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11

Before Stonewall: Gay L.A. (1964–70)

The crime: kissing at midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1967; fourteen men arrested by the LAPD vice squad. The place: the Black Cat, a gay bar on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. The charge: “lewd conduct.”

Police raids on bars had been a familiar part of gay life for decades, but this one had a sequel that made history. Five weeks later, several hundred people—perhaps 500 or more—gathered in the bar’s parking lot to protest the raid. Marchers on Sunset Boulevard carried signs reading “No More Abuse of Our Rights and Dignity,” “Abolish Arbitrary Arrests,” “Stop Illegal Search and Seizure,” “End Illegal Entrapment,” and “Blue Fascism Must Go!” It was February 11, 1967, more than two years before the Stonewall Uprising in New York (June 28, 1969): the first gay rally against police violence in America, the earliest gay street demonstration, and the historic beginning of the gay liberation movement.¹

The demonstration had been called by PRIDE, a group founded in L.A. in 1966—the name was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights in Defense and Education.” They called their meetings “Pride Night” and the bar where they met “Pride Hall.” According to historians Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, it was “probably the first application of the word to gay politics”—another “before Stonewall” moment.²

The LAPD actions that provoked the first gay street protest in America were described in a leaflet circulated by Tangents, an LA gay magazine founded in 1966. That New Year’s Eve,

12 vice-squad officers—plainclothesmen—started beating patrons to the floor about 5 minutes after midnight. They did not identify themselves except by their weapons. After beating the patrons, the 14 to be arrested were laid face down on the sidewalk outside the bar. 5 patrol cars, containing 2 uniformed officers each, were brought from a near-by side street where they had been parked for some time and the individuals arrested were taken to the newly opened Rampart St. Police Station. Three bartenders were among those arrested.³

The LA Free Press immediately saw that the Black Cat Tavern protest was a transformative moment for gay people. “All over the city, 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 witnesses, even though police may bring pressure on their employers.”⁴

One more thing: the same night as the Black Cat protest—February 11—the Sunset Strip protests a few miles to the west were reaching a climax—80,000 leaflets had been distributed calling for a demonstration that night, which “saturated the clubs and made their way clandestinely through every high school in the county.” “One of the most interesting and pace-setting” developments in the Sunset Strip protests, the Freep noted, “came from homosexual organizations who are currently up in arms about New Year’s Eve police raids on a number of Silver Lake area gay bars.” PRIDE, while organizing its own protest for that night, also endorsed the February 11 Sunset Strip demonstration. The kids there carried one of the same signs as the gay demonstrators outside the Black Cat: “Stop Blue Fascism.”

PRIDE founder Steve Ginsberg explained PRIDE’s attitude in the Freep: PRIDE wanted to “take to the streets,” unlike the “prissy little old ladies of some of the older groups.”⁵ The “older groups” against which the new libertarians were rebelling started with the Mattachine Society, an L.A. LGBT organization founded by Harry Hay in 1950. Given the temper of the times, the Mattachine founders had had as their goal the quiet integration of gays and lesbians into the mainstream, not loud street protests confronting the cops. Hay himself was a member of the Communist Party and a talented organizer; he organized the Mattachine Society, named after the medieval French secret societies of masked men, into cells that did not know each other’s membership or leadership—a system he had learned from the Communist Party’s experience with fascism in Europe and now with the rise of McCarthyism in the United States. The Mattachine Society organized the first national movement of what they called “homophiles.” Starting out small and fearful, in the basement of L.A.’s First Unitarian Church, they took their first great leap forward in 1952 when the group challenged a vice squad arrest of Dale Jennings, a core member. They raised money for an attorney, who won an acquittal by arguing that Jennings had been entrapped—the first acquittal of an admitted homosexual charged with morals violations.⁶

But as the group blossomed, the red-baiters went after Harry Hay. The LA Daily Mirror published a column in 1953 charging that Mattachine had Communist ties, and at the group’s convention that summer, Harry Hay and other founders, including his partner Rudi Gernreich (later a famous fashion designer), resigned when the convention denounced them as Communists “who would disgrace us all.”⁷ The irony was deep: Harry Hay had been expelled from L.A.’s Communist Party in 1948 because leaders feared gay party members could be blackmailed into informing for the FBI. As Dorothy Healey recalled: “I personally met with Harry Hay to tell him we were going to have to drop him from the Party rolls. I made it clear to him that this was not a moralistic judgment by the Party, and he could see the logic of the argument.” Nevertheless, she wrote in her 1990 memoir, expelling Harry Hay and other gays was “a self-inflicted wound” on the party in L.A.⁸

