Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance author and the (semi) retired author of “The Book Nook.” Mail all comments to jessemonteagudo@aol.com
by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons; Basic Books; 432 pages; $27.50.
In the late 1960’s, police Vice officers raided a popular gay bar, where they attacked, harassed, and arrested men in drag, other patrons, and bar employees alike. This led to several days of active protest which ushered a new era of gay militancy. The bar was the Black Cat in Los Angeles and the raid took place shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, 1967: “uniformed police, who had been alerted by the undercover officers, rushed in and began to swing billy clubs, tear down leftover Christmas ornaments, break furnishings, and beat several men brutally. Sixteen customers and employees were arrested and forced to lie face down on the sidewalk until squad cars came to take them away. Plainclothes officers chased two men across Sanborn Avenue to the New Faces bar. There, the officers knocked the woman owner down and beat her two bartenders unconscious. . . .Six men were charged with lewd conduct: They were seen kissing other men on the lips for up to ten seconds. A jury found them all guilty.”
This was the last straw, as far as many gay Angelenos were concerned. Led by the homophile group PRIDE - Personal Rights In Defense and Education - activists took to the streets, organizing protests outside the beleaguered Black Cat: “Hundreds of onlookers supported the parading picketers, and activists passed out 3,000 leaflets to motorists explaining why they were there.” But while the Black Cat protests made an impact in its own time, forty years later very few people know about it, even in Los Angeles, unlike a similar event that happened in New York City two and a half years later. Certainly New York City’s role as America’s media capital had something to do with Stonewall’s unique impact, as well as the relative topography of N.Y. and L.A.: “Los Angeles is an area spread out over 450 square miles, where (unlike New York’s Greenwich Village, the site of Stonewall) people seldom take casual walks. The Black Cat protests attracted multitudes of people who drove across town to participate, but chance passers-by (such as many of the Stonewall protesters had been) were scarce.”
The Black Cat protests of 1967 is one of many revelations uncovered by historians Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons in Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, the first comprehensive history of lesbian and gay life in Southern California. It is long overdue. Most GLBT histories centered around New York City and its impact on America as a whole, thus largely ignoring the contributions made by lesbian women, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people who lived in Los Angeles and its environs. A decade before Stonewall, Black and Latino queens and butch hustlers (including writer John Rechy) resisted the police at Cooper’s Doughnuts. More recently, “Angelenos were able to establish the biggest, wealthiest, longest-lived gay and lesbian international church, community center, and national magazine” - the Metropolitan Community Church, Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and The Advocate (originally’s PRIDE’s newsletter), respectively.” Long before most of their East Coast counterparts ventured out of their closets, L.A’s gay movers and shakers influenced local politics via the Municipal Elections Committee of Los Angeles (MECLA). West Hollywood was (and is) America’s first “gay city” (1984).
In Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A. have two near-perfect writers. Dr. Faderman is the award-winning author of such classics as Surpassing the Love of Men and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, while Stuart Timmons is the biographer of Harry Hay. For Gay L.A., Faderman and Timmons split the research and writing; Faderman naturally covering the women and Timmons, the men. They also did a good job comparing the status of lesbians and gay men, especially when dealing with police entrapment or persecution: lesbians were less likely than gay men to cruise in public places like parks, restrooms or taverns. Also “the notion of sexual pleasure in which a penis was lacking was anyway not taken seriously by many men who made and enforced the laws.” Lesbians were only arrested or harassed if they dressed in male attire or otherwise threatened the sexual status quo. Still, there was not much separatism in the LA. community, and men and women worked together against common threats from the like of State Senator John Briggs. After AIDS killed many male leaders, women took up the slack as heads of L.A.’s multiple lesbian and gay organizations. All this is covered by the authors with effective thoroughness. On the other hand, a history of L.A.’s thriving transgender community is still needed.
Of course as far as the outside world is concerned, Los Angeles is Hollywood; and Gay L.A. reads like a Hollywood epic, with great struggles overcome and great goals achieved. It is also the story of ordinary men and women whose stories are preserved thanks to the authors’ incisive interviews and research. Like many others, lesbians and gay men came to Southern California in search of a new life and new opportunities. Gay L.A. is an important story that needed to be told and, thanks to Faderman and Timmons, it finally has been told.
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