Source: Los Angeles Times, Desert Sun, UPI via Political Gateway, KESQ News
Warm Sands is an older neighborhood, a mix of vintage ranches and glassy contemporaries. There are cactuses and fruit trees, a health food shop, the oldest hardware store in town and -- displayed prominently on one corner lot -- a 5-foot-tall sculpture of a phallus.
Subtlety is not always a hallmark of Palm Springs' gay community. But then, unlike in many towns, it doesn't have to be. As many as half of Palm Springs' 40,000-or-so adult residents are gay; it has become, some locals contend, the gayest city in America.
Reactions to a new book about gay life in the desert city, Postcards from Palm Springs by Robert Julian, are characteristically lacking in subtlety. The book has been called "ludicrous" and worse by Palm Springs residents. [Amazon listing]
"Evidently he theorizes that Palm Springs is a sexual cesspool. Everybody's having sex 24 hours a day. Boy, I wish I could find that," said the director of a local gay theater who appears in slightly fictionalized form in the book.
A commenter on a story about the book in the local newspaper writes of Julian, "He's been bitter for long, long time. I got to give props for a great publicist though. Taking a self published solipsistic rant and getting the press coverage for a deservedly unknown typist, major publicity talent. Now, back to real life."
Another complains that Julian hadn't lived in Palm Springs for long enough to understand the city. "If you want to know the reality of it, LIVE here for awhile (and I don't mean "part-time"), get to know the true residents and their everday hohum lifestyles and then all of your negative stereotype-filled ill conceived notions will head back North -- hopefully for good."
Julian insists that his book shows parts of the city that even some long-time residents are not familiar with. "I take people into venues in Palm Springs that they wouldn't be able to go on their own," Julian says. "I talk about the clothing-optional gay resorts that are all over Palm Springs."
"He insulted people, he called us names and now he's going after us as a way of promoting his book," said the theater director. "Whoever he's got for publicity is really stirring up a lot of people."
When Julian arrived in 2006 with his partner, architect Patrick McGrew, he found a community so entrenched that it had its own diversity. Down the street from his house, one boutique was marketed to drag queens and another to "bears," a subculture of gay men who are typically masculine, stocky and hairy.
In Warm Sands alone there were 11 "clothing optional" gay resorts. City Hall paused to care only when tallying up the half-million dollars in occupancy tax revenue the resorts generated each year.
"I fell in love with it immediately," Julian said.
He'd been coming to the desert from San Francisco for 30 years, or, since the tail end of the era in which movie stars actually lived in Palm Springs' movie star colony.
There was one thing missing, Julian decided. He set out to write a book that would do for Palm Springs what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah, Ga. -- tell its story with an eye toward intrigue and a whiff of scandal.
"This has become a gay city," said Julian. "So, I thought somebody needs to write about the 21st century gay Palm Springs. It's a distinctively different place from the Palm Springs of the 1950s and, in some cases, I think it's a great social experiment. This is the first time in history we have a clearly identifiable, openly gay, graying population. And, when those people come together, how do they behave?"
From the perspective of Julian, who sought to reinvent himself at age 55 in Palm Springs after attaining some financial security selling real estate, Palm Springs was bizarre.
"I wanted to catch Palm Springs in all of its weird, unique craziness," he said. "This is a very weird place -- strange and wonderful to me, but strange. And so much of what's out there in the public mind is Palm Springs in the 1950s. And it's gone."
Julian's memoir circulated through town this winter. The book begins innocently enough.
There is mention of Julian's Lhasa apso, Little Bill, who is so pampered that he gets half a baked potato each night with his dinner.
And there are ruminations on being an aging gay man.
Gays his age, he believes, are part of a grand social experiment. Because they entered adulthood as the gay rights movement was getting underway, many of them were among the first gays who were never in the closet. Now they are starting to retire -- many of them in Palm Springs.
He was 55 when he wrote the book, he writes, "the age at which successful heterosexual men are hitting their stride in their respective professions, cuddling grandchildren and booking vacations with a second or third wife.
"For a gay man, it is well past the age of invisibility," he wrote. "Fifty-five in the gay world is the equivalent of 75 in the straight world."