Mattachine “never recovered from the loss of its founders,” Faderman and Timmons report. The same convention that expelled Harry Hay also declared, “We do not advocate a homosexual culture or community, and we believe that none exists.”⁹ Meanwhile, the Mattachine group in West Hollywood took the opposite tack: in 1952 they launched the first national homosexual magazine in America. They called it ONE Magazine (the name came from a line of Thomas Carlyle, “a mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one”), and their fourth issue, published in 1953, featured on the cover the terrific mock-HUAC headline, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Homosexual?” In November they added the line “The Homosexual Magazine” to their cover, and soon they were selling 5,000 copies a month, featuring cover stories on “Homosexual Marriage” and “Homosexual Servicemen.” Thus, Faderman and Timmons report, “ONE set a community agenda that would last for the next fifty years.”¹⁰

But in August 1953, just seven months after publishing their first issue, ONE’s office in L.A. was raided and the magazine seized by postal officials as obscene. The ACLU, to its shame, refused to take the case, so it was left to a single attorney, Eric Julber, two years out of Loyola Law School, to appeal the initial conviction. He was in court for four years, and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. On January 13, 1958, the court declared that a magazine could not be declared obscene only because it was about homosexuality, and ruled that ONE could be sent through the US mail. “ONE Magazine has made not only history but law as well,” Don Slater wrote in the next issue. It “has changed the future for all US homosexuals. Never before have homosexuals claimed their rights as citizens.”¹¹

Two and a half years before the Black Cat Tavern protest, journalists were already reporting that something new and big was starting to happen in gay L.A., and that LAPD repression was a key to understanding the changes. In 1964, Life magazine ran a two-part feature, “Homosexuality in America: A Secret World Grows Open and Bolder.” It reported on gay life in Manhattan, San Francisco, and L.A., and the report from L.A. focused on the LAPD. They had arrested 3,069 men for homosexual offenses in 1963, but, Life reported, “the LAPD could not help but notice that a mini-revolt was already occurring on the streets.” LAPD inspector James Fisk explained: “The pervert is no longer as secretive as he was. He’s aggressive, and his aggressiveness is getting worse.”¹²

“Homosexuals everywhere fear arrest,” Life reported. But “in Los Angeles, where homosexuals are particularly apparent on city streets, police drives are regular and relentless … Leaders of homophile societies in Los Angeles and San Francisco have accused the police of ‘harassment, entrapment and brutality’ toward homosexuals.” However, “there is no law in California—or in any other state—against being a homosexual. The laws which police enforce are directed at specific sexual acts.” The magazine also noted that it was a crime in California “to solicit anyone in a public place to engage in a lewd act. Under these laws, the police are able to make arrests. In many cases, a conviction results in a homosexual being registered as a ‘sex offender,’ along with rapists, in the state of California.” In L.A., the Life article conceded, there was a “running battle between police and homosexuals” that had “produced bitter feeling on both sides.”

Two years after the Black Cat Tavern protest, the Stonewall Uprising got a lot of attention, and it has since been part of the historical canon; in contrast, the Black Cat Tavern protest was little known at the time and remains little known today. Some say the greater prominence of Stonewall explains why the gay liberation movement took off in New York City instead of L.A. But in fact, the Black Cat Tavern protest broke the ground for many historic developments in L.A. The first was the founding of the Advocate, today the oldest and biggest gay magazine in the nation, devoting regular coverage to the fight with the LAPD—again, before Stonewall. Second was the establishment, following another protest against the LAPD, of the Metropolitan Community Church in L.A.—eventually the largest gay church in the world. And finally, the demonstration presaged the first officially recognized gay pride parade in America—the result of a legal battle with the LAPD that ended in triumph for gay L.A.¹³

Issue number one of the Advocate was dated September 1967. It had begun publication as the newsletter of PRIDE; the editors, Richard Mitch (using the pseudonym “Dick Michaels”) and Bill Rau (under the name “Bill Rand”), then turned it into a newspaper.¹⁴ The first issue led with the sequel to Black Cat—a meeting between vice squad head Charles W. Crumly and gays at the home of Jerry Joachim, one of the founders of the Advocate. But meeting with the cops was a two-way street: “PRIDE is asking you to think about something,” Joachim wrote, addressing gay men: “your conduct.

