Like the first gay wave a century earlier, they have a place where they can escape from the city, relax and feel like they belong. We all know, come to Douglas, our beautiful four block town and come to Everyday People,” Carlson says.Ĭarlson says they all have second homes just down the road from each other here. We all converge after a whole long week of work. “We all come in from Chicago and Detroit. He says his crew is a bunch of busy professionals who live and work in the city. In a room of about 50 people, about a dozen guys are gathered in the middle, hugging and greeting one another. “Friday nights have been dubbed, not by me but by a lot of our guests, they dub it as Fri-GAY nights,” Balmer says. He says there’s always a large mix of people that dine at his restaurant, but says there’s also a large gay crowd that shows up on Friday nights. He’s a lifetime local and was Douglas’ first mayor. You can see that at play at Douglas’s Friday night watering hole-a restaurant called Everyday People.
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There were bomb threats and young men would try to break car windshields in the parking lot with baseball bats.īut Jennings says the gay population is much more accepted and integrated into the community these days. Jennings says there were a lot of problems when the Dunes first opened. The Dunes Resort is now touted as the largest gay resort in the Midwest, with around 80 rooms. So instead, Jennings and his partner drove across the river to Douglas and were able to open up a resort there. “They said over their dead bodies would we ever have a license,” Jennings says. By the early 1980s Jennings had come out to his family and he and his new partner wanted to start up a gay resort and bar in the area.īut the Saugatuck City Council wouldn’t grant them a liquor license. There wasn’t a gay bar in town for another decade after that. “Around two in the morning, when the bars would let out, there was a little hot dog stand on the corner, about a block or block and half away, and quite often there would be confrontations between gay persons and what I would refer to as maybe some redneck trouble makers,” Jennings says. But that doesn’t mean everyone got along. Jennings says The Blue Tempo ignored the law and the police chief didn’t enforce it. “We were lumped in with prostitutes and vagrants,” Schruer says. Schruer says back when Carl Jennings was bartending at The Blue Tempo, there was actually a law that said that you could not serve alcohol to homosexuals.
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Jonathan Schreur, the B&B owner, grew up there and says Saugatuck-Douglas was referred to as “sin city.”įrom the 1968 Michigan Liquor Control Act It was very different than the religious and conservative communities of Zeeland and Holland, just north of town.
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You had to be a straight person, or at least appear to be that way and then if you’re fortunate enough to find something like Saugatuck,” Jennings says, “It just felt warming and accepting.” “Back then you had to live and lead two lives. Jennings would escape to Saugatuck on the weekends to bartend at the de facto gay bar in town, called The Blue Tempo, under the guise that he was making more money for the family. “If you were known to be gay or something like that the police would harass you and want you to give them the names of anyone you knew that happened to be gay,” Jennings says. At that time Grand Rapids wasn’t a safe place for gay people. Back then, he was living near Grand Rapids with his wife and kids. Once Ox-Bow was established, the artsy community and Chicago urbanities were traveling to Saugatuck-Douglas and more gay people started hanging out at the dunes.Ĭarl Jennings started coming to the area in the 1960s. “A lot of people who attended Ox-Bow, a lot of the creative types maybe were gay men and women,” Schreur says. We don’t know if those naked men were necessarily gay, but Schreur says the gay population did start to take off around 1910 when the Art Institute of Chicago opened up a summer program in Saugatuck, called Ox-Bow.