Those were not the passages that ruffled the feathers of Palm Springs. It was the depiction, scattered through the book, of Palm Springs as an outpost of aging men with Peter Pan complexes and sexual hyper-drives -- men who, as he writes, "put the sex in sexagenarian."
On Page 133, he drops by a pool party at a resort staffed by young escorts who are soon cavorting in a hot tub, "surrounded by overweight middle-aged men holding cameras."
On Page 190, he peers through a crack in the wall outside Bacchanal, a resort in his neighborhood, and sees a "middle-aged man in a leather vest gently using a leather whip" on another man.
There are depictions of naked tourists hanging around the pool, naked locals at the gym, a naked exhibitionist who flashes him one evening while he's walking Little Bill.
Critics don't necessarily contest any of the anecdotes. But they say they paint a grossly distorted image of Palm Springs, a city described by its local TV station as a "serene vacation getaway, a nice place to retire or raise a family."
The Desert Sun reports that the book Julian first envisioned was to be "a gay version of A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle's warm account of moving into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the country."
But, the Sun writes that by the time it was published "it had somehow morphed into something closer to Running With Scissors -- Augusten Burroughs' virulent memoir of growing up gay, which sparked defamation of character and invasion of privacy law suits.
"Julian, whose real name is Robert Julian Stone, hasn't been sued, but he's raised some ire."
A former actor and longtime film critic for the Bay Area Reporter, Julian won a starring role in the first production of Palm Springs' gay-oriented Thorny Theater in in December, 2007.
But, when his behind-the-scenes observations showed up in his book, with the names of the director, theater founder and theater company changed, the troupe reacted with indignation.
"He called my house the house of stench," said Arch Brown, a playwright and founder of the Thorny Theater. "He (Julian) claims he slept with his co-star and his co-star's lover. Not true.
Julian responds that Brown didn't challenge his assertions when he fired him from the Thorny Theater by e-mail after the book came out.
And Palm Springs has had a reputation for sexual freedom since the 1920s. Postcards From Palm Springs is tame compared to the recollections of Frank Sinatra's former valet, George Jacobs, in Mr. S: My Life With Frank Sinatra, which is being made into a movie.
Locals insist that the book's stories of sexual escapades are overblown. "By the time the witching hour comes, most of the locals are home watching TV," said Jim Strait, 54, who moved to town four years ago. "If you're looking for this stuff you can find it -- but you can also find it in Peoria."
The book has been criticized by people who feel it creates an unrealistic and lewd representation of the city.
"For the love of God, the whole thing is just ludicrous. You don't come out here because it's going to be a carnival. It's just a nice place to live," a resident said.
Julian seems whipsawed by the response to his book. In some moments, he seems taken aback. One friend told him he might have to move. Julian thinks it was a joke but he sounds uncertain. In the next moment, Julian is defiant and unrepentant.
"When you talk about things that people don't like to talk about, it can make people crazy," he said one recent afternoon while sitting under a wide umbrella and sipping fresh-squeezed orange juice next to his pool.
"The job of a writer is to tell the truth. And I did."
"I didn't write it because I wanted to generate controversy," Julian told KESQ. He says he's simply defending his view of the city and the gay lifestyle. He doesn't think it says anything bad about the city. He says it's simply the truth.
"I wanted to explore what that process was like for me as an individual as well as for the people around me," Julian says.
"The book is mostly for men. I talk about them from the inside rather than from the outside looking in."
"I haven't read Robert's book. I certainly am going to read it now and I just hope it paints Palm Springs in a good light," says Rick Anderson owner of INNdulge, a hotel in the Warm Sands neighborhood.
"This is what I call a memoir of person and place and it's the book that only I could write and I'm very pleased with it," says Julian.
Julian is now being touted as a spokesman for "the new Palm Springs." He's expected to begin hosting a talk radio show in three to six months on KNews.
Julian is amazed at the reaction to his book, and just a little disappointed by those who are offended by it.
To those friends who didn't see it coming, he offers a favorite quote from writer Joan Didion: "Beware of your friends who are writers," he recited. "They will always betray you."
Full article: Palm Springs' image in book creates uproar - Los Angeles Times
Gay community rejects Palm Springs book | UPI via Political Gateway
Robert Julian's foray onto Palm Springs has its Thorny side | The Desert Sun
Local Author Defends His View of Palm Springs Gay Community | KESQ