While New York Slept
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The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center (The Center) is the largest and best-funded GLBT organization of its kind in the world. The Metropolitan Community Church is the oldest and largest GLBT church and the largest GLBT organization in the world. Bookstores with readings and cultural groups have been active as almost nowhere else in the U.S. When incorporated in 1984 West Hollywood was the first city anywhere to be governed by a majority of gay and lesbian officials.

Why is L.A. not better known for these accomplishments? It seems to have suffered a double neglect. Although founded in 1781, it was always perceived as a “young” city, inferior to New York and San Francisco, if not even to other U.S. cities. Its history and cultural life were seldom disseminated until the end of the 20th century. When Gay Liberation did take hold, Stonewall became the central image of that movement, and a more radical politics seemed almost to erase what had been accomplished in L.A. during the preceding twenty years. The radical accomplishments in their time of Mattachine and ONE were perceived as accomodationist and their leaders as old fogies by a younger and more activist generation.

The book offers a comprehensive history of gay Los Angeles, starting with the cross-dressing berdache or two-spirit Native American peoples and picking up with the 19th-century migration across America and the large number of cross-dressing women it included. Other stalwart women included Eliza Farnham, who wrote in 1856 about her farming life with another woman. Faderman and Timmons cite that there were twelve men for every woman in 1850, but oddly they don’t discuss the intimate male-to-male bonds that must have occurred at this time. They do, however, discuss these relations starting in the 1880’s, which were widespread and well documented by local newspaper articles, usually from the vantage point of arrests or scandals. Men in lodging houses were often spied upon or even entrapped, while wealthier men’s private parties were infiltrated by the police. In addition to these headline-grabbing incidents, the authors have discovered early same-sex communities in L.A. Several lesbians in the 1940’s lived in homes close together for friendship ties and in order to care for each other. In 1947 Lisa Ben published (by typing copies) Vice Versa, the first publication written by and for lesbians.

The section on Hollywood brings new detail to stories that have been told before. No author can go wrong quoting Tallulah Bankhead, and after a lengthy exposition on cross-dressing women stars of the 30’s, the book notes that when Bankhead was considered to replace Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, Bankhead quipped: “Oh, goodie, I always wanted to get in Marlene’s pants.” The discussion of Katharine Hepburn’s early life pleads a case for her being regarded as a lesbian.

The homophobia of the L.A. Police Department is documented thoroughly, from the early twentieth century to entrapment and defamation in the 50’s and 60’s to a maneuver to stop the first L.A. pride parade in 1971. Because the L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept., not the LAPD, had jurisdiction in unincorporated West Hollywood, that community was able to become an entertainment venue that housed several gay bars and night clubs.

Much of Gay L.A. is devoted to the early efforts to organize a gay rights movement. Different organizations often clashed with each other along ideological or gender lines, but  ONE secured a huge victory in the case of ONE v. Olesen, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and produced a decision upholding the right to mail literature that discussed homosexuality. No further activism could have been accomplished without this ruling.

Disputes were often between those who perceived themselves as middle class or mainstream as opposed to (usually) those who were younger and radical. Organizations that began as somewhat radical, emerging from the Gay Liberation Front, ended up funded by grants from the U.S. government or even corporations. This transition was painful for each group and is told with dramatic intensity. The book presents all sides and gives rounded pictures of movement icons such as Harry Hay, Dorr Legg, Morris Kight, and the late Betty Berzon. The clashes at The Center were particularly dramatic, with more established board members clashing with younger activists.

The book gives detailed histories of the many women’s organizations during 1970’s separatism but also gives its moving conclusion when men and women worked together in 1976 to defeat Proposition 6 (the Briggs initiative), which would have banned gay and lesbian teachers from public schools while forbidding all teachers from saying anything positive about gay persons or gay life. Working class lesbian separatist Ivy Bottini gives a poignant statement of reconciliation: “I loved working with those men. … I will never again be a separatist.”

The book does not treat all of L.A. culture. Performers other than drag performers are seldom mentioned, not even the fabulous Frances Faye, a jazz singer and nightclub entertainer who dyed her close-cropped hair a different color every night. The book does discuss Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild and his photography, published in his own magazine Physique Pictorial and elsewhere, but identifies Muscle Beach in Mizer’s heyday as being in Venice, when it was in Santa Monica, as depicted in Tennessee Williams’s glorious story, “The Mattress by the Tomato Patch.”

Literary analysis is outside the scope of this work, but it gives some details of bookstores as cultural institutions, particularly Sisterhood Bookstore in Westwood and A Different Light, first opened in Silver Lake. L.A. is a large and sprawling city, but these and other institutions, while they fostered an individual artist’s or writer’s work, also created a cohesive network of friends who formed social networks and eventually assumed community and political leadership roles. Beginning in the early 1970’s Christopher Isherwood came out and appeared in public as a gay man, and, with his lover Don Bachardy as a gay couple and role model. The list of writers is long, but a few names—Katherine V. Forrest, Eloise Klein Healy, Terry Wolverton, and Paul Monette—should be mentioned.

West Hollywood was originally known as Sherman and was the site of a market, Shermart, which was “gay central” for L.A., a daily meeting place outside the bars. Twenty-four hour coffee shops (a very L.A. institution) such as Arthur J’s are discussed as places that were at times used as sexual hunting grounds.

Power politics is followed through the decades, including the skill of Don Kilhefner and others in getting the first ever tax-exempt status for any organization with the word gay in the title. Gays banded together in 1969 to defeat the homophobic City Councilman Paul Lamport, and this success led to the later formation of the nation’s first GLBT political action committee, the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles, led by David Mixner and then Gayle Wilson, a friend of Cher. There have been numerous other firsts, including the appointment of the first gay judge anywhere, Stephen Lachs.

There are copious footnotes and documentation for the academic reader, but Faderman and Timmons have told a gripping and exhilarating story that general readers can readily appreciate. The authors have done much to reinstate L.A. as the early engine of what would later become the national gay and lesbian rights movement, as well as to delineate the city’s pioneering role in subsequent GLBT political and cultural developments.

 

Dan Luckenbill is a senior manuscripts processor in the Department of Special Collections, UCLA Library.