“It appears that the Napa Valley got all the best marketers in California,” the Australian blog the Boutique Adventurer quipped upon visiting Livermore a few years ago. And Livermore’s grape-growing business, which SFGate once described as “an appellation from which wineries tried to hide,” proudly added over 50 well-respected vintners, like Steven Kent Winery, McGrail Vineyards, and Nottingham Cellars. In my decades-long absence, the worn-out Vine Cinema where I watched Top Gun with my Vans sticking to the gunky floor got a shiny new marquee and added an “Alehouse.” Instead of blockbusters, it’s now transformed itself into the sort of bona fide art house I used to have to go to Berkeley or San Francisco to enjoy. Homecoming queen court royalty of the Livermore High School Cowboys, I saw little of my budding gay self represented in the snoozy town I couldn’t wait to escape.
Lowermore schoo lzip movie#
What I left in my dust when I moved away in 1988 was one crumbling movie theater and two dowdy wineries established in 1883, back when Livermore Valley was California’s leading wine region. This essay was adapted from the Alta newsletter, delivered every Thursday. And now I’m seeing the hokey, sometimes embarrassing Northern California cowboy town of my closeted queer youth with new eyes. While I was away sticking my nose up at it with youthful disdain, it went and got cool without me. Something weird happened recently to my hometown of Livermore, California.