YOUR EX’s Oliver Hall finds California’s queer oasis still knows how to make gay travellers feel right at home.
Palm Springs has a way of slowing your pulse before you have even unpacked. The mountains sit around the city like a painted backdrop. The street lighting is low, and the town feels warm and unhurried. After the relentless sprawl of Los Angeles and the high-gloss chaos of Vegas, arriving in Palm Springs feels like stepping into a retreat.
This is a city long associated with Hollywood escape, mid-century modern architecture and gay men seeking mental and physical rejuvenation. Movie stars once fled here to loosen their ties away from the studio system. Decades later, Palm Springs still carries that same promise of escape, only now that comes with men-only resorts, supper clubs, mineral spas and a queer nightlife strip where nobody seems interested in pretending to be younger than they are.
Our base is Descanso Resort (@descansops), a stylish men’s resort with a relaxed Hollywood Moderne feel. Our room is spacious and comfortable, with a kind of desert-chalet ease that encourages immediate unpacking, then just as quickly abandoning all ambition. The staff are superb from the start, the sort who make every request feel like no trouble at all.
Descanso understands the art of staying put. Breakfast and lunch are included, with sandwiches and salads served poolside, and a 24-hour snack room keeps guests supplied with fruit, soft drinks, tea, coffee and home-baked cookies. The pool glints behind the palms. The hot tub sits dangerously close to our room. By evening, we find ourselves drawn to the fire pit, where the friendly residents gather and share stories.
Palm Springs rewards this kind of surrender. There are plenty of things to do, of course, but the city’s real luxury is how little pressure it puts on you to do them quickly.
Dinner at Eight4Nine (eight4nine.com), in the Uptown Design District, offers our first taste of the city’s see-and-be-seen dining scene. The dining room is stylish and slightly cavernous, somewhere between restaurant, gallery and high-end furniture showroom. Cocktails arrive in bright desert colours, followed by moreish dishes including asparagus bisque, smoked niçoise, miso-marinated sea bass and a s’mores-style chocolate fondue with homemade marshmallows. Between these polished plates and people-watching, dinner in Palm Springs feels like a feast for both the eyes and the taste buds.
Afterwards, we wander the Arenas District, the city’s compact queer nightlife hub. On this midweek night, it is more mellow than manic, but the bars, patios and shopfronts still have plenty of men drifting between them with the calm confidence of people who know exactly where they are. Chill Bar, Hunters, Quadz, Streetbar and Blackbook are all within a minute’s walk of each other, meaning a night out can be as ambitious or as lazy as your shoes allow.
The following day belongs to The Spa at Séc-he (thespaatseche.com), and it becomes one of the trip’s defining experiences. Built around the hot mineral spring waters of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the spa is vast, immaculate and deeply calming. Before our massages, we each take a private mineral bath, then wander through the facilities in a euphoric daze.
There are dark relaxation rooms with vibration therapy, zero-gravity chairs, a selection of pristine hot pools and quiet lounges where you can sip, flick through magazines and slowly forget what day it is. The men’s changing rooms are huge and loaded with amenities, and make you realise how often spas treat male guests as an afterthought. After experiencing The Spa’s ‘The Back of Body Massage’, we leave convinced this is truly a temple dedicated to unwinding.
That evening, Palm Springs gives us glamour.
The Purple Room Supper Club (purpleroompalmsprings.com) sits tucked inside Club Trinidad Resort, and once inside, the room glows with Rat Pack nostalgia. Dinner, cocktails, low lighting and a stage close enough to see every raised eyebrow. Rose Mallett, a jazz singer who came to prominence during her association with Marvin Gaye, is taking to the stage, and she is extraordinary. In her 80s, sipping a raspberry lemon drop between songs, she sings standards including “Summertime” with the ease of someone who has long stopped needing to prove anything.
There is something moving about watching a performer still so alive in the work. No brittle reach for relevance, just command, humour and pleasure. Palm Springs is good at that: letting glamour age without dimming it.
Before leaving town, we make time for Cheeky’s (cheekysps.com), the brunch institution famous for its bacon flight. It is lively, bright and full of people beginning the day with admirable commitment to indulgence. We get ours to go, a line-up of bacon variations including jalapeño, wood-smoked and maple, plus iced coffee for the road. It is exactly the kind of breakfast that makes leaving feel foolish.
Upon our exit, we visit the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (pstramway.com), one of the city’s great spectacles and a stunning final farewell. The rotating climb takes you from desert floor to alpine chill, rising above Chino Canyon towards Mt San Jacinto State Park. In around ten minutes, the temperature drops, the valley opens beneath you and Palm Springs suddenly looks like a toy town arranged under an enormous sky. It remains one of the essential things to do here.
By the time we leave, the city has worked its quiet trick. We are softer, slower and already negotiating how soon we can come back. Palm Springs may be famous for desert music festivals and poolside pleasures, but its real gift is permission: to pause, be spoiled and rediscover the bliss of giving in to the moment.
The YOUR EX team were guests of Visit Greater Palm Springs. For more information, head to visitgreaterpalmsprings.com and follow @VisitGreaterPS. Book your flights at united.com.