It must be above reproach in public places … We are going to ask you not to cruise in public parks [his emphasis]. That represents an intolerable situation to the LAPD, and rightly so … Every effort will be made to persuade the homosexual in LA to confine his sexual activities to private places. We are asking you particularly to boycott Griffith Park. Show the LAPD that we can keep our word—obey the law … If we do our part, perhaps the LA police will grasp this opportunity to stop police harassment.

Joachim concluded asking readers to “remember there are arrests that are justified. Our skirts are not 100% clean, and you know it.”¹⁵

Asking gay men to stay out of Griffith Park was huge. Jerry Joachim wasn’t talking only about furtive one-on-one sex in the bushes late at night; Griffith Park was widely known as a place where “wild orgies involving scores of men were common … even in daylight.” John Rechy told historian Lillian Faderman that “he knew of no other city in the 1960s that had a daytime scene as thriving as Los Angeles did in Griffith Park.” The LAPD, Faderman and Timmons report, “could not keep up” with “the exuberant gay male eroticism there.”¹⁶ It seems clear from Rechy’s account that the request in the Advocate had no effect on sex in the park.

But the next page of the Advocate’s first issue took a different tack in dealing with the LAPD. In a column with the byline “Mariposa de la Noche,” the paper noted that “summer is beach time,” and said that “cruising the beach studying the regional ‘wildlife’” was part of gay life—including “such little sea-beasties as crabs—a markedly unpopular subject; chicken-of-the-sea—constantly in great demand; and fish—popular mainly among biologists and dikes. Always a favorite study is anatomy. In fact many a bronzed body has been inspected and dissected on location, then picked up for further homework.” The paper recommended a “noteworthy Pacific playground catering to our royal society … Santa Monica State Beach, affectionately known as ‘Fag Beach.’ Whatever that means. Located cruisingly close to Chautauqua Blvd., State Beach offers much to the gay sea set … the attire is rather unrestricted.” But those cruising the beach had to be on alert for the LAPD: “The adjacent bathhouse is a definite no-no,” the column reported. “The Vice Squad has a fetish for tearooms, especially the one at State Beach.”¹⁷

Instead of boycotting Griffith Park, as Jerry Joachim and PRIDE requested in the first issue of the Advocate, a different group of activists—the Gay Liberation Front—declared the park the site for the first “Gay-In,” on May 30, 1968. The park had already been the site of a “Be-In” in February of the previous year, a public celebration of the counterculture—including a performance by the Doors. Now, instead of keeping the park the secret site of gay sex, it would become the public site of gay celebration. “Come and Cavort!” the leaflet said, “at the Gala Los Angeles Gay-In.” It identified the sponsors as the Los Angeles Advocate, One Incorporated (the publisher of ONE Magazine), Tangents, and a couple of lesser-known groups. And it called the event a “historic first, a gay day in the park.”¹⁸

Griffith Park is huge—4,000 acres—so the question for organizers was where to hold the Gay-In. They chose what one called the “stunningly liberationist” merry-go-round.¹⁹ The organizers intended the Gay-In as a “challenge to the police policy that effectively banned any public gathering of gays and lesbians.” Thus the Gay-In featured speeches and music and dancing, as well as booths where “professionals and activists offered free legal advice and other services designed to help gays and lesbians come out at work and home and fight … firing, eviction, or improper treatment by doctors and psychiatrists.”

The Advocate reported that “more than 1,000 Gays, and a number of startled straights, paid a visit to the event.” The group was “as diverse as gay life itself … There were the long-haired love children, leather queens, a huge blue jean brigade, baskets at attention, everyday businessmen, college kids, streetwalkers, transvestites, lesbians in Levis, and bare chests were everywhere in abundance.” A guerilla theater group presented “a modern day fairy tale” that involved “good fairies and an evil, old, closet queen who saw the light and learned to live outside of her closet.” The Advocate reporter was particularly enthusiastic about the “Kiss a homosexual” booth, and by the fact that five couples were married at the Gay-In—three female and two male. The LAPD arrested only one person at the Gay-In, and not for sex-related activity: a fifteen-year-old boy with an American flag painted on his face was charged with “desecrating the flag,” and they “hauled him off in handcuffs. A large crowd followed, jeering and demanding his release.”²⁰

Morris Kight had been born in 1919 in Comanche County, Texas, and had arrived in Los Angeles in 1958. He had been working in the civil rights movement since the early 1940s, a friend recalled, but “suddenly he found himself, like many other gays and lesbians in L.A., dealing with the brutal ways of the Los Angeles Police Department.”²¹ Kight himself recalled in a 1994 interview: “I was doing street organizing, street work, street counseling, one-to-one curbside counseling” with gay men. “My major goal was for gay people to be proud of themselves … Next I wanted them to live lives of usefulness and creativity … I wanted them to stay out of trouble.” And last of all, “I wanted to get ready for the revolution.”²²

