Lost river gay

Morning person or night owl? Butch or femme? Mountain person or beach lover? Of course, life is never totally black and white, but for many D.C.-area LGBT folks, the most popular second-home spots come down to where you like to use either your downtime or your retirement years.

Lost River, W.Va., an unincorporated community in West Virginia’s Hardy County along Route 259, is about a two-hour control from Washington and has become a sort of unofficial rural gay area in recent years. Lgbtq+ life in Rehoboth Beach, Del., of course, is well established. When D.C. gays proceed to the beach, more often than not, it’s to Rehoboth. Traffic can be dicey, especially on Friday and Sunday evenings in the summer, but it’s about a two-and-a-half-hour/120-mile drive from Washington.

We asked locals why they chose one or the other.

A gay retreat in West Virginia

You don’t expect to detect a gay haven in the backwoods of West Virginia, said Laura Moser in The Recent York Times. But the tiny group of Lost River is “definitively the backwoods,” and it’s slowly evolving into “a sort of Provincetown on the Potomac”—a getaway for gay weekenders from Washington, D.C., about two hours away. “The beauty of Lost River, beyond its rolling lush hills and unmistakable streams snaking through hardwood forests, is its surprising cosmopolitanism.” The area’s first gay tourists were attracted by the Guesthouse Lost River, a small upscale lodge that started advertising in male lover publications in the early 1980s. Same-sex attracted and lesbian couples have since been major contributors to the local economy, creating the Confused River Farmers Market and, just this year, the upscale Lost River Trading Post. Thanks to the area’s “live and let live” attitude, more and more same-sex couples are choosing Missing River for their wedding receptions.

Western Tennessee’s big gamble