Somewhere in the state of Washington, possibly near Seattle, there’s supposedly a campground specifically for gays. Take a moment to make your own mental picture of how it might be. I’ll wait. I’ll Goodle “paddle boarding why” and listen to Omar Apollo’s devastating gay breakup song yet again which opens with a perfectly in tune gay question, “Was there something wrong with my body?” Sing it, Omar!
Okay, got your gay campground mental picture? Let’s compare it with my perceptions. When I first heard Vancouverites talk about it twenty-five years ago, chandeliers seemed to really stand out in the conversation. Inside the tent? Hanging from a Sitka spruce? Can an ornate light fixture run on batteries? How long of an electrical cord was needed? It sounded elegant, over the top…and I couldn’t summon an image of me being there that didn’t involve tripping over that dang cord. Lights out, everybody.
That seemed more worrisome than the possibility of tics and Lyme disease. After all, I’d also heard this campground was an extremely social community. If I kept messing with the chandelier’s power—there couldn’t possibly be more than one, could there?—I’d surely be shunned…even sooner than usual!
What was wrong with flashlights anyway?
Didn’t we all play flashlight tag as kids? Why do we give up all the fun stuff?
In this gay camp area, I’d heard there was an element of one-upmanship. (Really, how gay is that?!) Meals had to be Instagram-worthy, even if social media wasn’t a thing back then. Forget hot dogs and smores over a bonfire. Someone would roast a turkey while the competition—er, neighbors—would use their firepit to make a retro meal of duck à l’orange and the meringue for baked Alaska (What says “camping” more than a dish with “Alaska” in its name?). (The ice cream would be made from scratch, of course. Vanilla would be too, well, vanilla. Something involving fancy liqueurs.) I don’t know if there is a way to eliminate any chance of salmonella when cooking turkey or duck by campfire, but surely the flavors would make any possibility of diarrhea, fever and stomach cramps worth it. (Add an extra roll of 3-ply Charmin to the backpack.)
The impression I got was that a chance spotting of a Northern Spotted Owl or a bleeding tooth fungus was incidental to a glamorous party weekend in the woods. I suspected site regulars spent rainy Pacific Northwest winters drawing up tent layouts and contemplating how to adapt Martha Stewart “good things” for the forest. Anything with a truly natural pine set would be oh so cliché. The main objective seemed to be that all things pretentious had to come off as easy-peasy: “Oh, we do this sort of thing all the time.”
Apparently, there were other over-the-top aspects regarding outfits and sex antics, but I was hung up on proper lighting and fiddly meringue.
Everything I’d ever heard about camping was intimidating: bears, rattlesnakes, murderers lurking in the woods and, added to the mix…meal planning.
Yikes. And, yuck.
Needless to say, I began to tune out whenever this mythical rural legend of a glam-gay campground[1] came up in conversation once every five years or so. Real or not, I would never go. It sounded like an awful lot of work when I could just rent a cabin or, better yet, day hike and unwind in a Jacuzzi tub at a Hilton or even crash on a basic mattress at Motel 6. Camping is not my thing. It's one of those things I've told myself I would never do.
No regrets.
But now things have changed...
[1] All this initial talk of a glamorous gay campground preceded the coining of the term, glamping, which didn’t occur until 2005, being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016.
2 comments:
Interesting and amusing post, james! I've never liked the idea of camping, so it would be a hard pass for me, as well!
Thanks for leaving a comment, John! No matter how much you glamorize the experience, it's still camping. Not in my comfort zone.
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