What Route 66 revealed about queer history at California’s end of the road

At the western edge of Route 66, Santa Monica Boulevard can feel like a celebration in motion: rainbow signage, crowded bars and a nightlife scene that seems to promise queer belonging at the end of the Mother Road. But after a month tracing LGBTQ+ history along the route, Alysse Dalessandro’s conclusion is more complicated than that first impression.

The California stretch of the iconic highway, she writes, sits within a larger history of travel, survival and visibility that reaches back well before the road became a nostalgic symbol of midcentury Americana. Along the way, she found stories that were documented, hinted at or still waiting to be uncovered.

Desert crossings and early traces

Dalessandro’s trip into California began in Needles, where the heat reached 120 degrees and the desert still felt far removed from any coastal image of the state. At the Needles Regional Museum, she encountered exhibits tied to the El Garces Harvey House, one of the last remaining buildings that once served Fred Harvey restaurant and hotel guests on the Santa Fe Railway.

That connection mattered because Route 66 often ran alongside railroad lines through the Southwest, creating an overlap between rail travel and the highway’s early path. It was in that landscape that she began looking for evidence of queer travelers who may have passed through before the route became part of the American road trip myth.

An answer came through the lives of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willa Cather and her life partner, Edith Lewis. According to Garrett Peck, author of The Bright Edges of the World: Willa Cather and Her Archbishop, the pair traveled together through the Southwest in the 1920s and often stayed and dined at Harvey Houses. Cather and Lewis lived together in New York City’s West Village from 1909, and Lewis joined Cather’s Southwest travel in 1915, including a 1925 trip to Santa Fe.

“Lewis was often mistaken as Cather’s secretary,” Peck said. “In fact, Lewis couldn’t even type. And of course, the two women, while they’re traveling, made no effort to correct other people.”

Dalessandro describes reading that history while also thinking about how she had protected herself on the trip as a solo queer traveler, including by staying at Travel Proud-certified properties and keeping more visibly queer clothing packed away.

Archives, visibility and community memory

At the Goffs Schoolhouse Museum, she found a Pride flag on the front porch and a museum archive maintained by the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association. Museum director Laura Misajet showed her the crumbled roadway from the original 1926-31 alignment of Route 66.

The archives did not yet contain documented LGBTQ+ history, but Misajet said those stories may still surface in the collection. For Dalessandro, that possibility underscored how much queer history along Route 66 remains hidden in plain sight.

The journey west then became more personal when her wife arrived in California. In Pasadena and West Hollywood, Dalessandro describes a shift: hand-holding felt easy, and community resources were visible enough to guide where they ate, stayed and spent money.

At the California African American Museum, she visited Free and Queer: Black Californian Roots of Gay Liberation, where she learned about Pauli Murray, who became California’s first Black deputy attorney general in 1946 and challenged discrimination in employment and housing in Los Angeles.

Nearby, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives preserves more than 12,000 pieces of lesbian history. Executive Director Kymn Goldstein was in the early stages of a digital mapping project charting businesses, gathering places and community spaces along this stretch of the Mother Road, including the former lesbian bars the Normandie Room and Palms.

“When people think about Americana, they don’t think about us,” Goldstein said. “They think about the ’50s road trip, a family of four in a car, but we were in cars, traveling across the country.”

On the other side of the park, West Hollywood’s new AIDS Monument brings another layer of remembrance into view. Tony Valenzuela, executive director of the ONE Institute, said the monument’s San Vicente Boulevard location, less than a quarter-mile from historic Route 66, was deliberately chosen for visibility.

“Visibility was a huge part of the protests,” Valenzuela said. “Also, you can’t change hearts and minds, and you can’t win a movement without being visible.”

As the bronze pillars lit up one by one, Dalessandro says the moment felt like a vigil and a reminder that public memory expands when people refuse to carry it alone.

The road home, and what remained visible

The return trip east, nearly 2,000 miles, took Dalessandro and her wife through places where visibility could feel ordinary and others where it felt precarious. At Grand Canyon National Park, they rode with Pink Jeep and noted the work of lesbian architect Mary Colter, whose designs — Hopi House, Hermit’s Rest, Lookout Studio and Desert View Watchtower — still stand in the park.

In Amarillo, the mood changed at Cadillac Ranch. Dalessandro and her wife, who uses she/they pronouns interchangeably, painted over a Bible verse and added a rainbow before a teenage boy painted the verse back over while his family cheered. Later, at 806, they found a bathroom graffiti message that read, “Trust no gods.”

Oklahoma City brought relief. At Frankie’s, a lesbian bar, they were greeted with a neon “Welcome Home” sign and hugs from regulars. They spent the night at the Skirvin, a historic hotel recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Dalessandro says the contrast between Amarillo and Oklahoma City made one point clear: Route 66 cannot be reduced to a single nostalgic image. It has held fear and belonging, Bible verses and Pride flags, unease and comfort, sometimes within the same day’s drive.

Making room for the next generation

In the final stretch of the trip, the focus shifted from recovery of the past to the people carrying it forward. Albuquerque drag queen Vanessa Patricks told Dalessandro, “if you don’t feel like there’s space, make space.”

She also spoke with 18-year-old Ayzia Bridges, whose mother, makeup artist Danielle Bridges, applied gender-affirming makeup before the interview. Asked what queer elders should know, Ayzia said:

“I think they fought a lot to set the base for us. And I think it puts a lot of weight on our shoulders to follow in their footsteps. But in the most respectful way, I don’t wanna follow in their footsteps. I want to see how far we can go.”

For Dalessandro, that answer captured the larger lesson of the journey: the road’s queer history is still incomplete, but it is not absent. Much of it remains in archives and memories waiting to be found, and much of it is being made now by people who refuse to let their stories disappear.

Visit California, Hilton and Booking.com provided support for the trip. Dalessandro says all views and opinions are her own.