Refuge in The Dunes: How Saugatuck Became an Unlikely Queer Oasis

Queer legacy lives on in Michigan’s most storied resort town

Oval Beach1 Craig Watson — Vacationers relax on Oval Beach in Saugatuck. Photo: Craig Watson

George Elkind

Published: July 23, 2025 | Last Updated: July 23, 2025

For many queer Michiganders, Saugatuck-Douglas is a space they’ve felt free to take for granted, whether they’ve been or not.

A small, upscale oasis of relaxed and open queer expression on Michigan’s conservative-leaning west coast, the pair of neighboring towns no longer hosts only Grand Rapidians or Chicagoans looking for a change of pace. With its rolling hills, picturesque dunes and small, well-kept downtown, the area has grown into a well-known destination for queer vacationers, residents and business owners across the Midwest and even beyond.

But the reasons Saugatuck — founded as a shipbuilding and lumber town and a small port around 1830 before evolving into a farming community and, later, a tourist destination — became a queer hotspot aren’t nearly as clear as the reasons it’s remained one. Even for historian Eric Gollannek, executive director of the Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Society, researching and understanding the area’s queer history has involved reckoning with serious obstacles.

“It’s challenging talking about queer history,” he tells Pride Source. “You’re looking at the history of people at the margins, and the degree to which people are out, people are open about who they love, their expression — it’s tough to pin down. And it also changes over time: the language, [and] the way people express themselves and choose to identify.”

In a September 2021 exhibit at the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center, entitled “A Century of Progress: 100 Years of LGBTQ History in Saugatuck-Douglas,” Gollannek and his collaborators point to newspaper articles documenting — sometimes with concern — incidents of men sunbathing together on Saugatuck’s beaches as early as the 1890s. While it’s uncertain all these men would identify as gay today, the reports mirror a later history from at least as early as the 1950s to the ‘90s, in which a nearby stretch of private beach became a popular bathing and cruising spot. In both instances, the record suggests that the presence of dunes along the beaches allowed for some discretion, providing a kind of cover.

In the time between those early stirrings of queer activity and the mid-20th century, Gollannek says the area evolved from an industrial hub to an attractive arts and tourist destination, drawing an eclectic mix of middle- and upper-class visitors from cities like Chicago and Saint Louis by car and, often, steamship. Part of the area’s attraction lay in leisure, but for many longtime urbanites, it also lay in art, something he suggests made the area more inviting for queer folk.

Dunes Resort poster 1983 — A Dunes Resort poster from 1983.

“Artists were kind of fanning out from Chicago from art schools in Chicago, seeking out spots where they could paint ‘en plein air’ and be out in nature, really looking to the Midwestern landscape as a kind of vernacular inspiration,” says Gollannek.

“There’s this kind of free-thinking open-mindedness, this bohemian ideal, a desire to get away from the constraints of Victorian society and get closer to nature.”

This set of ideals, both an extension and retreat from big-city tastes and culture, helped set Saugatuck apart from other resort towns along Lake Michigan — and it soon erected institutions to reflect that. By 1909, the Big Pavilion (since burned down) was built as a massive dance hall along the water; in 1910, the Ox-Bow School of Art, a still-active wing of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was established in Saugatuck. There, as in Provincetown, Mass., old industrial spaces and a picturesque setting provided an affordable, inspiring setting for practicing art while still catering to the tastes and needs of former and visiting city-dwellers.

At the same time, a sense of seclusion and separation from city life allowed for certain freedoms in expression — something that may have appealed just as much to prominent queer practitioners.

Among these was Florence “Dannie” Ely Hunn, a renowned designer and architect who took up residence just south of Saugatuck in the 1930s and designed many cottages and homes over a thriving design career which stretched across nearly seven decades, from 1915 until her death in 1984. For most of her life, she lived with a partner, Mabel “Jims” Warren, with whom, historians say, she enjoyed a romantic relationship.

