ryan vaillancourt, downtown news: “lavender los angeles” opens thru 11-20, exhibit of gay LA from 1880’s (2053)
Standing Up Before Stonewall
Exhibit Illuminates Los Angeles’ History of Gay Life and Activism
by Ryan Vaillancourt
Published: Friday, November 6, 2009 3:55 PM PST
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - In 1969, the Stonewall Riots in New York ignited the nation’s gay rights movement, proving to be a flashpoint for organization and advocacy against discrimination and prejudice. The riots followed a police raid of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Greenwich Village.
Although Stonewall is widely considered the most important event for the gay rights movement, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Nor was New York alone as a host city for gay advocacy: Los Angeles’ homosexual community also played a major role in the fight for recognition and justice, and the organizers of a two-week exhibition in the Historic Core intend to illustrate that history.
“Lavender Los Angeles,” which began Nov. 7 and runs through Nov. 20 at The Exchange on Fifth Street, tracks the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender culture from the 1880s through the present.
“This is as much a gay pride exhibition as it is an L.A. pride exhibition,” said Tom De Simone, a co-founder of Roots of Equality, the organizer of the exhibition and a series of accompanying panel discussions. “It’s a story about our city.”
Throughout that story, which is filled with chapters about both acceptance and discrimination, Downtown plays a starring role.
“We wanted to show that West Hollywood wasn’t the center of gay life in Los Angeles,” De Simone said. “I think that’s true today and it’s especially true when you look back at history.”
Among the Downtown landmarks highlighted in the exhibition are Pershing Square, which functioned as a cruising site from the 1920s into the early 1960s, but was also known as a place for community-building, said De Simone.
Also featured are a cluster of former bars and hotels on Main Street, such as Cooper’s Donuts, a late-night spot frequented by drag queens, hustlers and cruisers. According to author John Rechy, an iconic chronicler of homosexual culture in Los Angeles, Cooper’s was the site of a riot in 1958 that began after a police raid of the shop.
Nine years later, and still two years before Stonewall, hundreds of people staged a protest outside the Black Cat bar in Silver Lake (it’s now called Le Barcita) in the wake of a New Year’s Eve clash between plainclothes cops and gay revelers in the bar.
Photos and Text
De Simone and event organizers scoured the archives of local gay magazines like One to produce the exhibition. Other information was culled from the archives of the Central Library. Hundreds of items and articles have been copied and hung on the walls of the space for Lavender Los Angeles.
In one Los Angeles Times photo dated Jan. 27, 1950, three black men with carefully sculpted, pencil-thin eyebrows and painted toenails sit on a bench inside an old police station. One looks forlorn, while another flashes a bright smile as he gestures toward the third man, who hides his face from the camera. They’re wearing drab denim shirts and the same type of jeans, each with one striped pocket.
“Masculine jail clothing was substituted for feminine attire worn by these three youths after they were nabbed early today,” reads the caption. “They said they had been employed as female domestic servants in fashionable Wilshire district. Physical examination by police showed that ‘Tisha Porter’ actually is Queque Malpress, 19; ‘Rita Porter’ is Frank Porter, 21, and ‘Mary Lee Porter’ is Willie Moore, 21 (left to right).”
The show also includes an old public service announcement video from the Inglewood Police Department warning children about the dangers of homosexuals and hitchhiking. It is one of several examples of police treating homosexuality as a crime, though the Lavender organizers will also seek to highlight the LAPD’s evolution over the years, toward being a more gay friendly organization, in a Nov. 9 panel discussion (7:30-9 p.m.) with gay officers now in the department.
“If you just saw the exhibition you’d think, ‘Oh my God, the LAPD are the most horrible, evil people alive and for the gay community, I guess they were,” De Simone said. “But we wanted to have a panel showing they’ve come a long way, but also on the work that still needs to be done.”
The police panel is one of six events tied in with the exhibition. On Nov. 14, there will be a Downtown walking tour highlighting sites that played key roles in gay life. The following night, representatives of publications including the Advocate and Frontierswill highlight gay media. On Nov. 19, former state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the first openly gay official to serve in the state legislature, and gay rights activist Torie Osborn (before taking a position with the United Way this year, she worked in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office) will lead a LGBT political power discussion.
The two-week event closes with a masquerade party on Nov. 20.
“Nothing too raucous,” De Simone said of the closing night party. “But it’ll be a nice end to our celebration and maybe the start of something new, something bigger.”
Lavender Los Angeles is at The Exchange, 114 W. Fifth St., rootsofequality.org.
Contact Ryan Vaillancourt at ryan@downtownnews.com.
page 16, 11/09/2009