The gay life too seems so intergrated into the rest of the city that speaking of “alternative” culture seems like a waste of time, because you’re either on Castro Street living the platonic ideal of gay life (or in SoMa getting fisted,) or your just another San Francisco resident that happens to like dick. I really can’t tell.

The end result is that the sum of the city’s whole is more than the parts its made of. The appeal of the place is divorced from any one element of it, and I can’t really even quantify it any more. The best I can do again is just see it as a destination and acknowledge that I’ll probably spend a good amount of time in my life fighting against the little dinosaur brain in my pants that slouches toward the skycraping rainbow flag to be born.

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