Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ fruit of gay organizing that was spurred by the Black Cat Tavern raid: in May 1969, Paul Lamport, the LA City councilman said to have been behind the New Year’s Eve raid, was voted out of office, in the nation’s first openly gay electoral campaign.³⁸ Lamport had been endorsed by the new LAPD chief, Tom Reddin, and had campaigned against gays in a district that included not only Hollywood but also Silver Lake and Echo Park, which together “contained perhaps the greatest concentration of gay population and gay businesses in the nation.”³⁹ Lamport blamed the Advocate, in part, for his defeat, and said the paper produced “a steady stream of filth and perversion”—indeed, the newspaper had vowed “to really swing an election” and defeat him.⁴⁰ (The Freep also campaigned against Lamport, who had condemned city officials for what he said was a “secret” program to “welcome an invasion of 100,000 hippies” to Los Angeles in summer 1967.)⁴¹ Bob Stevenson, the man who defeated him on the basis of gay support, died in office and was replaced by his widow Peggy, who also won the election after campaigning for gay votes. Lamport tried to return to the city council in the next election, in 1973, this time seeking gay votes, but was defeated. The district has had a gay rights supporter as its councilperson ever since.

      The LAPD confronted the third Gay-In on April 5, 1970, with a massive force, but the conclusion of the confrontation marked the beginning of a change. “The police really came to that one, really seriously,” Morris Kight remembered, showing up in riot gear, forming a line and brandishing batons, preparing to clear the park. He recalled speaking to the commander on the scene, telling him:

      If you want to cause a riot and hurt a lot of people including yourselves, that’s exactly what you are going to get … The crowd is having fun, nobody is violent, nobody is armed, nobody wishes to do any physical harm, they want to have fun, and your presence is offensive. Why don’t we agree that you will leave. I will go away and go back down and associate with the people, and you will quietly withdraw. Because if you don’t, you will have a violent riot here today.

      “They withdrew within twenty minutes,” Kight reported.⁴²

      The climax of the battle between gay L.A. and the LAPD came in June, on the first anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, when L.A. became the site of the nation’s first officially recognized gay pride parade. (New York had a march, but L.A. got a police permit for a parade, and the city closed Hollywood Boulevard to traffic for the event.) Morris Kight recalled that their first idea to commemorate Stonewall was to hold twenty-five simultaneous demonstrations located at key “symbols of oppression, repression and exploitation,” including churches, synagogues, schools, military recruiting stations, and of course police stations. Troy Perry had a different idea. At a meeting with Kight and Reverend Bob Humphries, he said, “This is Hollywood. Why don’t we just hold a parade?” Kight later recalled that he agreed with Perry’s idea to organize a single march down Hollywood Boulevard: “It’s a world-famous street and we wanted to be where the people were, where the media were, where the action was.”⁴³

      They went to the police commission to apply for a parade permit—which required a sponsoring organization. “We didn’t have an organization yet that was incorporated other than our church,” Perry recalled. Morris proposed they call it “Christopher Street West”—in honor of the Stonewall uprising a year earlier. Before the meeting with the police commission, Perry remembers, “we had agreed at first that we wouldn’t use the word homosexual until we had to.” Chief Ed Davis kept asking who they represented. “After about an hour, [the police were] getting nasty a little bit,” so Perry finally said, “We represent the homosexual community of Los Angeles”—a simple statement, but a historic one. “And with that, oh, my god, all hell broke loose … Chief Davis said, ‘Did you know that homosexuality was illegal in the state of California?’ I said, ‘No, sir, it’s not.’” The chief then told the commission that, as long as felony laws against oral copulation and sodomy were on the books, they “would be ill-advised to discommode the people to have a burglars’ or robbers’ parade—or a homosexuals’ parade.”⁴⁴

      At the end of the meeting, however, the police commission agreed to issue a permit—if the applicants could post two bonds, one for $1 million, the other for $500,000. The bonds, they were told, were “to pay the merchants whose windows are going to be broken out when people start throwing rocks at you all in the street.” “My God,” Perry recalled, “it was the Jews in Germany all over again. If a Jew ducked a rock and it broke out a window, the Jew had to pay for it. So they were doing the same thing with the queer community: the queers are gonna pay for it.” In addition, the commission said “you will post in cash the amount of $1,500 to pay for the policemen that it will take to protect you.” “We thanked them profusely,” Perry recalled, “and said we’d be back.”⁴⁵

      They went to attorney Herbert E. Selwyn, a longtime defender of gays in the courts and a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California. He met with the commission and persuaded them to drop the bond requirements—but they insisted on the requirement of a $1,500 payment for police protection. Selwyn and the ACLU took that issue to the California Superior Court, where the judge, Richard Schauer, declared: “These people are taxpayers like anybody else. They don’t have to put up any money to hold a parade. You don’t require it of other groups, you’re not going to require it of them.” He ordered the commission to issue the parade permit and ordered the police to protect the marchers as they would any other group, without charging them for protection.⁴⁶

      The first officially recognized gay pride parade in US history stepped off on Sunday afternoon, June 28, 1970, at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and McCadden Place, just east of Highland Avenue. Two thousand people showed up, Perry said, to “march, drive their floats, and walk their pets. I’ve never felt so empowered in my life.” And along the parade route, he recalled, “50,000 people showed up to watch us march. I’d never seen more hats and dark shades in my life!” (Meanwhile, back in New York, gay leaders had failed to get a parade permit “and had to march on the sidewalks, without any formation,” Perry recalled.)

      “The parade was incredible for its time,” Perry reflected. “We didn’t get the bands that we wanted, so my roommate, Willie Smith, drove the parade route in his VW minibus, playing World War II German marches from an amplification system he’d hooked up. Willie’s thinking? Since the Los Angeles police department treated us like the oppressed of WWII, they might actually enjoy the music and leave us alone.”⁴⁷

      The parade down Hollywood Boulevard “had a little bit of everything,” he said. The Society of Anubis took the lead with its float—they had 800 members, divided equally between gays and lesbians, plus a state charter stating their official purpose was to overturn unjust sex laws and “present to the public a true picture of the homosexual as a worthwhile member of society.” Another group carried a sign that said “Heterosexuals for Homosexual Freedom.” The parade included a guy with an Alaskan husky and a sign that read “We Don’t All Walk Poodles” (he led what Perry called “the pet-walking section”). A photograph of the guy and the dog was later published in a Time magazine article about “the new gay militancy.” The GLF of Los Angeles came down Hollywood Boulevard carrying banners and shouting, “Two, four, six, eight, gay is just as good as straight.” Perry recalled that a gay group from Orange County brought a large sign that read “Homosexuals for Ronald Reagan.” “I heard a woman on the sidewalk say, ‘I can forgive them for being homosexual, but I will never forgive them for supporting Reagan.’”

      And just in case people watching missed the point about fighting LAPD harassment, a float featured a man on a cross with a sign that read “In Memory of Those Killed by the Pigs.” Another group made a similar point with a different approach: a “flock of shrieking drag queens” appeared, “running every which way to escape club-wielding guys dressed as cops.”⁴⁸

      Troy Perry was asked, forty-three years later, what he remembered СКАЧАТЬ