Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