Kight was also an organizer against the Vietnam War, which he called “the worst of wars.” Among other things he founded the Dow Action Committee in 1967, which protested the use in Vietnam of napalm, manufactured by Dow Chemical. “As the war rose, I gave more and more time and energy into protesting,” he later recalled, “and less and less time to serving lesbian and gay people, and I felt horrible about that,” he recalled. Also, “I was red-baited by gay people constantly,” Kight said, but the Dow group also served as a training ground for gay and lesbian members, who were “seeing how to leaflet, how to organize, how to manipulate the press, how to deal with the police, how to do a sit-in, how to do civil disobedience, how to do a demonstration.”²³

Kight described his move from the anti-war movement to the gay liberation movement in that 1994 interview: In October, 1969, the national Moratorium to End the Vietnam War held demonstrations across the country, and Kight was invited to speak at the San Francisco event, where he was introduced as a gay person. Of speaking before tens of thousands of people, he said, “I felt euphoria, I felt dizziness, I felt almost like falling, I felt ‘good grief, I should go home.’” He suddenly remembered seeing his father in 1926 in rural Texas plowing a field with a horse and singing a Protestant song, “I’m Going Home.” On the platform in San Francisco, he said, “I thought I would leave here and leave the antiwar movement, I’ll remain a pacifist. I’ll go home to Los Angeles and home to my people.” He left the platform, went straight to the airport, flew back to L.A., and resigned from anti-war organizations, including the Peace Action Council. “The following day I announced the founding meeting of what was to become the Gay Liberation Front in LA.”²⁴

The GLF had already been organized in New York and Berkeley—L.A.’s group was third. Within a year there were almost 400 members. Kight later recalled that for the next few years, he spent a quarter of his time on GLF street demonstrations, and half of his time on the GLF’s social services—its “Gay Survival Committee,” which in 1971 became the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center (later LGBT Center), the first and biggest in the world. The other quarter of his time he devoted to the anti-war movement, he said, “because the war in Indochina was still going on.”²⁵

Most of what the GLF did was organize street protests about discrimination against gays—at restaurants (Barney’s Beanery, which had a “no faggots” sign), stores (Tower Records, which fired a gay clerk), and newspapers (the LA Times, which refused to run news about homosexual organizations and activities). But the GLF also did anti-war organizing and draft counseling. Support for the anti-war work wasn’t unanimous; in May 1970, after the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings, GLF leader Jim Kepner wrote in the Freep that “a few members feel Gay Lib should not be involved in other ‘movement’ issue,” but that “the group overwhelmingly voted to wire Nixon an angry protest against the illegal invasion of Cambodia and the vicious shooting of students.” The same article reported that “seventeen GLFers joined the thousands who demonstrated in Oceanside in support of anti-war Marines. We kept our own propaganda level low for the occasion, feeling it sufficient to let it be known that gays were supporting the main cause, and not seizing the occasion, as so many did, for side trips.”²⁶

The GLF organized for an anti-war demonstration in April 1969 in San Francisco. The leaflet had two slogans: “Out Now!” and “Come Out!” Another anti-war demonstration, this one in L.A. in October 1970, was endorsed by the GLF. And in November 1970, the GLF endorsed and collected signatures for the “People’s Peace Treaty,” where individuals signed a statement declaring that “the American people and the Vietnamese people are not enemies.”²⁷

And the GLF produced a key publication: A Guide to Revolutionary Homosexual Draft Resistance, a leaflet that declared, “The US government oppresses homosexuals in employment, military duty, tax laws, and criminal prosecutions” and asked, “Is this a system you want to die for?” The leaflet, organized as a Q and A, followed: “What is there about being gay that makes me unfit for military service?” The answer provided by the GLF was eloquent: “Nothing. All branches of the military have homosexuals, both men and women, who are serving capably and honorably.” But the US “has laws against homosexuals being inducted,” and “every year, in every branch of the service, men are dishonorably discharged and imprisoned because their homosexuality has been revealed.” Therefore, the GLF recommended that at preinduction physicals, young draftees should check the “yes” box on the question about “homosexual tendencies.” They should refuse to answer any questions about their experiences because “48 out of 50 states have criminal statutes against homosexual acts,” and the Constitution protects Americans from self-incrimination. The leaflet recommended that “if there is a better way to avoid the draft, such as a student deferment or a medical disqualification, use it”—but instructed young men to “stand your ground,” and in all cases “refuse induction.”

