“We are that little band the Future will celebrate!”
— Dale Jennings, “An Address to the Mattachine
Society Banquet Upon Receiving for ONE Magazine
The 1953 Achievement Award,” Tangents, Nov. 1953.
ON THE ELEVENTH NIGHT of February 1967, over 200 people from all walks of life—artists, teachers, factory workers, bankers, street cleaners, retired military men and women—filled the corner of Sunset and Sanborn in the heart of LA’s Silverlake district. Legal experts, clergymen, and local activists spoke on police brutality and homosexual rights while protestors waved signs demanding “No More Abuse of Our Rights and Dignity,” “Abolish Arbitrary Arrests,” and “Peace!” Across the street, nervous police clutched their batons while unmarked squad cars circled the protest like vultures.
The protesters were reacting to a bar raid that had happened at that very spot on New Year’s Eve in the Black Cat bar and New Faces bar (not to be confused with the San Francisco gay bar of the same name). Police raids of gay bars were common enough in LA at the time, but these raids had been especially brutal and humiliating for the patrons who were beaten and arrested that night.
“All over in the city,” wrote a reporter for the local gay newspaper Tangents, “homosexuals are determined that they will no longer ‘cop out’ to the lesser charge if they are arrested. And when someone else is arrested, they will come forward as a witness, even though police may bring pressure on their employers” (Kennedy, 2001). Two years before Stonewall, the faint pulse of the modern gay rights movement could be heard beating throughout the city of lost angels.
To ring in the new year, the popular New Faces bar decided to host a holiday costume contest. Around fifteen or twenty men showed up in elaborate drag, with wigs and make-up. According to one source, by ten p.m. the bar was packed. “There was laughter. The cash register jingled. But once the winner was chosen at 11:30, the crowd thinned.” Nearly everyone left to check out the new bar across the street, The Black Cat. Word had it that the Cat was decorated to the nines (Tangents, Jan. 1967).
According to Tangents, The Black Cat was happy and hopping. “There were colored balloons covering the ceiling … and three glittering Christmas trees.” When the New Faces crowd entered at around 11:30 pm, there were also police officers in plain clothes. The police were playing pool and drinking beer, fitting in until the time was right. When the clock struck midnight, the crowd yelled “Happy New Year!” The bartender pulled a string to release colorful balloons from the ceiling. The Rhythm Queens, a group of singers that had been hired for the night, belted out a jazzy version of “Auld Lang Syne.” The crowd toasted the New Year and some of the patrons allegedly kissed.
That’s when all hell broke loose. The undercover officers started beating and arresting people at will. One person was kneed so hard in the mid-section that “his bowels emptied,” according to Tangents. Police injured another person with a pool cue to the back of the head. When several people ran for cover to the New Faces bar, police followed them and raided that bar as well, beating one employee so badly his spleen ruptured.
The Organization
In his 1983 book on the history of the gay political struggle, John D’Emilo argued that “the movement’s history cannot be understood merely as a chronicle of how activists worked to mobilize masses of gay men and lesbians and to achieve a fixed agenda. Instead, the movement constitutes a phase, albeit a decisive one, of a much longer historical process through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority.” Within this historical process, gays and lesbians moved from considering themselves as isolated individuals and genetic freaks at the turn of the 1900’s to feeling as if they were part of a minority group in the 1950’s. This process crystallized after the Second World War, when many of the gay men and women who had fought in the war migrated to big cities, where they could be both homosexual and anonymous.
This was especially true of post-war Los Angeles. Since the city was one of the port cities during the War, the gay and lesbian community flourished there after it ended. The gay community was especially present in the bohemian Silverlake and Echo Park areas of the city, where the hills were alive with artists, writers, experimental filmmakers, and political radicals. One such radical, Harry Hay formed the country’s first gay political organization, the Mattachine Society, with four friends, Rudi Gernreich, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Dale Jennings, in the living room of his Silverlake home in November of 1950. The Mattachine formed to “pool what we know, to expose what we feel is wrong and to remind ourselves that we are mutually dependent members of the world’s largest minority” (ONE, Jan. 1953).
Mattachine echoed what many American homosexuals were already thinking at the time. In his 1951 landmark book, The Homosexual in America, Donald Webster Cory (a pseudonym) explained: “the homosexuals are a minority group, consisting of large numbers of people who belong, participate and are constantly aware of something which binds them to others and separates them from the larger stream of life.” Like Cory, the Mattachine believed that homosexuality was congenital, so you were born gay just as you might be born Chinese or blue-eyed. Cory had argued that “homosexuality is virtually as ineradicable as if it involved the color of one’s skin or the shape of one’s eyes.” It was from this conviction that the Mattachines concluded that prejudice against homosexuals is as unjust as prejudice against ethnic or racial minorities.
In 1953, several Mattachine members started another organization called ONE, which published a magazine and hosted homophile studies classes. Like Mattachine, ONE was dominated by gay men. One of the few female members, Flo Fleischman, frustrated by the absence of women, soon started one of the city’s first gay women’s groups. With her friend Betty Perdue, one of two women that she’d met at ONE, Flo took out an ad in The LA Free Press calling on “gay women, professionals, who want to form a group and get together on Sundays.” Fleischman reported in a 2005 interview with this writer that she received about forty replies: “We formed a group with no name, mostly school teachers. … We met at different people’s homes once a week.” Her group eventually joined forces with the San Francisco-based Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and became the Manhattan Beach chapter of DOB.
