The Beefcake and Gay Pride of Myrtle Beach

My sister and her husband go to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina almost every year, and this year they invited me and Bob.

But I declined; I've already been to South Carolina once this summer, and Myrtle Beach is not exactly on my bucket list.

It's full of tacky amusements, like a pre-War Coney Island:

1. A wax museum
2. Ripley's Believe it or Not
3. A Medieval-themed dinner theater
4. A Hard Rock Cafe.
5. A tacky boardwalk

6. A Ferris wheel.

This gets 14 million visitors annually?

Harbinger of the end of civilization: the Metropolitan Museum of Art only gets 7 million.

Besides, it's surrounded by South Carolina.






Of course, it's a beach, and beaches have men in swimsuits.

But they'll probably be surrounded by a woman and children.














Or a lot of women




Or a lot of children.







There are about a dozen high schools and colleges in the vicinity, including Carolina Forest, Myrtle Beach (with its motto "We go hard at Myrtle Beach"), Socastee, two Catholic, one Jewish, and the Calvary Christian School for the fundamentalists.

The Christian School seems to take them a little younger than high school age, though.













There's some attention to diversity in town.  Max Wolff, who has Down's Syndrome, was on the swim team at St. James High School.  He graduated in 2017.  In July 2018 he won two silver medals in swimming at the Special Olympics (missing the gold on a technicality).

And Myrtle Beach is the gayest city in South Carolina, if that's a draw, with gay rights protections and 12 gay couples per 1000 households, or 1% of the population, not counting the singles.









In June 2018 Myrtle Beach held its annual LGBTQ Pride Festival, featuring a series of expensive parties entitled "What happens on the beach, stays on the beach."

Sounds closeted.

If this is LGBTQ Pride, I'll take vanilla.