[Ed’s note: Some language in this article might be offensive to some readers.]

There we were, huddled at a table at Paradise Piano Bar like a group of evil no-gooders meeting for one reason and one reason only.

Even in writing, I feel I have to whisper it, for we fear that the “I Love Ghetto Long Beach” bag-toting, fuck-off-and-die-LA homos from across the bar might die with their martinis clutched in their hands should we be too loud. And cautiously glancing over one of his shoulders, ensuring a server wouldn’t pass by in hearing, a comrade decided to just say it.

“We shouldn’t be afraid to bring WeHo here.”

There. He said it. We all said it. And we all agreed.

And before I hear the hyena-like, redundant and banal screams’n’cries that permeate even the least Long Beachey of Long Beach places, let me preface it with the fact that, under no circumstance, do we want to alter Long Beach’s aura and mimic the vacuity and vapidity that is WeHo. There are things that define Long Beach as Long Beach, even beyond the best pour in southern California, and for that reason, we should have more to offer than a dilapidated corridor that makes even my friends from Queens say, “Really?”

For some reason, the Long Beach-made phallus up our community’s arse is so stubborn that the idea of creating quality LB joints for queers to amass at somehow equates to us suddenly becoming tanbed gym rats where even the blackest guy in the room is only a mouth-opening away from a Ken doll.

As harsh as this is going to sound, my fellow Long Beachers: you can bring the Abbey (or any of the great bars like it) elsewhere and leave behind the $22 martinis, the awkward let-me-dry-your-hands-for-you-for-money bathroom attendant and talk of your Instagram followers totes hitting 1000. You can have Abbey-quality and get a stiff cocktail without raping your wallet, a good ol’ DIY urinal, and discussions about getting Jewels onto Drag Race or Bill Viola’s contributions to the Long Beach art scene or the need for craft cocktails in our neighborhood or the Center’s epic-ness or how MOLAA is an entirely underrated institution or…

Quality spaces does not equate to surface-level faces. The only way that the Broadway Corridor is going to turn into WeHo mentally is if you permit it—and from what I’ve gathered, we’ve been keeping those insipid, Satan-spawn Angelinos out well enough for several decades.

So now that we’ve put our Minute Men on the borders of LB and have secured the homeland, I think it’s about time we focus on our own and give Long Beachers a place that actually, for much lack of an eloquent phrase, looks pretty. I am talking things that, despite one’s taste preference for WeHo, one can’t argue are inherently bad things for a neighborhood: better lighting, more accessible and wider sidewalks, clearer crosswalks (perhaps mimic the awesomeness that are the rainbow crosswalks on Santa Monica or the stone crosswalks lining 7th?), better parkways, lamppost signage…

After all, are you honestly going to tell me that, if one were to remove the people and prices from the Santa Monica strip of WeHo, that you would still hate the place? You forever want to be at the darkness that is Broadway and Hermosa? Have some intellectual honesty here.

Now I’m not going to out my accompanying friends—designers, business folk, artists, city-go-getters—since they still need to work in this town but I’ll be the one to slap my face on it. I have written rants about the plasticity that is LA and my adoration for the divey goodness that is LB.

However, I am, as are my comrades, utterly tired of the ignored strip that is the so-called pride of our community. Ignored by the City in favor of continually dismal attempts to better Pine and the Pike instead of bettering a strip which is already filled with people. Ignored by councilmembers. Ignored by the very businesses who operate on it. Ignored by its own residents.

It’s time, people. As more young LGBTQ people choose to live here, as more Millenials open businesses here, it is time to relish our past but finally take a step forward. Towards quality. Towards beautification. Yes, towards those all-too-modern concepts that eschew irony and uphold that weird thing called aesthetics.