But the GLF position on the draft was not anti-war, nor was it anti-imperialist: “No homosexual shall be drafted against his will,” the GLF list of demands stated in 1970, “nor shall the military deny entrance or demand release of any person because of homosexuality.”²⁸ The next year, when Congress had to decide whether to extend the draft, the GLF in L.A. took a stronger stand: “Our Gay brothers have been harassed and intimidated by this system. Now we have a chance to do away with it.”²⁹

Finally, the GLF also engaged in electoral politics, campaigning for Robert Scheer for Senate that year and other Peace and Freedom candidates for statewide office. The Peace and Freedom platform included a plank crafted by the GLF, which declared “the necessity to work to abolish all laws” that discriminated against gays and lesbians, as well as “all forms of economic and social exploitation.” It called for the freeing of everybody who had been jailed on homosexual charges, and for sex education programs that would give “the same validity to homosexual forms of expression as to heterosexual forms.” (Scheer got 57,000 votes, about 1 percent of the total.)³⁰

The GLF, of course, became part of a national gay liberation movement, and one of its key strategists and spokespeople was Carl Wittman, whose “Gay Manifesto” was published in the LA Free Press Gay Liberation Supplement in 1970. Wittman had been a national leader of SDS but left the organization to devote himself to organizing the gay movement. “How it began we don’t know,” he said in his “Manifesto.” “Maybe we were inspired by black people and their freedom movement; we learned how to stop pretending from the hip movement. Amerika in all its ugliness has surfaced with the war.” But gay people were doing something new: “We are full of love for each other and are showing it; we are full of anger at what has been done to us. And as we recall all the self-censorship and repression for so many years, a reservoir of tears pours out of our eyes. And we are euphoric, high, with the initial flourish of a movement.”³¹

Wittman’s “Manifesto” also declared that “our first job is to free ourselves.” That meant allying with the new women’s liberation movement, and “junking male chauvinism.” It meant recognizing that “marriage is a rotten, oppressive institution.” It meant resisting the “‘movement’ types [who] come on with a line of shit about homosexuals not being oppressed as much as blacks or Vietnamese or workers or women.” But it also meant forming coalitions, recognizing that “not every straight is our enemy. And face it: we can’t change Amerika alone … it’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.” As for the anti-war movement, he wrote, “we can look forward” to working with them “if they are able to transcend their anti-gay and male chauvinist patterns. We support [anti-war protestors], but only as a group.” Wittman’s “Manifesto” concluded that the “imperatives for gay liberation” started with “free[ing] ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self defense and political activity, initiate counter community institutions.” That’s exactly what the gay movement in L.A. was doing.

A year and a half after the Black Cat Tavern protest, in August 1968—but still a year before Stonewall—gays in L.A. organized another, bolder, protest against the LAPD: a flower power march on the police station where men arrested in another bar raid were being held. The Patch was a gay bar in Wilmington, run by Lee Glaze, a comedian known as “The Blond Darling.” The police had told Glaze he had to prohibit “not only drag but also groping, male-male dancing, and more than one person at a time in the restrooms.” Glaze would play “God Save the Queen” on the jukebox to warn customers whenever the cops showed up. But one weekend night, when the bar was “packed with 500 patrons and the dancing was wild,” the vice squad “burst in with half a dozen uniformed policemen behind them.” They stopped the music, demanded IDs, and started arresting men they said had been dancing together. Glaze jumped up on the stage and shouted, “It’s not against the law to be homosexual, and it’s not a crime to be in a gay bar!” The raid, the Advocate reported, had become a political rally, mostly because of “the solid display of defiance … by Lee Glaze,” whose speech was “a minor masterpiece” that “infected the audience with some of his own courage.” Glaze announced the bar would pay bail and provide a lawyer for the two men who had been arrested, and a dozen marchers set out for the jail.³²

The marchers stopped along the way at a flower shop run by one of the bar patrons, and, Faderman and Timmons report, they left with “all the gladioli, mums, carnations, roses, and daisies.” They arrived at the LAPD Harbor Division station bearing huge bouquets and posed for pictures under the “Los Angeles Police Department” sign. One of the marchers later recalled: “When we arrived at the police station, Lee told the officer at the desk, ‘We’re here to get our sisters out.’ The officer asked, ‘What are your sisters’ names?’ When Lee said, ‘Tony Valdez and Bill Hasting,’ the officer had this surprised look on his face—and called for backup.”³³