Some gay women continued to participate in organizations like ONE despite the rise of women’s consciousness raising groups. In the very first issue of ONE magazine in January 1953, for instance, Betty Perdue wrote a poem that expressed her feelings of unity with gay men and women. In “Proud and Unashamed,” she imagined a time when all gay people “might be proud and unashamed to bring our love out into the sunshine and proclaim to the world, ‘We love! We love!’”
When one of the Mattachine founders, Dale Jennings, was arrested for lewd conduct in a Los Angeles park in 1952, the group launched its first political action campaign against the legal system—and won. Organizers handed out fliers and put money jars in the gay bars across town to raise money for Jennings’ legal defense. The fliers they made are probably the first to politicize an individual’s arrest as a gay rights issue. Once in court, Jennings’ lawyer argued that homosexuality and lasciviousness are not one and the same and that it was because Jennings was a member of a minority group that he was unfairly targeted by police. He also argued that a person can’t be guilty of being a homosexual if this person is born a homosexual. After forty hours of jury deliberation, the judge stepped in and dismissed the case. Jennings became the first “out” homosexual to successfully defend himself in court.
Jennings explored the larger implications of his trial in the first issue of ONE magazine, just a few pages from Perdue’s poem, concluding with the following:
Were all homosexuals and bisexuals to unite militantly, unjust laws and corruption would crumble in short order and we, as a nation, could go on to meet the really important problems which face us. Were heterosexuals to realize that these violations of our rights threaten theirs equally, a vast reform might even come within our lifetime. This is no more a dream than trying to win a case after admitting homosexuality.
The very next year, when the Los Angeles postmaster refused to deliver the issue of ONE magazine devoted to homosexual marriage, ONE took the case to court. The organization suffered several defeats at the local level but persisted to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1958 that the publication was protected under the 14th Amendment and thereby freed all gay- and lesbian-themed magazines to travel through the U.S. mail.
Countercultural Currents
Beneath the city’s polished Hollywood image, Los Angeles endured the countercurrents of the 1960’s as much as any other city in the country. It was Los Angeles and not New York or San Francisco that made the cover of Time magazine in 1965 when President Johnson had to activate the National Guard to quell the riots in Watts. And it was Los Angeles, not Detroit or Chicago, that inspired Buffalo Springfield’s famous antiwar anthem, “For What It’s Worth,” after band members witnessed a violent riot break out between police and hippies in front of the rock-and-roll bars on the Sunset Strip in 1966.
A year later, it was Los Angeles all over again. The Black Cat and New Faces raids were just the latest in a string of police shakedowns of gay bars. Throughout the post-war period, the vice squad harassed gay bars as a matter of sheer habit. Fleisch-man remembers what happened to her friend Shirley:
Shirley used to dress like a man. I remember going down to Eighth and Vermont, where there was the If Club and The Open Door. They were dumps. Shirley was under the hood of the car … she was drinking a beer. And the cops came over and harassed her. … [W]hen she mouthed off they put her in Sybil Brand, the prison for women, just off the San Bernardino freeway. They put her in the “Big Daddy” … where they put the obvious gay women for 30 days. … She had to do dirty work like clean urine, sewage, the dirtiest of dirty jobs. She was really upset when she came out of there.
By the mid-1960’s, the systematic abuse of gay men and women by police had reached a boiling point, the result of a collision of two extremes. On the one hand, the government during the Cold War initiated a broad-based effort to expel homosexuals from government office and public life. Eisenhower’s infamous Executive Order 10450 legalized the firing of alleged homosexuals from government office while his campaign slogan, “Let’s Clean House,” translated on the local level to police chiefs working overtime to rid their city of “sexual perverts.” At the other extreme, the Counterculture was becoming more and more confrontational in its approach to social change. Along with the rest of the country, gay Americans watched as the Civil Rights Movement evolved from the polite marches in the 1950’s to the angry protests of the 60’s. The new mood was captured in the slogan “Black is beautiful,” which was later echoed by the GLBT movement in the slogan “Gay is good.” This shift, along with the rising antiwar movement on college campuses, fueled the growing radicalism of the gay movement as the 60’s wore on.
Gay stereotypes were also changing. As early as 1964, Life magazine ran a cover story titled “Homosexuality in America” that featured photographs taken in the San Francisco leather bar known as The Tool Box. These photos captured the changes in style and attitude taking place within the urban gay community at large. Here, the leather-clad muscleman was replacing the image of the limp-wristed pansy. The angry dyke was replacing the homely spinster.
