It was not all Fellini-esque platoons of queer boys on our scooters racing through nighttime L.A.
#67: Love, West Hollywood edited by Chris Freeman and James J. Berg:I'm a white girl from New England, with a snooty college education that prepared me to teach English classes to other uptight Boston kids. To be discussing rumors of pubic lice in a dingy Sunset Boulevard motel, is not where I expected my life to take me.
--Karen Marie Christa Minns, "Streetwork L.A./Hollywood"
Synopsis: An anthology of memoirs by members of the Los Angeles LGBT community, exploring the city's civil rights history.
When I was just finishing up as an undergrad in 1995, the modern concept of regional literature, literature of place had just taken off, in California of all places, and a variety of graduate and adult-learner workshops on the topic were only just being offered in such exotic and nature-dominant places as Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia and Alberta. Which meant of course, that twenty or so years of Outward Bound students’ journals were being overlooked as prime fodder for this new movement.
Which was of course, the old regional literature movement (Sarah Orne Jewett’s Maine, Steinbeck’s California, Frost’s New England, etc etc degree in English and job as an admin) gussied up and with higher tuition fees.
Same cabin, different day.
But this is regional literature squared.
This anthology collects the memoirs of 36 members of the LGBT community who all write of their experiences in Los Angeles, specifically how their experiences intersect with their LGBT identities and the history of LGBT history in Los Angeles as a whole. Not just a regional literature focusing on one of the most famous cities in the world, but cross-indexing it with what contributor Dan Luckenbill refers to as “oral histories and memoirs [that] remain the primary resources for a culture that was hidden and even criminalized.”
The stories are expectedly fascinating and heartbreaking by turns. Lesbian playhouses, gay bathhouses, LGBT film festivals, woman-only football fields and the bar that sustains them, and “Free Venice”, a gay beach “between the first and second lifeguard towers just north of the [Pacific Ocean Park] Pavilion” where, in the early 70s, absolutely everyone was naked and frolicking in the surf with the partner of their choice.
The contributors represent a nice diversity of gay and lesbian voices, including a number of people of color. There’s only one bisexual story and one transgender piece and, sadly, they’re two of the more puzzling contributions, but overall, Alyson Books has compiled a remarkable quilt of American LGBT voices.
I always expect anthologies to be mixed in quality, but here I think there were only three pieces that didn’t captivate me from the get-go. And there are a couple true gems.
The collection opens with a brief (and I do mean brief) history of LGBT activity in Los Angeles dating back to the 1920s, penned by the anthology editors (“Remembering Forgotten Los Angeles”). I like that chance the editors took, putting their own voices up front in a piece that’s easily the least personal of the group. It’s a risk that pays off.
Other notable pieces:
“Streetwork: L.A./Hollywood” by Karen Marie Christa Minns: a moving piece about the author’s drug outreach work in 1982, serving hustling LGBT youth outside the world-famous Oki Dog;
“The Plush Pony” by Pat Alderete: where a Chicana dyke seeks acceptance in a varrio outside her own by playing and photographing a women’s football league in El Sereno;
Robin Podolsky’s incendiary “To Live Outside the Law You Must Be Honest”, a tale of activism in the era of California’s bigot-governor Pete Wilson;
and my personal favorite, “Gay is Good: An Essay Too Personal and Otherwise” by Winston Wilde, a coming-of-age tale that wanders all over the L.A. area (“En Nuestra Pueblo de la Senora de la Reina de Los Angeles, I have lived many lives: my years in Malibu with John, in the Hollywood Hills with Paul.”) and draws a poignant and vivid map of the author as a young gay man.
And therein lies the crux of the anthology’s power. L.A. is a network of vastly disparate neighborhoods connected by a common dream, the golden vision of, as the foreword promises, “community across wide geography…permanence in this city of transience.” Every place referred to in the pages is accompanied by its street listing, or where it is in reference to a notable street or cross-street. James Rex, a custom shirt shop on Sunset near Doheny; the Fox Venice theater, not far from the beach; the unfriendly territory of Orange County; a funky Victorian studio in Venice on Ozone and Pacific; the infamous 8709 bathhouse on West Third Street, “not technically in the West Hollywood city limits”.
This is how things are not just located but rooted in L.A., with landmark-evoking direction for the like-minded, a type of short-hand that indicates not just place but neighborhood, that mutable concept describing people who all inhabit one locale, either by accident or, more often than not in this anthology, by dedicated choice.
Or as fifteen-year-old lesbian GLASS (Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) graduate Eva S. writes, “From seeing my first tranny prostitute on Santa Monica Boulevard to becoming addicted to crystal meth at age fourteen-all that took place in West Hollywood.”
The other salient point of the collection was unexpected; nearly every contributor who spoke of the late 80s and early 90s described the rise of AIDS in nearly identical terms: so many friends and acquaintances dead that they nearly lost track.
Stop for a minute and think about that.
