I am too tired for the drag show at the Cabaret theater at Flixx, one of a handful of gay bars scattered around town, so I settle into the main bar instead. It seems the entire crowd is composed of a single group of more than a dozen preppy, cornfed Midwest cuties, but they are huddled together like a cluster of circled wagons and prove impenetrable.
DAY 8: OMAHA TO DENVER
It’s cold and brisk as I rise, shine, grab a complimentary breakfast bag from my hotel, and rejoin the road. I have not yet had my morning coffee, and with crusty sleep bejeweling the edges of my eyes, everything on the dashboard of my car blurs together so that Apple Car Play reads as Anal Play. (I wish.) Today’s journey to the Mile High City will be my longest, but will offer pin-drop solitude and the Heartland’s most breathtaking scenery. Queer life, not so much.
In liberal Lincoln, I stop for coffee at Hub Café (I’m so tired I’m tempted to splash the piping hot beverage right on my face) and in front of the phallic Nebraska State Capitol I struggle to angle my phone just right to take the perfect selfie. A sweet Midwestern couple in Cornhusker gear shows up just in time to snap a perfectly mediocre photo of me.
Nebraska is a beauty. Most folks don’t know it because they sprint across the state via monotonous I-80, a total snoozer. But at Grand Island, I swerve onto Hwy 2 and head north along Sandhills Journey National Scenic Byway, a two-lane road famous for its miles of undulating sandhills rippling across the prairie in every direction and interrupted only by ranches and tiny Nebraska farm towns. The raw, vivid landscape awakens my senses.
Dancing Statute In Front of Denver Performing Art Complex (Photo_ Jay Yuan)
This is a quiet America, a land perfectly frozen in time. I see a horse the color of an Oscar statuette grazing on the hillside, a train chugging along so slowly a sloth could beat it in a race. In Broken Bow I eat at Runza, a Nebraska fast-food franchise of German origins and one of the few chains I will visit on this trip. Three times the workers come by to ask me how everything is, and it is all great. In the Nebraska National Forest, I am the only one around as I climb Scott’s Lookout Tower and survey the landscape. Within weeks of my visit, the tower and much of the forest will be reduced to rubble and ash, victims of a devastating wildfire. By midday, it is a bone-dry 97 and the landscape turns sallow, the hills now weeping under the punishing heat.
Carhenge in Alliance, Nebraska (Photo by Jason A. Heidemann)
Western Nebraska is full of treasures worth checking out. Magnificent Carhenge mashes up Cadillac Ranch with England’s most confounding monument (hence the name); Chimney Rock is a pointy little curiosity; and Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area offers rugged, Wild West topography that will silence anyone who thinks the Great Plains offer only flat terrain.
After 13 hours of steering my covered wagon across the prairie, this cowboy is only too happy to rest his sore eyes upon the Mile High City. My host in this nosebleed town is Scott, a bearded and tatted nudist and writer (his Instagram handle is @bareinkslinger) who I discover through MisterBandB. He and his partner Luke are the loveliest of hosts and own a charming little home on the Denver-Aurora border. I settle right in…au naturale, of course.
At Steubens in Denver, I’m eating my third fried chicken dinner this week. I shouldn’t be tempting my cholesterol levels like this, but dang I’m having trouble resisting the intentional retro diner vibes this joint is feeding me, including wood paneled-walls, mocha leather banquettes, and a pierced and tatted server who I presume will call me honey (she doesn’t).
A slim little dancer in a pair of briefs slithers up to me at the bar at male strip club Boystown. He is from Wisconsin, tells me that his name is Sky and says he’s “turning 25 for the sixth time” later this month. When I call him a go-go boy he proclaims himself a stripper and schools me on the difference between the two. Behind us, a blonde and bearded dude with a package so large it’s testing the strength of the tighty-whities supporting it, is working the pole and collecting singles from a group of thirsty gays. Featherweight Sky replaces him a few minutes later and strips to a sheer pair of baby blue undies held up only by a pair of spaghetti straps. I hungrily insert my remaining singles into his G-string like it’s a winning slot machine and call it a night.