However, this radicalization was not uniform and was in fact resisted in some quarters. After the success of Jennings’ trial, Mattachine increased its membership significantly, attracting a wider but conservative clientele. This base, fearful of government intervention, ousted founding members like Harry Hay, who had separatist ideas and ties to the Communist Party. The society’s philosophy during this time is summed up by the organization’s 1954 convention slogan, “Evolution, not revolution.” But many of the Mattachine’s founding members continued to speak their radical politics at social functions around town. In 1954, Dale Jennings spoke of fear and revolution at a Mattachine Society banquet: “Moderation is a form of fear,” he argued, comparing the homosexual cause to the American Revolution. “When we avoid action by pleading its imprudence we in our fear forget those most imprudent men at Valley Forge.” Jennings continued:
Before smiling away these grand comparisons, think for a moment how gigantic is the oppression under which we live. None has ever equaled it in completeness. We are dictated to in every facet of human behavior. Where we live, whom we shall have for friends, how we shall express that friendship, the color of our friends. … We shall not have physical satisfaction in any kind not approved by the courts of law, what we wear, how we wear it, how we move, our facial expressions, gestures, vocabularies and what we say with them, our very tones of voice. … This a tyranny beyond any tyranny ever known!
Convergence of the Twain
The tyranny and oppression of which Dale Jennings spoke finally reached a boiling point after the Black Cat and New Faces bar raids on New Year’s Eve, 1966. Afterwards, pride and the LA Tavern Guild organizers launched a strategy of resistance through the law. As they had done so successfully in Jennings’ legal case, organizers placed receptacles in gay venues across town to raise money for the legal defense of the people who’d been arrested. All in all, the Tavern Guild raised about $3,400 in “a fine show of concerned solidarity” (in Jim Highlands’ words).
Not all of the defendants went to trial. According to Tangents, four pled no contest, paid the fine, and went home. The “common drunk” charges were dropped along with the lewd conduct charges against a married bartender. In the end, only six of the sixteen arrested went to court with the lawyer, paid for by the Tavern Guild. However, despite the organizers best efforts, all the defendants were found guilty of lewd conduct, and police brutality was ruled out on the technicality that it had no bearing on the arrests. What’s more, to punish organizers for fighting the case in court, the LAPD began haunting the Black Cat and New Faces bars regularly. Patrons eventually took their business elsewhere. The Black Cat closed down that spring.
The trial’s outcome was a blow to the gay community. But rather than fall into despondency and give up the fight, pride and other community groups handed out over 3,000 fliers headed by the word “crisis” in large, bold letters. “This has happened in countless streets, bars and restaurants in all sections of our city,” the flier said, “Abuse of our rights and dignity must stop!” The community had decided to take their protest to the streets. Organizers planned the protest with other non-gay citizen action groups like ramcon (Rights of Assembly and Movement Committee). The goal was to launch the kind of broad-based demonstration that would attract local and even national media attention. However, as local activist Jim Kepner explained in a press statement at the time, “the [straight]coordinators howled at the word ‘homosexual’ on our leaflets, so, under pressure, we avoided mentioning our name during the rally, but swore that ‘the love that dared not speak its name’ would never be silenced again.” Still, when the 200-plus protestors waved their signs and picketed that February night, there was no mistaking whose cause they were fighting for.
Here was a turning point in gay and lesbian activism. The very site where the police had asserted their brutal authority became the location for the birth of a powerful gay rights movement. Not surprisingly, The Los Angeles Times dismissed the protest out of hand. According to one report (2/16/67): “The elements for a minor riot were there but after a few brief, tentative physical encounters … the pickets departed, dragging their enthusiasm behind them.” But leaders of the local gay community regarded the action as a success, if only because it proved that it was possible to mount a public rally on behalf of homosexual rights. A month after the protest, The Los Angeles Free Press, the city’s most respected underground newspaper, published a “Gay Liberation Supplement” that articulated the local community’s desire to “build a new, free, and loving gay counter-culture.”
The dearth of mainstream media coverage only fueled the fire for Los Angeles gay activists. pride members Bill Rand and Dick Michaels launched their own gay media outlet, The Los Angeles Advocate, out of the basement of the CBS affiliate building the very same year. In the magazine’s very first editorial, the publishers announced, “Homosexuals, more than ever before, are out to win their legal rights, to end the injustices against them, to experience their share of happiness in their own way.” Today, The Advocate is the country’s most important gay and lesbian magazine.
Though the Los Angeles gay community’s activism in the aftermath of the Black Cat and New Faces raids did not have any immediate effect on the LAPD’s protocol toward gay people and bars—and subsequent issues of The Advocate carried articles with headlines like “Anatomy of a Raid”—it did have a profound effect on how gay people viewed themselves. Gay people in Los Angeles and across the country were beginning to feel as if they had the right to assemble in peace, and that it was the police who were in the wrong. “We are born,” wrote the editors in the premiere issue of The Los Angeles Advocate. Two years later, this birth erupted in angry violence at the Stonewall Inn in New York City.
References
Cory, Donald Webster. The Homosexual In America (Second Edition). Castle Books, 1960.
D’Emilo, John. Sexual Politics/Sexual Communities: The Making of A Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. University of Chicago Press, 1983.
Kennedy, Moria Rachel. Mapping LA: The Intersection of Place and Politics, Temple Press 2001.
Belinda Baldwin, Ph.D. (critical studies), is a writer/producer based in Los Angeles.