——

There was another fruit of the protests against the LAPD raid on the Glade: two months later, Troy Perry, one of the participants, who had been a Southern Pentecostal minister, started the world’s first openly gay religious congregation—the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). “Lee showed me you don’t have to be afraid of the police,” Perry said. “Once that happened, it encouraged me to become a gay activist.” And it started when a friend of Troy Perry named Tony got arrested by the LAPD at the Patch. The two had been dancing to “La Bamba,” when the police arrived and handcuffed Tony and another man. Both were charged with lewd conduct and hauled off to jail. Perry recalled his feeling at the time: “It was so unjust.”³⁴

“It took me until 5:30 AM to get Tony released,” Perry recalled. “It was all due to delaying tactics by the police. The booking procedure, the mug shots, the fingerprinting, just took hours. It was part of the harassment that took place far too often against the gay community in those days.” When Tony got out, he told Perry, “I’ve never been arrested before for anything in my life. Never! And I’m 26 years old now. The police kept telling me they are going to call my employer and tell him I’m gay. I’ll probably lose my job. You know, Troy, I’ve learned one thing from this experience: People don’t really care. Nobody likes a queer.”

“I tried to be helpful,” Perry recalled, telling Tony, “Even if people don’t, I’m still convinced that God cares about you.” But Tony “just laughed bitterly. ‘Come on, Troy,’ he said. ‘God doesn’t care about me.’” Troy Perry went home alone, and prayed: “Lord, we need a special church … if you want such a church started, just let me know when.” Then, “a still, small voice in my mind’s ear spoke, and the voice said, ‘Now.’”³⁵

Thus the MCC was founded to respond to the deeper emotional damage done by the LAPD. Starting with a group of twelve in Los Angeles in October 1968, by 2011 it had 172 churches throughout the world, including parishes in forty-six of the fifty states. It owns $100 million worth of property, and “is probably the world’s largest employer of gays and lesbians.”³⁶

Perry announced its foundation in an ad in the Advocate, and the first gay worship service was held in his living room in Huntington Park in October, 1968. At that first service he told the gathering what MCC “was going to be”: a “three-pronged Gospel” consisting of “Salvation,” “Community,” and “Christian Social Action.” “We would stand up for all our rights, secular and religious, and we would start fighting the many forms of tyranny that oppressed us.” Thus from the first the MCC was committed to action. A parishioner later recalled, “Someone would call a protest, against … the Hollywood police for discriminatory policies—and then our telephone trees would be buzzing, and 80 per cent of the people who showed up at the demonstration would be from the Metropolitan Community Church.”³⁷

Another fruit of gay organizing that was spurred by the Black Cat Tavern raid: in May 1969, Paul Lamport, the LA City councilman said to have been behind the New Year’s Eve raid, was voted out of office, in the nation’s first openly gay electoral campaign.³⁸ Lamport had been endorsed by the new LAPD chief, Tom Reddin, and had campaigned against gays in a district that included not only Hollywood but also Silver Lake and Echo Park, which together “contained perhaps the greatest concentration of gay population and gay businesses in the nation.”³⁹ Lamport blamed the Advocate, in part, for his defeat, and said the paper produced “a steady stream of filth and perversion”—indeed, the newspaper had vowed “to really swing an election” and defeat him.⁴⁰ (The Freep also campaigned against Lamport, who had condemned city officials for what he said was a “secret” program to “welcome an invasion of 100,000 hippies” to Los Angeles in summer 1967.)⁴¹ Bob Stevenson, the man who defeated him on the basis of gay support, died in office and was replaced by his widow Peggy, who also won the election after campaigning for gay votes. Lamport tried to return to the city council in the next election, in 1973, this time seeking gay votes, but was defeated. The district has had a gay rights supporter as its councilperson ever since.

The LAPD confronted the third Gay-In on April 5, 1970, with a massive force, but the conclusion of the confrontation marked the beginning of a change. “The police really came to that one, really seriously,” Morris Kight remembered, showing up in riot gear, forming a line and brandishing batons, preparing to clear the park. He recalled speaking to the commander on the scene, telling him:

If you want to cause a riot and hurt a lot of people including yourselves, that’s exactly what you are going to get … The crowd is having fun, nobody is violent, nobody is armed, nobody wishes to do any physical harm, they want to have fun, and your presence is offensive. Why don’t we agree that you will leave. I will go away and go back down and associate with the people, and you will quietly withdraw. Because if you don’t, you will have a violent riot here today.