DAY 9: DENVER TO TAOS
This is the second time I’ve driven Hwy 285 south out of Denver, and once again it’s like being hugged hard by Mother Nature. Here the Rockies tower over me, soft and sloping in places and hard, pointy, and jagged in others. Alongside the highway, fly fisherman wade waist deep and cast their line into rushing rivers while log cabins with green shingled roofs dot the landscape and cattle ranches with names like Deer Creek Valley announce themselves via cast iron signage. Salida is a gem of a town. A place where the Wild West has been replaced with hippie chic. Once again, I have lunch at Sweetie’s, the best sandwich shop in Colorado.
At Valley View Hot Springs, a firefly is soaring over me like a WWII bomber. Beside me, a dude I’m calling the Mushroom Man is micro-dosing up the other bathers, which includes a cowboy in large, pink-tinted sunglasses who’s been riding his hog across North America for almost a year, a couple who once walked the entirety of the Pacific Coast Trail from Mexico to Canada, and me, not indulging in ‘shrooms mind you, but happy to be taking an afternoon soak in this little nudist paradise at the base of, wait for it, Nipple Mountain. Nobody even notices the deer grazing outside the tub. This place is heaven, but do make a reservation in advance.
Hotel Luna Mystica (Photo by Amanda Powell @adrift_adream)
At Hotel Luna Mystica in Taos, I check in to my gender-neutral airstream trailer named Terry just in time to watch a heavenly sunset. Taos sits on a large Mesa with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains providing a magnificent backdrop. I happen to love New Mexico. Taos in particular offers low-key attractions like the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, Taos Pueblo (closed during my visit) and Earthship Biotecture, a community of eco-friendly homes that look like the results of a Gaudi-gone-wild drunken Southwest weekend. At Orlando’s New Mexican Café, the menu mostly contains the words “blue corn” and “smothered” so I order blue corn shrimp enchiladas smothered in pozole, cheese, and beans. I highly recommend it.
Art Gallery in Taos Pueblo (Photo by Vineyard Perspective)
DAY 10: TAOS TO ALBUQUERQUE
After a hearty breakfast at Michael’s Kitchen Restaurant & Bakery in Taos, I hit the road and breeze right into Santa Fe by mid-morning. The oldest capital in the United States, Santa Fe has never been my cup of tea. Its reliance on hawking tchotchkes to tourists like turquoise jewelry, dreamcatchers, and t-shirts featuring airbrushed wolves howling at the moon has never been my thing. But this brief visit has its moments.
Ethyl the Whale at Santa Fe Community College (Photo by Jason A. Heidemann)
On Canyon Road I’m sitting outside at the Wilford Gallery, where I’m pretty sure the overly attentive gallerist is hitting on me. The gallery is home to the largest collection of wind sculptures in the world, the work of artist Lyman Whitaker. Their pinwheel-like design hypnotizes me and temporarily distracts me from the midday heat. I enjoy a bowl of pozole at Modern General, a cozy urban café where several folks are tucked into corners and punching away at their laptops. On the way out of town, I stop at Santa Fe Community College and visit Ethyl the Whale, an 82-foot sculpture constructed entirely out of recycled plastic trash and meant to bring attention to the negative impact of plastics on the environment. It was purchased and brought to Santa Fe via experiential art collective Meow Wolf. It’s very cool.
In Albuquerque, I am staying with a guy named Mark at his bookable adobe-style home on the northwest side of town. Eager to explore the city before the sun takes its final bow, I head to Old Town where I see an enormous woman standing at a bus stop with her shirt pulled up and massaging her breasts at passing cars. Old Town boasts a pretty, central plaza and adobe-style homes featuring turquoise trimmings. At this hour its cobbled streets are mostly empty.
I pull into the gravel parking lot at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Organic Farm and see a yellow diamond sign warning of crossing alpacas. The grounds are stunning, both rustic and charming at the same time; Chip and Joanna Gaines couldn’t dream up this level of farmhouse chic if they tried. I’m here to visit the onsite restaurant Campo (which boasts a queer sous chef) and I sit at the bar where I enjoy the most thoughtful and flavorful meal of my entire trip, including assorted house-made breads, a local tomato salad, and an excellent carrot cavatelli pasta.
