Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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Название: Set the Night on Fire
Автор: Mike Davis
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Зарубежная публицистика
isbn: 9781784780241
isbn:
Morris Kight, a week after the parade, described it as “joyful, folksy, funky, and happy,” noting that the parade “received more public notice than all the homosexual activities in the past combined. Sidewalks crammed with people came to watch.” The “friendliness” of onlookers was wonderful, he said, but the thing that “counts for most, is that Gays are a lot taller, a lot stronger, a lot freer, a lot more honest with themselves.”50
That first gay pride march opened the door to the flowering of gay L.A. The next year, 1971, the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center opened, the nation’s first and largest of its kind. Of course, there were plenty of attacks and setbacks—in 1973 the MCC at Twenty-Second and Union was burned down—and of course the AIDS crisis lay ahead. But defeating the LAPD and stepping out in the sunlight on Hollywood Boulevard that June day of 1970 marked a turning point for gay L.A. Kight, for one, called it the happiest moment of his life.51
What about the women? The story up to this point is almost all about men. However, photos of the Black Cat Tavern protest show several young women among the demonstrators. Women attended the first meetings of the Metropolitan Community Church; they celebrated at the first Gay-In in Griffith Park; they marched in the first gay pride parade down Hollywood Boulevard. And of course, women had been arrested by the LAPD in raids on lesbian bars. The crime for which gay women were arrested in the Fifties and Sixties was “masquerading” or “impersonation”—wearing masculine clothing. At the beginning of the Second World War—the era of Rosie the Riveter, who wore men’s work clothes—LA Mayor Fletcher Bowron asked the city council to ban the wearing of pants by women who worked at city hall; he said that it was worse to see “masculine women much more than feminine traits in men,” and that the city should not allow the war to “undermine those things we like to consider feminine and ladylike.”52 The courts had declared in 1950 that laws prohibiting women from wearing men’s clothes were unconstitutional, but police raids on lesbian bars continued in the 1960s, Faderman and Timmons report, with the LAPD vice squad arresting women on charges of drunkenness or prostitution. But the leadership and organization of the gay movement in L.A. up to 1970, and the editors and writers for the gay magazines, were virtually all male. It was not until 1971, Faderman and Timmons conclude, that “both ‘gay women’ and ‘lesbian feminists’ came to the conclusion that “women had to do it for themselves.”53 That’s a different story, a story about the Seventies. The story of the gay movement up to 1970 is thus a story about men as leaders and organizers.
Historians of gay L.A. always emphasize that the movement started in L.A. “before Stonewall”; it was host to the first protest march, the first publication of the Advocate, the first gay church, the first invocation of “pride,” the first official gay parade. But why? Why would gays organize first in L.A. rather than New York? In part, the answer requires understanding the difference between the LAPD and the NYPD. The LAPD treatment of gays was worse—more systematic, more thorough, and more relentless—because the LA police were not corrupt. It seems paradoxical, or ironic, at first, but it makes sense: in New York City, the gay bars were run by the Mafia, and the Mafia paid off the police to leave them alone most of the time and provide advance warning of raids. The advance warning was to permit the bartenders to remove most of the liquor so it wouldn’t be confiscated, but it also meant that regulars could be warned and only a few random patrons would be arrested. According to Martin Duberman, “a patrolman would stop by Stonewall once a week to pick up the envelopes filled with cash—including those for the captains and desk sergeants, who never collected their payoffs in person. The total cash dispensed to the police each week came to about two thousand dollars.”54
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