“They withdrew within twenty minutes,” Kight reported.⁴²

The climax of the battle between gay L.A. and the LAPD came in June, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, when L.A. became the site of the nation’s first officially recognized gay pride parade. (New York had a march, but L.A. got a police permit for a parade, and the city closed Hollywood Boulevard to traffic for the event.) Morris Kight recalled that their first idea to commemorate Stonewall was to hold twenty-five simultaneous demonstrations located at key “symbols of oppression, repression and exploitation,” including churches, synagogues, schools, military recruiting stations, and of course police stations. Troy Perry had a different idea. At a meeting with Kight and Reverend Bob Humphries, he said, “This is Hollywood. Why don’t we just hold a parade?” Kight later recalled that he agreed with Perry’s idea to organize a single march down Hollywood Boulevard: “It’s a world-famous street and we wanted to be where the people were, where the media were, where the action was.”⁴³

They went to the police commission to apply for a parade permit—which required a sponsoring organization. “We didn’t have an organization yet that was incorporated other than our church,” Perry recalled. Morris proposed they call it “Christopher Street West”—in honor of the Stonewall uprising a year earlier. Before the meeting with the police commission, Perry remembers, “we had agreed at first that we wouldn’t use the word homosexual until we had to.” Chief Ed Davis kept asking who they represented. “After about an hour, [the police were] getting nasty a little bit,” so Perry finally said, “We represent the homosexual community of Los Angeles”—a simple statement, but a historic one. “And with that, oh, my god, all hell broke loose … Chief Davis said, ‘Did you know that homosexuality was illegal in the state of California?’ I said, ‘No, sir, it’s not.’” The chief then told the commission that, as long as felony laws against oral copulation and sodomy were on the books, they “would be ill-advised to discommode the people to have a burglars’ or robbers’ parade—or a homosexuals’ parade.”⁴⁴

At the end of the meeting, however, the police commission agreed to issue a permit—if the applicants could post two bonds, one for $1 million, the other for $500,000. The bonds, they were told, were “to pay the merchants whose windows are going to be broken out when people start throwing rocks at you all in the street.” “My God,” Perry recalled, “it was the Jews in Germany all over again. If a Jew ducked a rock and it broke out a window, the Jew had to pay for it. So they were doing the same thing with the queer community: the queers are gonna pay for it.” In addition, the commission said “you will post in cash the amount of $1,500 to pay for the policemen that it will take to protect you.” “We thanked them profusely,” Perry recalled, “and said we’d be back.”⁴⁵

They went to attorney Herbert E. Selwyn, a longtime defender of gays in the courts and a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California. He met with the commission and persuaded them to drop the bond requirements—but they insisted on the requirement of a $1,500 payment for police protection. Selwyn and the ACLU took that issue to the California Superior Court, where the judge, Richard Schauer, declared: “These people are taxpayers like anybody else. They don’t have to put up any money to hold a parade. You don’t require it of other groups, you’re not going to require it of them.” He ordered the commission to issue the parade permit and ordered the police to protect the marchers as they would any other group, without charging them for protection.⁴⁶

The first officially recognized gay pride parade in US history stepped off on Sunday afternoon, June 28, 1970, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Place, just east of Highland Avenue. Two thousand people showed up, Perry said, to “march, drive their floats, and walk their pets. I’ve never felt so empowered in my life.” And along the parade route, he recalled, “50,000 people showed up to watch us march. I’d never seen more hats and dark shades in my life!” (Meanwhile, back in New York, gay leaders had failed to get a parade permit “and had to march on the sidewalks, without any formation,” Perry recalled.)

“The parade was incredible for its time,” Perry reflected. “We didn’t get the bands that we wanted, so my roommate, Willie Smith, drove the parade route in his VW minibus, playing World War II German marches from an amplification system he’d hooked up. Willie’s thinking? Since the Los Angeles police department treated us like the oppressed of WWII, they might actually enjoy the music and leave us alone.”⁴⁷

The parade down Hollywood Boulevard “had a little bit of everything,” he said. The Society of Anubis took the lead with its float—they had 800 members, divided equally between gays and lesbians, plus a state charter stating their official purpose was to overturn unjust sex laws and “present to the public a true picture of the homosexual as a worthwhile member of society.” Another group carried a sign that said “Heterosexuals for Homosexual Freedom.” The parade included a guy with an Alaskan husky and a sign that read “We Don’t All Walk Poodles” (he led what Perry called “the pet-walking section”). A photograph of the guy and the dog was later published in a Time magazine article about “the new gay militancy.” The GLF of Los Angeles came down Hollywood Boulevard carrying banners and shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.” Perry recalled that a gay group from Orange County brought a large sign that read “Homosexuals for Ronald Reagan.” “I heard a woman on the sidewalk say, ‘I can forgive them for being homosexual, but I will never forgive them for supporting Reagan.’”

