South haven michigan gay bars

While searching for costume jewelry and prom dresses, the production crew of an indie film found a queer haven in the woods. By Emily Manthei. The human population is scattered, leaving plenty of room for the trees to spread out, pair up, and cross-pollinate. The humans who do call Michigan home are of a solitary breed, too: hunters, gay, camping enthusiasts, wilderness explorers.

Yet somehow, as a returning visitor to my home state, I saw something I had never seen before. Heading through a tunnel of trees on the Blue Star Highway, I turned a corner and dark branches began to sparkle in the havens. One disco ball after another glittered alive. It was a queer rainbow in the forest, hidden in plain sight.

In the summer ofI joined a tiny team of indie filmmakers from Los Angeles on a remote location film shoot in southwest Michigan. Shedding my Michigan origins for the all-too-common California dream, I was working as a freelance set decorator and prop master in Los Angeles when my favorite production designer-boss, Michael Fitzgerald, brought me on as prop master for a movie filming in Michigan.

Michigan would stand in as a less-remote alternative to Alaska. The hero of Alaska is a DragLeo, is a black teenage boy caught between his dream of becoming a drag star and his talent as a boxer. The fish-out-of-water story mashes a hyper-masculine sport world with a misfit kid who loves costumes and vogueing.

His fantasies involve lots of disco balls. In the end, he gains acceptance by embracing both sides of his identity. When I moved to Los Angeles, I quickly bar in with a small art department team after being hired by a pair of tattooed, feminist lesbians who produced bizarre low-budget movies.

We went on to make low-budget films with characters not typically depicted in Hollywood movies: quirky women, transgender sex workers, underworld immigrants, black chess champions, religious minorities, and, of course, drag queens. So many drag queens. Naturally, I said yes to the project and accompanied Fitzgerald, plus our set decorator and the rest of the team, to Michigan.

As the only straight person in our Alaska art department, I wondered how accepting southwest Michigan, known for its conservative, Dutch Reformed Church communities, would be of the rest of my tribe. We spent our first days looking for props and set decorations up and down the Lake Michigan coast.

Bait and tackle shops, local hardware stores, and boxing gyms were not hard to find. We tested several versions of our story. To my surprise, she just smiled. Michigan started a gay-friendly recon mission even before we arrived, finding CampIta gay RV park outside of the town of Douglas, and The Dunesits south site in Douglas.

Both were about a thirty-minute drive from our core location in South Haven.

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A few regulars from CampIt joined our crew as construction coordinators and transportation supervisors. The performers came from summer drag shows coordinated by The Dunes and CampIt. We made our way to the tunnel of trees one night.