“It seems pretty clear that she would probably identify as a lesbian today,” says Gollannek, noting that her identity wasn’t wholly unique in the local community.

“We have a number of examples like that, looking back to the 1920s and ’30s, where we can point to women in relationships with some pretty strong evidence to say ‘these are same-sex couples.’”

While the area’s gay male history has tended to be more visible, according to Gollannek, queer women vacationed and moved into the area over the same spans men have, but tended to live out their identities in ways that were “more subtle” and “less conspicuous” throughout the area’s early history.

While queer women’s activities in the area included the establishment of businesses like Hunn’s from the 1930s, they extended, too, to the establishment of women-run queer campgrounds in the area much later, in the 1970s, and to ownership of many local businesses today.

Throughout the 1950s, queer culture found traction not only via Saugatuck’s beaches, which remained popular, but unofficially within business settings, as well. By 1961, the area was supporting businesses like the Blue Tempo, a bar that hosted a robust queer clientele, albeit grudgingly, alongside a sizable straight patronage.

“The owner was clearly bigoted. He’s definitely not a gay ally in the modern sense of the term,” says Gollannek.

“The Blue Tempo is a place where you [could] order a drink [as a queer person], and the bartender doesn’t pour it out on the bar and tell you to leave after you give him your money. And we have some stories of places in Saugatuck doing exactly that in the 1960s and 1970s.”

By 1981, one of Blue Tempo’s bartenders, Carl Jennings, along with his partner, Larry Gammons, sought to create a dedicated, openly queer resort space in Saugatuck, one actually owned and operated by queer people.

After being rebuffed repeatedly by Saugatuck’s leadership, the pair looked further south, to neighboring Douglas, and found a space called the Amity Motel along the Blue Star Highway. Amity had a liquor license, a pool, and a modest number of rooms at the time, and it was up for sale. Soon, the pair made their move.

“Before the [Douglas] city council even understood what Carl and Larry were gonna do, they got approval for a liquor license. And so, there was a little bit of a fight in the beginning,” recalls Mike Jones, who’s now a co-owner of the space, now known as The Dunes Resort.

The opposition was more than theoretical. Jones remembers finding a bullet hole in a window shortly after purchasing the Dunes in 1998.

“There was pushback because [at the time], even though there had always been a gay presence, there’s now a great big gay business right on the Blue Star. I think the town was afraid of what that meant. How that would impact tourism, how that would impact the overall society of Saugatuck and Douglas. [What was on] everybody’s minds in 1981 was that we’d be bringing a bunch of perverts to town.”

Over time, Jones said, this perception lessened in the minds of neighbors. Under Carl and Larry’s stewardship, The Dunes Resort had been marketed as an explicitly queer travel destination in queer publications around the country, bringing not just queer visibility but a more openly expressive queer culture to Saugatuck — a tradition Jones and his partners were eager to continue.

Over the ensuing years, the resort drew acts as varied as Eartha Kitt, the Weather Girls and Jack Wagner. The space also played host to cabaret acts, striptease, and all sorts of queer events. It was as though the Big Pavilion had been queered.

“What I think is interesting is how many people I come into contact with that met at the Dunes over the course of time,” says Jones, suggesting that the Dunes’ early presence as a queer hub helped clear a path for later queer businesses — spaces which today can operate openly as such, festooned year-round with Pride flags.

“We have a big community of people that live here that originally came [to the Dunes, and to Saugatuck-Douglas] for the first time back in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

And then they decided to buy a second home, they ultimately retired here or they decided to open shops here.”

The Dunes became such a local institution by the time Jones and his business partners purchased it that their first changes — aimed at modernizing the space (“to make it less Brady Bunch-looking,” quips Jones) and keeping it afloat financially — triggered a new sort of pushback, this time from within the queer community. Shifts like a restaurant closure, new sound systems and more contemporary acts that moved past a disco-heavy playlist, all divided certain diehard, longtime fans