And just in case people watching missed the point about fighting LAPD harassment, a float featured a man on a cross with a sign that read “In Memory of Those Killed by the Pigs.” Another group made a similar point with a different approach: a “flock of shrieking drag queens” appeared, “running every which way to escape club-wielding guys dressed as cops.”⁴⁸

Troy Perry was asked, forty-three years later, what he remembered most about that day. He replied:

The thing that stood out in my mind was that there was no one picketing against us. When we came around the corner [onto Hollywood Boulevard] we didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how many people were there—and to see that crowd. At first, I started tearing up, and then I said, No, you’re not, this is a happy day, a good day, you’re going to wave to the crowd. And people just cheered as we went down the boulevard.⁴⁹

Morris Kight, a week after the parade, described it as “joyful, folksy, funky, and happy,” noting that the parade “received more public notice than all the homosexual activities in the past combined. Sidewalks crammed with people came to watch.” The “friendliness” of onlookers was wonderful, he said, but the thing that “counts for most, is that Gays are a lot taller, a lot stronger, a lot freer, a lot more honest with themselves.”⁵⁰

That first gay pride march opened the door to the flowering of gay L.A. The next year, 1971, the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center opened, the nation’s first and largest of its kind. Of course, there were plenty of attacks and setbacks—in 1973 the MCC at Twenty-Second and Union was burned down—and of course the AIDS crisis lay ahead. But defeating the LAPD and stepping out in the sunlight on Hollywood Boulevard that June day of 1970 marked a turning point for gay L.A. Kight, for one, called it the happiest moment of his life.⁵¹

What about the women? The story up to this point is almost all about men. However, photos of the Black Cat Tavern protest show several young women among the demonstrators. Women attended the first meetings of the Metropolitan Community Church; they celebrated at the first Gay-In in Griffith Park; they marched in the first gay pride parade down Hollywood Boulevard. And of course, women had been arrested by the LAPD in raids on lesbian bars. The crime for which gay women were arrested in the Fifties and Sixties was “masquerading” or “impersonation”—wearing masculine clothing. At the beginning of the Second World War—the era of Rosie the Riveter, who wore men’s work clothes—LA Mayor Fletcher Bowron asked the city council to ban the wearing of pants by women who worked at city hall; he said that it was worse to see “masculine women much more than feminine traits in men,” and that the city should not allow the war to “undermine those things we like to consider feminine and ladylike.”⁵² The courts had declared in 1950 that laws prohibiting women from wearing men’s clothes were unconstitutional, but police raids on lesbian bars continued in the 1960s, Faderman and Timmons report, with the LAPD vice squad arresting women on charges of drunkenness or prostitution. But the leadership and organization of the gay movement in L.A. up to 1970, and the editors and writers for the gay magazines, were virtually all male. It was not until 1971, Faderman and Timmons conclude, that “both ‘gay women’ and ‘lesbian feminists’ came to the conclusion that “women had to do it for themselves.”⁵³ That’s a different story, a story about the Seventies. The story of the gay movement up to 1970 is thus a story about men as leaders and organizers.

Historians of gay L.A. always emphasize that the movement started in L.A. “before Stonewall”; it was host to the first protest march, the first publication of the Advocate, the first gay church, the first invocation of “pride,” the first official gay parade. But why? Why would gays organize first in L.A. rather than New York? In part, the answer requires understanding the difference between the LAPD and the NYPD. The LAPD treatment of gays was worse—more systematic, more thorough, and more relentless—because the LA police were not corrupt. It seems paradoxical, or ironic, at first, but it makes sense: in New York City, the gay bars were run by the Mafia, and the Mafia paid off the police to leave them alone most of the time and provide advance warning of raids. The advance warning was to permit the bartenders to remove most of the liquor so it wouldn’t be confiscated, but it also meant that regulars could be warned and only a few random patrons would be arrested. According to Martin Duberman, “a patrolman would stop by Stonewall once a week to pick up the envelopes filled with cash—including those for the captains and desk sergeants, who never collected their payoffs in person. The total cash dispensed to the police each week came to about two thousand dollars.”⁵⁴