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This was when the contest was still outside, there was still a shower out there, and there was this wall behind the stage the other contestants would hang out behind. I had just moved to San Diego three days earlier. Myself, a friend of mine, and some little muscle bear from Laguna Beach. "The first time I was out here at The Hole, the wet underwear contest had three contestants. Nobody would give me their last name, and a few asked that I not take their picture. I went to collect its patrons' most deranged stories. The Hole didn't close over the July 4 weekend, but seeing as this was the last of its Sunday beer busts in its current form, a small part of it died. By some measures, the gay bar is dying, which figures-when gay places become unnecessary, they fade. But the sanitization of gay culture is something to marvel. That's not progress to mourn, nor is the distance that remains between swaths of our community and similar liberties something to celebrate. Gay bars in turn have gone from places to be among peers, as vital and dangerous as that was, to quaint as Queer as Folk. In a handful of whiplash-inducing decades, homosexuality has gone from illegal to celebrated. It was only obvious to serve a mess of liquor to said gathered queers, and what began in secret became the dance floors and lounges that have enriched our culture in ways both trivial and profound ever since. When popular convictions misalign with your life, you find places to exist or you won't. By necessity, those gatherings are as much about sex as mutual support. Gay people have always come together, whether out in the open or not. They'll tell you about the uncouth activities that could only happen decades ago (in public).Ī good gay bar is where a community center meets a bathhouse.
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They'll tell you about The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an organization of drag nuns who disturb as much peace as they make. Every regular has a story about The Hole's debauched antics-they'll tell you about Blowjob Alley, a long hallway made famous for its namesake, or their first go at the Wet Underwear Contest, where Ophelia Later, San Diego's greatest drag queen, held court over all manner of shivering, vulnerable men. Sexual tensions wax and peak among the crowd, and things happen here that wouldn't fly most anywhere else. Among the crowd, holding a quarter-gallon $8 cocktail, with an ocean breeze and the California sun, you'll unclench. Where the world outside is way too real, this feels like gay Margaritaville. To descend through its tree-shaded entrance into the morass of sloshed humanity below is to hallucinate a back-hair-fleeced mirage.
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Sunday is the only day it turns a profit. Once known as The 19th Hole, it sits at the bottom of a century-old ditch in the ground, lending two excuses for the least subtly-named bar since The Cock. The Hole stands on a bleached, sprawling San Diego street, between faceless auto shops and the iridescent green of a neighboring golf course.