Dunes gay resort

In a room of about 50 people, about a dozen guys are gathered in the middle, hugging and greeting one another. He inherited a legacy: a safe haven in the Midwest for gay resort-life that secretly rivals the historic Fire Island and Provincetown on the east coast.

Dunes Resort">Events | The : And it’s all for the LGBTQ+ community to enjoy!

This week Michigan Radio is resort a series called Community Vibe. The Blue Tempo burned down in By the early s 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.

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. Situated on 20 acres with 80 hotel rooms, cottages, and suites, the Dunes features a disco/bar complex with a high-energy dance floor, cabaret, game.

Back then, he was living near Grand Rapids with his wife and kids. 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.

One of those men is Bobby Carlson. One of the Country’s largest gay and dune resort, the Dunes Resort provides all the ingredients for a first-rate gay Michigan vacation under one roof, plus the Lake Michigan resort towns of Saugatuck and Douglas right outside the front door.

If you follow the Kalamazoo River about a mile from downtown Saugatuck, it dumps into Lake Michigan where you see miles and miles of dunes. In his spare time, Gay has been working on a project with the Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Society to tell the story of how the gay community came to be.

Carl Jennings started coming to the area in the s. Schruer and his partner run a Bed and Breakfast here. Jonathan Schruer has lived in Saugatuck for 11 years. He was still in the closet. Jennings says there were a lot of problems when the Dunes first opened.

It was very different than the religious and conservative communities of Zeeland and Holland, just north of town. The Dunes formed, however, with a word-of-mouth undercommons that fuels friends, friends of friends and others to commence a summer getaway community.

Matt Balmer runs the place. He lives downtown, which is lined with boutique and artsy mom and pop shops right on the water. 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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But Jennings says the gay population is much more accepted and integrated into the community these days. 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.

There were bomb threats and young men would try to break car windshields in the parking lot with baseball bats. The Dunes Resort is one of the largest LGBTQIA+ and gay resorts in the country, located between beautiful Saugatuck and Douglas, Michigan.

As it turns out, gay men and women have been coming to Saugatuck-Douglas for a long time. Up until five years ago, one of those dunes hosted a private nude beach.