As I mentioned yesterday in my recap/review of the opening of Looking's second season, the new episodes get off to a fun start with a trip up north to the Russian River — a longtime escape for SF LGBT folk that isn't too familiar to anyone in the rest of the country. Everybody's heard of Provincetown and Fire Island and Palm Springs, but only Bay Area people know about the ragtag, homespun, still sort of hippie areas of Guerneville and Armstrong National Forest, where Episode One of the new season was shot.

There are always going to be various explanations for how a town evolves, but in HBO's podcast about the show, called "Talking," locations manager Matthew Riutta explains pretty simply how some floods in the middle of the last century wiped out what was formerly a middle class resort for all stripes in and around Guerneville, and the gays basically took it over in the 1970s. They don't get into the very basic problem of SF weather in the summer, and how Guerneville's location in the redwoods provides both a warm little enclave protected from ocean winds in the daytime, combined with mild Bay Area temperatures at night given the proximity to the ocean.

Anyway, listen to Riutta talk about the Russian River along with Looking creator Michael Lannan, director Andrew Haigh, and Vanity Fair columnist Richard Lawson.

[h/t: Out Traveler]