Don Barrett (aka DBs travels)'s photos

The Ace hotel, very popular and markets to hipsters. It closed this week, not enough customers to warrant staying open.

Something to break the dismal Coronavirus drumbeat... Very popular in the Palm Springs area are large, metal, brightly-colored representations of animals (mostly pets). Many of the sculptures (possibly all) are by Karen and Tony Barone (link below). When I first saw these sculptures around the Palm Springs Animal Shelter, I thought them interesting. But, like one local leader said when some new ones were proposed for a fire station – there’s too many. This dog is in the front yard of a home. Source: baroneart.com/sculpture-tour

More storage of rental cars, in another part of the aiport.

More storage of rental cars, in another part of the aiport.

Something to break the dismal Coronavirus drumbeat... Very popular in the Palm Springs area are large, metal, brightly-colored representations of animals (mostly pets). Many of the sculptures (possibly all) are by Karen and Tony Barone (link below). When I first saw these sculptures around the Palm Springs Animal Shelter, I thought them interesting. But, like one local leader said when some new ones were proposed for a fire station – there’s too many. This cat is in the front yard of a home. Source: baroneart.com/sculpture-tour

Though you have to look close to see it, the United jet is not just waiting for access to the terminals – its engines are off and it is marked off with orange pylons. There are two jets at the terminal, both American (one you can barely see, it’s on the left side of the picture.) We were around the airport for about 30 minutes and the only air traffic was a private jet that landed. A friend flew to Denver on Monday on a United flight I’ve taken a number of times and it’s usually close full – she said there were 5 passengers.

Well, the plane’s demise is not due to the loss of tourism. The Fire Department’s training center is near here and I’ve always assumed this was used in training, but obviously its not used for that at the moment.

One readily visible marker of the impact of the virus on the Palm Springs economy is the masses of unused rental cars parked around the airport and in various other places in the valley. They seem to be parked in every available space. Why so many cars? February to May is the height of our tourist season. Besides just pleasant weather and nearby desert parks, this is also the time of major tennis and golf events, as well as the Coachella Music festival events -- all drawing 100,000’s of visitors each week. It’s a lot of unused rental cars, which means there’s also massive amounts of vacant resort (and AIRBNB) rooms, empty restaurants, closed bars, etc. AND, a huge number of unemployed service workers. …… Curious about the plane in the center? See later picture.

Palm Springs Swim Center, usually busy this time of year when the mid-day temperatures are comfortable. Pools were closed by SiP (Shelter in Place) rules.

From the park where we often picnic – don’t bother to zoom in, there is no one else in this section of the park. In the distance is Palm Springs stadium, home of Palm Springs POWER Baseball, of which I know nothing about :)

Most of the fast food chains in Palm Springs appear to be open and serving food to go. Since the only place to eat is at home or in a local park, a friend and I are using Subway a lot to pick up a sandwich and drink. They have a sign on the door saying ‘no more than 6 customers’, but the most we’ve encountered was 3 others besides us. The Starbucks next to it is only open as a drive-thru (the cars in line on the right of the building); there’s also a Carl’s Jr and a Dominos in the center that are open for takeout. None of the fast food places seem to have much business.

Grocery store near my house, on the 11th day of “shelter in place” (SiP). Though this looks busy, it is rather quiet for what would be the height of our tourist season. Talking with one of the clerks that I know, she said the store self-monitors how many shoppers are in it. She said they try to keep it around 50, when it gets around 70 they put guards at the door and limit entry. The first time I went after SiP was instituted, there was a line of about 20 people waiting to get in (all standing at least 6’ apart.) For about the first week of SiP, there were a fair number of shelves empty, but distribution seems to be working okay now with the exception of toilet paper and cleaning supplies, which are tight. Though health officials are recommending limiting shopping trips so as to limit exposure to the virus, there is currently no actual limit. One of the reasons the parking lot is as busy as it is, is that there is also a large drug store in the shopping center and multiple restaurants that are serving ‘takeour’ food (adjacent photo). We clearly aren’t facing the limits that many in Europe are facing. Compared to the rest of the U.S., I don’t know. I get multiple new sources, but none are talking about what conditions are like in daily life for those that are healthy.