The doorperson at Albuquerque Social Club looks like a plus-size version of P!nk. A members-only club, and one of only two queer bars in town, I pay the few bucks to join and decide to check the place out.
Because the scene here is so small, ABQ Social Club represents the entire rainbow spectrum. Posters stuck on the walls indicate leather and kink night, a party called Tops and Bottoms (a fundraiser for gender affirming surgery), line dancing and two-step lessons, an underwear dance party, and a night for nonbinary people. Tonight is karaoke night and I enter to the sounds of K.D. Lang’s “Constant Craving” being horribly butchered.
I sidle up to the bar and ask mixologist Cobain to tell me a story. He tells me about breaking up a fight on Britney night while dressed in schoolgirl drag and of another instance when a tatted hottie showed up blissfully unaware of underwear night, stripped to his skivvies, got shitfaced and ended up naked in the bathroom stall vomiting and defecating at the same time. It’s a Wednesday (I think) so as a tribute to all the worker bees at home in bed already, I belt out a truly awful rendition of “9 to 5” for all the office drones out there. On my way out of the bar I say to the smokers outside, “I screeched out a round of ‘9 to 5’ and you all missed it.” One smoker takes a confident drag, exhales, and replies, “I’m sure Dolly loved it.”
Artwork at the Desert Botanical Gardens in Phoenix (Photo by Raeann Davies)
DAY 11: ALBUQUERQUE TO PHOENIX
It’s almost too on the nose to wake up in Albuquerque to a smattering of hot-air balloons dotting the skyline like random splotches of oil paint on a canvas, but this is the dirigible mecca after all, and I love how they add much needed color to the parched desert palette. My host, meanwhile, keeps sending me flirty text messages (apparently, he is keen on the charcoal thong I wear around his kitchen at breakfast), but he is off to work and I’m back on the road.
New Mexico is immensely pretty, but the landscape has been corrupted with too many casinos. I reach the continental divide by afternoon and mark the occasion by snapping a photo and stopping for Navajo Fry Bread at Indian City just inside the Arizona border. While waiting in line I receive a Times alert that Queen Elizabeth II is dead, a reminder that even in the middle of nowhere the earth is still spinning and life is still happening.
On my way to Petrified Forest National Park I pass a billboard that reads: Enable the Lie, Watch Democracy Die and am reminded of my last Arizona visit in November 2020 when I traveled to the state to be a volunteer poll monitor in Maricopa County. It was such a long and challenging day, but when I woke up to a 2 A.M. and saw an AP alert on my phone announcing that Biden had taken The Grand Canyon State, I wept tears of joy.
Petrified Forest is a lovely drive-thru park offering paleontology exhibits, ancient petroglyphs, and its famous Rainbow Forest featuring logs that have been petrified for millions of years.
Arizona’s natural beauties are too numerous to count, and today that list gets even longer with my exploration of ponderosa pine covered Sitgreaves National Forest, which sits at an elevation of nearly 12,000 feet at its highest point and offers antelope, elk, wild turkeys, deer, and bighorn sheep among other woodland creatures. It’s home to 34 lakes and reservoirs and 680 miles of streams and rivers. The one last breath of clean mountain air I take before being dumped into the Valley of the Sun’s scorching summer furnace is in the town of Peyton, where a sixty-something man outside a Safeway grocery store is holding up a sign that reads: Lock Trump Up.
My nighttime arrival in Phoenix coincides with a milestone, I have surpassed the 4,000-mile mark. I’m also hitting a wall. I’ve been on the road nonstop for almost two weeks and it feels like nothing is making sense anymore, though that’s also because it’s 102 degrees at night and the Phoenix heat is scrambling my brain. My lodging is Tony’s House, a seven-bedroom, clothing-optional men’s resort tucked away in a sleepy residential neighborhood a short drive from the gay district. Owner Tony Cabral ran three video stores in the pre-streaming era and based the resort’s mid-century design on numerous road trips to Palm Springs where he hauled one fantastic piece of vintage furniture after another back to the Valley of the Sun. Cabral also offers male boudoir photography and designs t-shirts, stickers, mugs, and more.
