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Gay LA: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians
by Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons
Basic Books
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Gay LA: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians-- by Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons (Basic Books, 464 pages, $29.95)

Tinsel Town. La-la land. The Great Satan. Well, all right. It's not really called "The Great Satan"-- that's the term the Ayatollah Khomeini used to describe the US as a whole. But certainly he had Los Angeles in mind. And really... can you get gayer than Los Angeles?

Gay LA: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, is a great social, political, and cultural history of lesbian and gay life in Los Angeles. A major contribution to GLBT studies, it's as fun as it is informative, a perfect cross between an entertaining popular social history and a scholarly exploration. This should be no surprise. Faderman is the author of the groundbreaking Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, a history of lesbianism in US culture, and her autobiography Naked in the Promised Land. Timmons is best known as a journalist and the author of The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement. Both writers know their material deeply but also have the ability to convey a mass of facts and analysis in clear, compelling prose for readers whose knowledge of queer history ranges from minimal to spacious.

W

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hile Gay LA does not have an academic feel, the research that went into it is obvious. The sweeping overview is densely packed with wonderful detail and incident.

Things don't begin well when the Gabrielino Indian village of Yang-na-- which would eventually become Los Angeles-- was decimated by the Spanish conquistadors, who were particularly annoyed that the natives "are addicted to the unspeakable vice of sinning against nature." So even from its beginnings LA is pretty queer and other people don't like that at all. This, in a sense, is a nutshell history of the city in which freedom was often at war with repression. Although, in the end, the former mostly wins out.

Faderman and Timmons carefully trace this tension over the decades. Women, for instance, found economic freedom in the city through careers in business, real estate, and professions such as medicine. When the 1930s happen-- and Hollywood is in its heyday-- sins against nature become an obsession of the leading lights of the motion picture industry and we see another backlash against queer freedom. Faderman and Timmons are particularly good in describing how lavender Hollywood was. Not only do they give us the usual list of gay stars-- Cukor, Garbo, Dietrich, William Haines-- but add some new ones including Spring Byington, Hope Emerson, and Spencer Tracy. But while name-dropping is always fun, their point here is that the gay presence in Hollywood was a beacon of lavender light for the rest of queer America.

And indeed, while other cities had their public geography of homosexuality-- New York's Greenwich Village and Harlem being, perhaps, the most famous-- Los Angeles was certainly in the vanguard as well. In the 1940s and 50s gay public places such as Bitch Beach and Muscle Beach became nationally famous and gave birth to a public physique culture, as documented in magazines such as Physique Pictorial which, like Hollywood films, broadcast homosexual images and idea across the country. This is precisely the sort of culture that would produce a radical change in lesbian and gay life-- and did with the birth of the Mattachine Society in 1950, which began the modern gay rights movement. Indeed, Los Angeles was usually in the forefront of gay politics-- in 1967, two years before Stonewall, gay men rioted and protested in the streets for several days after police raided the Black Cat bar. Whether describing the rise of disco and the emergence of the newly forming religious-right campaigns of Anita Bryant and John Briggs, Gay LA perfectly balances popular culture with politics.

While some of the material here will be familiar to GLBT readers-- many will have heard, for instance, of Bib Mizer and the Athletic Model Guild-- a great deal will be fresh, unexplored territory. From the bitter strike in 1975 for an employee's union at the Los Angles gay community center to a 1991 queer activist invasion of the Oscar nominations press conference to protest the film Basic Instinct, Faderman and Timmons have mined great material that they spin out beautifully.

There's always been a male bias in popular gay history books, but the authors break new ground here detailing the work of lesbian (and non-white) communities. There is a great deal of time spent on the vital role that lesbians and people of color have played in LA-- and by extension, US-- history. Helen Sandoz tried to bridge the political and cultural gap between gay men and lesbians as well as make working-class women and men feel comfortable in mostly middle-class homophile groups. She receives more space here than in most other histories. And the rise of LGBT groups of color in the 1980s, such as United Lesbians of African Heritage-- a comprehensive history of which has yet to be written-- are detailed as well.

Faderman and Timmons have produced the first important gay history of Los Angeles, rich both in content and in the eloquence and erudition with which it is presented.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com