Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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Название: Before AIDS
Автор: Katie Batza
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: Politics and Culture in Modern America
isbn: 9780812294996
isbn:
Despite the community center’s conventional structure, the oppression sickness it sought to address resonated with the radical gay liberation rhetoric and politics in Los Angeles. The center would provide a place from which the gay community could attack its oppression and the larger oppressive society from many angles, while simultaneously creating a politically, physically, and mentally healthier community.37 Armed with the lengthy proposal and the enthusiasm of other GLF members, Kilhefner and Kight rented a rickety old Victorian house at 1614 Wilshire Boulevard and formally opened the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center in the fall of 1971.38 In keeping with their vision of the organization, the men immediately began the incorporation and tax-exemption processes, which lasted over a year.39 At the same time, they remained dedicated to their radical politics by placing themselves at the forefront of public protests and actions. In describing the politics of the center once it opened and the fervor of its volunteers and patrons, Kilhefner reminisced, “We had picket signs, must have had one hundred picket signs, almost for any occasion. So somebody would call and [report instances of homophobia] and within twenty-four hours we’d have picket signs … picketing. We were fighting back fast and instantly because this was movement building for us, community building for us, consciousness raising for us.”40 The Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center thus navigated the difficult path of being relevant to and worthy of support from two opposing political bodies, the state and the radical gay community. It was this combination that gave the center its distinctive character.
Beyond its emphasis on gay liberation, the birth and evolution of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center also reflects the strong radical political tradition of Los Angeles itself. In the decades immediately preceding the founding of the center, Los Angeles was a hotbed for the leftist and communist popular front and proved fertile ground for a number of radical organizations, including the Mattachine Society, the first national political organization for “homophiles” that emanated out of Los Angeles in the early 1950s.41 Starkly different from the political culture of Boston, the Los Angeles radical political tradition primed both the city and activists for the work and vision of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center.
A focus on health was central to the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center’s success in gaining political and financial support from both the state and the gay community, just as it had been for the Fenway Community Health Clinic of Boston. Among center activists and patrons, health embodied a wide range of issues that went far beyond physical illnesses and spoke to a larger political oppression. The state, on the other hand, had a very limited notion of health wherein statistics on disease contacts and treatments carried much more weight than talk of political oppression.42 The Gay VD Clinic was one of the few services within the Gay Community Services Center in which these two understandings of health overlapped.43 The clinic consisted of a series of three rooms. The first was a small room on the first floor in which people could wait, and nurses could conduct intake exams. The second was literally a closet that volunteers had converted, by removing its door and installing a light, into a laboratory for drawing blood and taking swabs. The third room was a screened-in porch with sheets hung up to provide privacy for exams. Despite its ramshackle appearance, the clinic passed inspection in October 1972 and immediately began offering services.44
Figure 4. The first Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center building was an old Victorian home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, “Gay Community Services Center Brochure,” box 3, folder 34, L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Records, Coll2007-010, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.
Dr. Ben Teller, an independently wealthy “hippie doctor” who had just moved back to the United States after working with the Centers for Disease Control in West Africa, served as the main point person for the clinic’s development and subsequent operation.45 At the request of Kilhefner and Kight, Teller agreed to share his license and liability insurance with the center and was given free rein to build the VD clinic as he saw fit. He recounted his vision in an interview:
It would be a free clinic … run on donations … where gay people [men] could come and feel totally comfortable talking about their sexuality and … sexually transmitted diseases. They didn’t have to have any shame or reservation explaining what was going on…. The waiting room would be filled with literature that would be relevant to them … it would be a place where professionals and paraprofessionals as well as patients could be totally open and honest about themselves and therefore promote good gay health…. That was the vision.46
Upon opening in the fall of 1972, the clinic came to embody much of Teller’s vision. The clinic was furnished with a “hodgepodge” of mostly thrift store purchases from the local Goodwill with a few high-quality pieces that had been donated by a wealthy contributor.47 Licensed gay doctors, nurses, and lab technicians volunteered to staff the clinic, which was entirely volunteer-run for the first few years.48 Teller offered, “The effect [of being able to work in an openly gay environment] on the professionals was I think as great as it was on the patients.” The willingness of everyone to work for free “testifies to the fact that the professionals were getting something out of it.”49
The politics of the clinic were the same as the rest of the programs housed in the Gay Community Services Center—the Gay VD Clinic was designed to challenge an oppressive heterocentric society. Teller explained that opening the clinic was “a political statement that there was a need for this and it could be easily understood.”50 In addition to challenging a heterosexist society and ignorant mainstream medical establishment, the clinic also fostered gay community building, both among volunteers and patients. The walls were covered in posters depicting two gay men in a variety of positions that read “Don’t Give Him Anything but Love,” and informational pamphlets covered the waiting-room tables.51 Signs that Teller hung prominently around the clinic pleaded, “This clinic runs on love and money, please give some of both.” He reminisced, “It was very much hippie and inspired, Gay Liberation Front inspired, hippie, I would say leftists, chaotic.”52
Despite the expense to the early radical ideal of critiquing the state, the center’s founders argued that, in order to provide the services the community needed, government funding was essential. Local, state, and federal grants allowed the entire center to grow, even though it funded relatively few of the center’s expanding program offerings. Services like the men’s VD program, the handful of alcohol and drug programs, and the interim housing program that obtained and maintained government (municipal, state, and federal) funding also brought in the most donations from community members.53 Thus, while government funds benefited only a small number of programs, the donation revenue those programs generated was then shared among all the center’s programs. The many rap groups and social events offered by the center required little in the way of funding, and many survived solely on the amounts allocated from the general donation funds.54 As a result of the center’s many programs, it quickly became, according to one person involved, “a very, very active place…. I remember being in their big living room with at least one СКАЧАТЬ