Think about how much death and dying it would take for you to arrive at that place where you simply lose count, where you can no longer keep the funerals straight. The outcry over HIV/AIDS infection has diminished with the rise of anti-viral medications and the Internet, bringing other causes to the forefront of people’s minds. But back when very little was known about the disease, it wrought a kind of destruction that’s hard to put out of mind, especially for the writers of these pieces.
A batch of incredible American voices, pieced together so they form a coherent and intriguing picture of the growth of a movement in one specific and unique place.
Alyson Books has published two other collections of citycentric LGBT history: one for New Orleans, one for San Francisco, specific to the Castro. You can bet I’ll be picking them both up.
Even if you choose not to, this one volume’s well worth a gander.
(x-posted to Three Dollar Bill)
--Karen Marie Christa Minns, "Streetwork L.A./Hollywood"
Synopsis: An anthology of memoirs by members of the Los Angeles LGBT community, exploring the city's civil rights history.
When I was just finishing up as an undergrad in 1995, the modern concept of regional literature, literature of place had just taken off, in California of all places, and a variety of graduate and adult-learner workshops on the topic were only just being offered in such exotic and nature-dominant places as Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, British Columbia and Alberta. Which meant of course, that twenty or so years of Outward Bound students’ journals were being overlooked as prime fodder for this new movement.
Which was of course, the old regional literature movement (Sarah Orne Jewett’s Maine, Steinbeck’s California, Frost’s New England, etc etc degree in English and job as an admin) gussied up and with higher tuition fees.
Same cabin, different day.
But this is regional literature squared.
This anthology collects the memoirs of 36 members of the LGBT community who all write of their experiences in Los Angeles, specifically how their experiences intersect with their LGBT identities and the history of LGBT history in Los Angeles as a whole. Not just a regional literature focusing on one of the most famous cities in the world, but cross-indexing it with what contributor Dan Luckenbill refers to as “oral histories and memoirs [that] remain the primary resources for a culture that was hidden and even criminalized.”
The stories are expectedly fascinating and heartbreaking by turns. Lesbian playhouses, gay bathhouses, LGBT film festivals, woman-only football fields and the bar that sustains them, and “Free Venice”, a gay beach “between the first and second lifeguard towers just north of the [Pacific Ocean Park] Pavilion” where, in the early 70s, absolutely everyone was naked and frolicking in the surf with the partner of their choice.
The contributors represent a nice diversity of gay and lesbian voices, including a number of people of color. There’s only one bisexual story and one transgender piece and, sadly, they’re two of the more puzzling contributions, but overall, Alyson Books has compiled a remarkable quilt of American LGBT voices.
I always expect anthologies to be mixed in quality, but here I think there were only three pieces that didn’t captivate me from the get-go. And there are a couple true gems.
The collection opens with a brief (and I do mean brief) history of LGBT activity in Los Angeles dating back to the 1920s, penned by the anthology editors (“Remembering Forgotten Los Angeles”). I like that chance the editors took, putting their own voices up front in a piece that’s easily the least personal of the group. It’s a risk that pays off.
Other notable pieces:
And therein lies the crux of the anthology’s power. L.A. is a network of vastly disparate neighborhoods connected by a common dream, the golden vision of, as the foreword promises, “community across wide geography…permanence in this city of transience.” Every place referred to in the pages is accompanied by its street listing, or where it is in reference to a notable street or cross-street. James Rex, a custom shirt shop on Sunset near Doheny; the Fox Venice theater, not far from the beach; the unfriendly territory of Orange County; a funky Victorian studio in Venice on Ozone and Pacific; the infamous 8709 bathhouse on West Third Street, “not technically in the West Hollywood city limits”.
This is how things are not just located but rooted in L.A., with landmark-evoking direction for the like-minded, a type of short-hand that indicates not just place but neighborhood, that mutable concept describing people who all inhabit one locale, either by accident or, more often than not in this anthology, by dedicated choice.
Or as fifteen-year-old lesbian GLASS (Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Services) graduate Eva S. writes, “From seeing my first tranny prostitute on Santa Monica Boulevard to becoming addicted to crystal meth at age fourteen-all that took place in West Hollywood.”
The other salient point of the collection was unexpected; nearly every contributor who spoke of the late 80s and early 90s described the rise of AIDS in nearly identical terms: so many friends and acquaintances dead that they nearly lost track.
Stop for a minute and think about that.
Think about how much death and dying it would take for you to arrive at that place where you simply lose count, where you can no longer keep the funerals straight. The outcry over HIV/AIDS infection has diminished with the rise of anti-viral medications and the Internet, bringing other causes to the forefront of people’s minds. But back when very little was known about the disease, it wrought a kind of destruction that’s hard to put out of mind, especially for the writers of these pieces.
A batch of incredible American voices, pieced together so they form a coherent and intriguing picture of the growth of a movement in one specific and unique place.
Alyson Books has published two other collections of citycentric LGBT history: one for New Orleans, one for San Francisco, specific to the Castro. You can bet I’ll be picking them both up.
Even if you choose not to, this one volume’s well worth a gander.
(x-posted to Three Dollar Bill)