We also notice how resilient Puerto Ricans are as they wait patiently for the return of the tourism dollars – the heft of the gay community’s “pink dollar” included.
Money starts to fly out of my wallet – we tip big and spend fast, but never quite as quickly as when I spy a slick, black baseball cap with a simple rainbow-flag patch in a shop window. It only takes a day or two on this Caribbean island of 3.3 million to grasp how much it’s still hurting. While the beach itself still has the same blue waters and golden sand, the skyline is much different: an old condo gone, a new one in its place a boutique hotel rebuilt and renamed what was once a cool beach club, now just an empty shell. We’ve been to this gay stretch of Condado Beach before – before three hurricanes, a series of earthquakes and a pandemic crushed Puerto Rico and its capital, San Juan, both their infrastructure and their spirit.