Jumping away from town and campus, there were basically two ‘swimming holes’ relatively near town – Griffy Lake (this picture) and the abandoned quarries. Griffy Lake (actually a reservoir) was for many years the main source of drinking water for Bloomington, though it was replaced by two larger lakes south of town in the 60’s. Griffy is surrounded by a nature preserve that was there in the early 80’s, but largely untended. Back in those days it was a relatively wide open space, with people wandering along the lake and setting up to swim anywhere – and nude sun bathing in some of the more distant areas. Luckily, because the campus was largely empty in the summer, it was never crowded. I don’t know when the city started exerting more control over the lake, but now they have a canoe rental and I didn’t see people along the shores. More interesting, though far more dangerous, was various flooded abandoned limestone quarries around town. These were informal swimming places, often past worn out ‘no trespassing’ signs, where there was nothing to tell you what dangers you were diving into or how far down the bottom was. I enjoyed them, but having always been wary of swimming in places where I couldn’t touch bottom, I spent less time swimming and more time watching. My hesitancy turned out to be fortunate – around the time I left Bloomington was when it was discovered that many of the quarries had old electrical transformers dumped in them, leaking mercury into the water. I tried to photograph one of the quarries we had used on this trip, but couldn’t get near one. I suspect they’re all fenced now, and with people no longer driving up to their edges, you can’t see them due to surrounding trees.

On the south side of campus, in the middle of fraternity/sorority row, the Institute for Social Research. I believe the building started out as a fraternity or sorority but had been converted into office and classroom space long before I arrived at IU. It was the site for the research and other scholarship activities of many of the faculty, as well as the site for the offices of graduate students who either worked on those projects or taught (I did both). As an older building, it had steam heat with the old-fashioned radiators that were either way too hot or cold. I taught a couple of classes in the building and the old steam heat was a problem – I’m allergic to strong odors and the heat would get so excessive that I’d have to ask students wearing strong perfumes or colognes to move to the back of the room, which is an awkward request! There were two other unforgettable experiences in that building, one particularly sad, one just remarkable. First the sad one – I was working one night on writing a paper on the computer when the electricity suddenly shut down. Of course I was angry at what I had lost (early computer, not as secure at backing up as now days), and I blamed the outage on some fraternity party creating some overload (that happened). Later, though, we found out that the power outage was due to a suicide. Re the remarkable event. I was one of the regular ‘hotline operators’ for the gay and lesbian hotline for south central Indiana (I don’t remember the official name of the hotline). The line could be called for free from anywhere in a broad area that went from Bloomington south to the Ohio River. We could transfer the hotline to some convenient location, so the evenings that I worked it, I’d go to my office to work while waiting for calls. The calls we got were a mix of frustrating. Rewarding, and just interesting. Somehow people (both men and women) in rural areas 60 to 100 miles away would find our number and call with questions that would now sound silly (“what’s a gay”) or impossible to answer (“I’m on a farm, nobody in my family knows I’m questioning, how I can I figure out if I’m gay”) – surprisingly, we got very few harassment calls. We did, though, get a surprising number of calls from rural folk who had figured most everything out and just wanted some detail or just to talk. The calls I remember most clearly were from a man who called repeatedly to talk about opera gloves – where he could get some, what they felt like when he wore them. Many of us who worked the lines got the calls (though he mainly wanted to talk with the men who worked the lines) and the conversations could go up to our 15 minute limit for calls. We talked about his calls in our monthly meetings and decided that he probably just needed to talk, since none of us could provide any answers. His calls, and many similar calls, were good lessons in the value of simple listening.

Of course there was a favorite bar/restaurant for Sociology grad students (and the younger faculty) – Bear’s Place, only a short walk from ISR (previous picture). I was surprised to see it was still there (it originally opened in 1972) and pretty much looked like it did when I was there in the early 80’s. Thinking back, I can’t believe the amount we drank and the number of burgers we ate while mixing arguments about Marx or Goffman with discussions of Dallas (the TV show) or some other show, complaints about faculty expectations, and tales of personal romantic woes…..

