Greg's long-lost story on Laguna Beach's Boom Boom Room....

Fred Karger hopes not. The 56-year-old retired public relations executive has teamed up with the city’s former mayor, Bob Gentry, to form the Save the Boom! campaign. So far, more than 5,000 signatures have been gathered urging the Laguna Beach City Council to help keep the Boom Boom Room and the Coast Inn permanently open as a gay bar and hotel. A web site, Savetheboom.com, has received over 25,000 hits.
"I think it’s important to preserve it for future generations.," says Karger. "Within the gay civil rights movement, we have very few buildings and facilities with as much history as the Coast Inn and the Boom Boom Room. I’ve been going there for 34 years, right out of college. The 70s were great and the 80s. This last summer, it really seemed to catch on again."
The story of how The Boom got into this dire position is one of dwindling business, multi-million dollar real estate deals, and a changing city that was once a affordable place for gays to live and very welcoming for those on a weekend getaway or just passing through.
Patrick O’Laughlin and James Marchese bought property that the The Boom and the Coast Inn sit as a real estate investment in 2000. With business falling off, in 2005 they decided to sell the property to Beverly Hills billionaire Steven Udvar-Hazy.for nearly $13 million but planned to continue to run the businesses through a lease agreement.
When he first heard the bar and hotel were closing down, Karger says he didn’t immediately see the big picture. It took a conversation with Joel Herzer, owner of the predominantly gay Woody’s at the Beach located a block away.
"I was talking to Joel about how he’d clean up when the bar closes, he’d get all the business. He said, ‘It’ll be just the opposite without an anchor.’ That was my wake-up call. If that anchor bar closed, the community would disappear along with it."
For Herzer, having the Boom a block away is good for his business since it makes the area more of a destination for gays in town for a night or for the weekend.
"We’ve always had a really great relationship. We have a nice place to meet and eat and greet and people would go over there after and go dancing. It’s one of those things where people like choices and if it goes, it narrows the choices for Laguna Beach."
Boom supporters note that with Laguna Beach located halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego, there are more than 500,000 gays living within a 60 mile radius of the city.
"If only1% of them came to Laguna for a weekend, the city would be flush with cash and all the gay and straight businesses would really prosper," says Herzer, whose business soared by 25% over Labor Day weekend . He credits the increase to the attention the Boom Boom Room has been getting, attracting old regulars who had found haunts as well as new visitors. Herzer goes so far as to say "the gay vibe is back in Laguna," reminding him of when he first moved into town in the mid-80s.
As for Gentry, he hasn’t lived in Laguna since 1999 when he retired and began splitting his time between homes in Hawaii and Palm Springs. But in his heart, the city he lived in for nearly 30 years is still home and he is dismayed by the metamorphosis that has been taking place.
"Laguna Beach wouldn’t be Laguna Beach without the gay community," says Gentry, who became the first openly gay mayor in the nation during his 12 years on the city council. "I see the dynamics of the city moving away from a hospitable environment to gays and lesbians to a more tolerant environment and I believe the city is missing the
boat economically and socially by not advocating a closer ties to the international gay and lesbian community. The Boom Boom Room issue for me has become a symbol of this change. My goal is to keep Laguna healthy, diverse and hospitable to the gay and lesbian community rather than being fearful and hesitant to invite it to its town."
Gentry is working to remind people that from the 1960s on, Laguna Beach was the destination resort for gays and lesbians way before Palm Springs and Coachella Valley caught on and that they city is what it is today because of its gay residents.
"Laguna Beach has a very strong taproot into the gay and lesbian community and the community has contributed a tremendous amount of great things to the city, helping to define it, helping to preserve its charm and just to make it the seaside resort that it is and attracting a very fine upscale tourism base," he says. "I see that changing and that’s why I’m involved and concerned."
If Gentry were to pinpoint a time when the city’s attitude changed toward the gay community, it would be in the mid to late 80s when Laguna had the highest AIDS rate, per capita, of any city in the U.S. including San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
"That’s what started the sort of coolness toward the gay community and stopped any kind of progressive laws or policies that we had from going any further."
Gentry remembers a time in the early 90s when he was contacted by the city of West Hollywood which was seeking to join together with Palm Springs and Laguna Beach to put money into the international gay tourism market by jointly promoting all three cities as three destinations to hit during a single vacation.
"The word I got back was, ‘We don’t want to do that. We have families here.’"
Save the Boom! leaders began a gay voter registration drive this fall in the weeks leading up to the Nov. 7 city council elections as they work to build a city government willing to use their bully pulpit to advocate for a stronger relationship with the gay community
in a proactive way, not just reactive.
Councilwoman Jane Engle, a 23-year resident of the town and a member of the city council for the last two years says she’d "love to see it stay, it’s an icon of our town."
But Engle says the council is limited in what it can do since Hazy does own the land.
"I don’t know of anything that we can do. We can encourage but we can’t make the owner keep it the way it is," she says. "Speaking for myself, there’s no one that I know of on the council who doesn’t have the sense of not wanting it to go."
While no members of the Laguna Beach City Council have joined the front lines to save the Boom, openly gay Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl has.
"The fact that they are continuing to operate for a year is a very good sign," he says. "We have time to work on it. This is a great opportunity to preserve an icon."
People who frequent the bar and hotel are caught between resignation and cautious optimism while some are just plain mad.
LA resident Phil McFall, down for the weekend recently, sees plans to raze the complex as "a betrayal."
"This is what’s working here," he says. "If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. I don’t want to see old architecture knocked down, I want to see it preserved. Let California be 200 years old like the East Coast. Let it have its heritage."
Adds his boyfriend, David Goman: "I’m glad that it’s staying open for another 11 months.We’ve been coming down here with friends for 10 or 11 years and it’s the only gay resort that I know of here in Laguna and it would be a shame to have it close. It’s Laguna, it’s the ocean, it’s the weather. You can’t beat it. It’s a good escape. And there’s nice people here, it’s different from the L.A. crowd."
Bartender Robert Etchen plans to be there pouring drinks if closing day does arrive.
"I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s hard to imagine not coming in here every weekend," he says. "I do it because I enjoy working with the people."
Etchen, 41, has been a bartender at the club for 16 years and he doesn’t sugar-coat what he sees as the reality of the situation. "We’ll either be closed next year or the following year. They sold the building and (the owner), he’s got to get some return on his investment."
Michael Vieira, 46, owner of GayMart Laguna across the street from the Boom for the past 1.5 years, sees things in a similar light.
"I don’t see change as bad, you have to look at change as good," he says. "Everyone is saying, ‘Where will gay men go?’ They didn’t put any money into it. With times changing, they needed to bring itup-to-date. But if it closes, I will miss it."
The Boom opened in 1927 as The Seven Seas, a bar for servicemen. But by the late 70s, it had become the center of Laguna’s burgeoning gay community.
Herzer: "It’s a lot more exclusive than it used to be. The cheapest rooms are $200 to $300 a night." He compares it to Palm Springs, where he owns the wildly popular Wang’s, where rooms can be found at about $125 a night even during the height of the tourist season.
"I am very confident that during this next year, something dramatic is going to happen and the Boom Boom Room, in one form or another, will be around for another 60 years," Karger predicts.