Palm Springs: Desert Heat and Rainbow Flags

The train from LA to Palm Springs is a couple of hours, give or take — but the transformation outside the window is one of the most dramatic I’ve seen on any rail line in the country. You leave Union Station and crawl through the eastern sprawl of Los Angeles, past warehouses and strip malls and the kind of neighborhoods that look the same from every train in every American city. Then the San Gabriel Valley, suburbs thinning, landscape going drier. And then, almost without warning, you’re in the desert.

Not “kind of desert.” Not “desert-adjacent.” Actual, honest-to-god desert. Sand and scrub and distant mountains and a sky so blue and empty it looks like someone turned off the clouds. The air outside the window shimmers with heat. The last gas station disappears behind you and then it’s just the Sonoran Desert doing what it does best: being vast and indifferent and genuinely beautiful in a way that doesn’t care whether you appreciate it.

The Heat

Let me be specific about August in Palm Springs. You step off the train and the heat hits you like opening an oven door, except the oven is the size of a valley and there’s no closing it. The temperature when I arrived: 112 degrees. One hundred and twelve. People say “but it’s a dry heat” and they’re right — it genuinely is different from East Coast humidity — but 112 is 112. Your sunglasses get hot on your face. The steering wheel of a parked car could brand cattle. The locals move from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned building with the efficient purpose of people who have fully made their peace with living inside a geological hair dryer.

But here’s the thing I didn’t expect: I kind of loved it. After weeks of Pacific Northwest mist and San Francisco fog and coastal overcast, the absolute certainty of the sun felt almost luxurious. No ambiguity. No checking the weather app to decide if you need a jacket. The weather was hot. It was going to be hot tomorrow. It had been hot yesterday. The desert had made its decision and I respected the commitment.

A Queer City in the Desert

Palm Springs has been a queer city longer than most people realize, and the history of it matters. Back in the golden age of Hollywood, this was where the stars came to escape — close enough to LA for a weekend trip, far enough to feel like another world. And among those stars were the closeted gay actors and directors and writers who couldn’t be themselves anywhere in Hollywood but could, at least partially, exhale out here. Over the decades, that quiet refuge became something louder and more deliberate. The city has had openly gay mayors. Rainbow flags fly from businesses up and down Palm Canyon Drive not as a seasonal gesture but as a year-round fact. Queer-specific resorts and hotels are woven into the landscape — not as niche or specialty accommodations but just as part of what the city is.

Walking through downtown Palm Springs as a gay man felt different from walking through other “gay-friendly” places. There’s a real distinction between a city that tolerates you and a city that was, in a meaningful sense, built by people like you. Palm Springs is the latter. The queer businesses weren’t in a designated gayborhood. The rainbow crosswalks weren’t a recent addition. This was just what the town was, and it wore that identity as naturally as the mid-century houses wore their flat roofs — without announcement, as if it had never been any other way.

The bear community has a particular relationship with Palm Springs, which I’d known going in but still appreciated seeing in person. Certain bars, certain resorts, certain pool parties — the infrastructure for queer men of a specific type is built into the fabric of the place. I found it immediately comfortable in a way I hadn’t expected. This was my people’s desert.

Mid-Century Modern Everything

The houses, though. Palm Springs is a genuine time capsule of mid-century modern architecture — not in the way real estate agents use the term to sell anything built between 1945 and 1975, but in the purest possible sense. The city is full of buildings that look like they were designed for a magazine shoot in 1962 and then perfectly preserved in the dry desert air. Because in many cases, that’s exactly what happened. Clean lines. Floor-to-ceiling glass. Butterfly roofs. Stone walls. That specific mid-century confidence that a house should look like it’s considering becoming airborne.

Spent an afternoon driving through residential neighborhoods, gawking. The Kaufmann Desert House. The Elrod House. The Alexander homes in rows — each one a variation on angular optimism, each one the kind of thing that would be in a museum if it were anywhere else. The desert is the right setting for this architecture. The stark landscape makes the geometry pop. The relentless sun plays off the glass and steel in ways the original architects clearly anticipated. It’s a style built for this specific light, and in this specific place it looks exactly right.

Pool Culture

In August, everything in Palm Springs revolves around the pool. This is not optional and it’s not really a choice — it’s the climate making the decision for you. The resorts understand this at a molecular level. They’re designed so the pool is the gravitational center and everything else orbits around it. You wake up, you go to the pool. You eat lunch at the pool. You have drinks at the pool. You leave the pool only to shower, nap, and return to the pool. The desert has imposed a lifestyle and the lifestyle is horizontal and wet and I was all the way in.

Spent two days mostly submerged, reading and drinking things with a lot of ice and talking to strangers in the water who were dealing with the exact same situation. There’s an easy sociability to pool culture that I appreciated — the shared circumstance of being partially underwater in 112-degree heat creates an instant community. A guy from Chicago told me about his favorite taco place in Pilsen. A couple from Toronto walked me through the Canadian healthcare system with more patience than I deserved. A woman from Phoenix said 112 was “not that bad, honestly” and I chose to believe her because the alternative was too much to process.

Mountains and Date Shakes

The San Jacinto Mountains rise directly behind Palm Springs like a wall — 10,000 feet of granite going straight up from the desert floor. One of the most dramatic elevation changes in North America, and from town the mountains look close enough to touch. The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway runs from the desert floor to the mountain station in about ten minutes, a temperature drop of thirty or forty degrees that’s apparently like teleportation. I didn’t take it — wait was long, and I was in full desert-surrender mode — but I could see the tram cars gliding up the cliff face from the pool, which I decided was good enough. Proximity counts for something.

What I did do was eat. Palm Springs has a genuinely excellent food scene for a city its size, and I made the most of it. Date shakes first — the signature drink of the Coachella Valley, thick and sweet, made from the dates grown on the palms that give the city half its name. Desert cocktails with prickly pear and agave. A taco truck that only operated after dark, once the temperature dropped to a balmy 95 and people emerged from their air-conditioned spaces like desert creatures after sundown. I went back twice.

The food after dark in Palm Springs has its own energy — you’ve survived the day, the night is warm but survivable, and everyone eating outside has that post-desert-heat looseness that makes conversations easy and the food taste better than it might otherwise. I don’t know how to explain this except that I spent a lot of evenings in the desert eating outside and I was happier than I expected to be.

Desert Quiet

On my last evening, I sat outside as the sun went down and the temperature became something a human could survive without water immediately at hand. Sky turned orange, then pink, then purple, then a deep indigo that seemed to have actual weight. Mountains went black against the sunset. Stars started appearing — more than I’d seen since Crater Lake, because the desert doesn’t waste light on anything that isn’t necessary.

After weeks of cities and forests and coastline and train stations and highway rest stops, the desert was genuinely different from everything else. Sparse where everything had been lush. Still where everything had been moving. Hot where everything had been temperate. And quiet — genuinely, deeply quiet — in a way that felt almost deliberate, like the landscape had decided something.

The desert doesn’t try to impress you. It doesn’t perform. It just exists, ancient and patient, and if you sit still long enough you start to feel some of that patience move into you. I don’t know how else to describe what it does. It just does it.

I sat there until the stars were fully out and the pool lights were the brightest thing in the valley. Tomorrow I’d board the Sunset Limited and head east — back toward humidity and green and eventually home. But right then I was in the desert, in a place that had welcomed people like me for decades before it was fashionable to do so, and the night was warm and the sky was enormous and I was in no hurry at all.