Back to campus, and my main ‘home’ as a graduate student. There were basically two on-campus ‘homes’ for Sociology graduate students, Ballantine Hall and the Institute for Social Research (later picture). Ballantine Hall was the location of the Sociology department, the site of all of the faculty offices, and the site for very many of the classes (both that we took and that we taught). Ballentine Hall, compared to many other buildings on campus, was relatively dreadful. At 10 stories it is the tallest building on campus and, when it was completed in 1959, the largest academic building in the world. It was just classrooms and offices, so there weren’t any open spaces to break up the sense of dull repetition. Despite its size and interior blandness, its layout was such that it was easy to navigate – except when the elevators didn’t work. Like much of campus, it’s hard to get a good picture of the building, and that was made worse on this trip by some major refurbishing that was happening. The picture link below has a good winter picture of it. Putting aside the comments on the building, now’s a good time to say a few things about my time in Sociology there. The first thing to address is how I, an openly gay man living in what was then the ‘gay mecca’ of San Francisco, ended up at IU. For very many years I had a love/hate relationship to gay life in SF, I liked the ability to be quite open, but was frustrated by both the economics of trying to afford to live in SF and by a gay culture that had no interest in areas outside their neighborhood. In the late 70’s it was very hard to get a good job in SF, and so I decided to explore graduate school again (after an earlier attempt.) IU was the home of some of the faculty who did some of the earliest, positive, work on gay life, and was also a well-respected school with a diverse faculty that provided multiple angles for attacking the issues I was interested in – how class prejudice had an impact on the lives of working-class gays and lesbians. Though IU fit with much of what I was concerned with academically, I was worried about moving to a small Midwestern town after having been out and spending long periods in large coastal cities (Manhattan, Boston and SF) for a number of years. I was already in my early 30’s, and not willing to go back to hiding my sexuality. So, I wrote a personal letter to the department, they gave it to a grad student (non-gay) who had moved to IU from the LA area (he became a long-term friend), and he responded with an invitation to visit. I went, felt very welcomed, and decided on IU. Life there, as both an older graduate student and as an openly gay man, was generally good. I went to Bloomington with a friend and we were quickly welcomed into the community of sociology graduate students, and I was treated no differently by faculty (with a couple of exceptions). Surprisingly, though it felt like my relationships with the department were smooth and welcoming, many years after I left I learned that many following students characterized me as a ground-breaker in terms of making the department comfortable for gay students. Since I never felt like I was blazing new territory, I’m not quite sure how that reputation came to be. Like in Sociology, Bloomington itself was a surprisingly welcoming community of lesbians and gay men. Though it was quickly clear that Bloomington was something special in a state that was more conservative, it also became clear over time that, though the state was conservative and even often disapproving, there was a history of tolerance that meant that we seldom felt a sense of physical danger. As I said with the first Bloomington photo, it was an interesting experience being there. Given the divides that are happening in the country now (in 2019), it might be helpful if we got out of our enclaves more often, to see that we’re not as different as we often believe. ….. One more important note about IU and Bloomington. I left Bloomington early, after almost all of my Sociology graduate course work was completed, but nowhere near the point of completing my PhD. Why? Part of the reason was the future job market. From what I could see in the mid-80’s, if I finished my PhD in the next couple of years, I would end up having to apply for jobs in parts of the country that were far away from the urban centers where gay life was easier (e.g., in South Dakota). Also, we were at that time at the height of the AIDS crisis AND in the middle of the Reagan presidency, a time when anti-gay fever (due to both AIDS and Reagan’s politics) was sharply increasing across the country (there were even some national discussions of quarantining gays.) It was before gay men could know who would be next with AIDS, so the value of a PhD was questionable when live expectancy was uncertain – that uncertainty, combined with the risk of having to move to a potentially unwelcoming small town in a rural state, was not favorable. I hoped that my new skills could be of some use re AIDS, so I moved back to a town I knew, Boston and then later back to SF. When the prospects of early death became less likely, I decided to finish my PhD. With strong help from faculty at IU and support from my work environment in SF, I finished my PhD in ‘92. History: bloomingpedia.org/wiki/Ballantine_Hall Picture: bloomingpedia.org/w/images/6/65/Ballantine.jpg

What looks to be a typical street scene, and sort of is. It’s actually reflective of nearby residential streets, but this is directly across the street from the student union and what you see here are homes that have been converted into the offices of various organizations, plus there’s a few churches scattered in here. The building on the left side of the picture with two white flower pots on the steps is now the official LGBTQ center.

One of the many places I lived in Bloomington, this with some of the more interesting background. I had a friend who always managed to somehow make good connections with various bureaucrats, and so he managed to rent this from the university. It was a large and rather elegant house that had been some administrators home but, at that time, was simply being held by the university for later use. We shared the entire house, with my friend and his girl friend having a bedroom on the first floor and me on the top floor. Since it was owned by the university, we didn’t have to worry about much of the upkeep other than snow removal. It’s size worked perfectly – I was a leader of the small gay group and we could have meetings in the living room along with potlucks in the dining room. My friend who rented the place usually left town with his girlfriend over the holidays, so another friend and I organized Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner for other gays who had nowhere else to go. Besides being an easy one block walk to the student union, it was also an easy walk to the gay bar and back through the cruising area around the library, so an ideal location... One fun point – it was also the location for the letter writing campaign we would do, which led to Indiana Governor Bowen claiming that, as far as he knew, there were only ‘13 homosexuals in Indiana and they all live in Bloomington’.