Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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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 hundred people in there at any one time in the different rooms.”55
Government funding allowed existing offerings to grow in size, strength, and quality. Within a few short years, the center outgrew the dilapidated mansion on Wilshire Boulevard, moving in 1975 to a new and larger location at 1213 North Highland in the gay neighborhood of West Hollywood.56 By 1978, the center provided services to 13,600 people per month and obtained roughly $750,000 in government funding. The funds came from many government sources, ranging from local to federal, including the Greater Los Angeles Area Community Action Agency, the Los Angeles County Department of Urban Affairs, the United States Department of Health, the Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council, and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act.57 Part of the center’s success reflected its greater access to local funding through Los Angeles County than other gay clinic counterparts in other cities, but its intentional design as an organization that would be palatable and attractive to government funding at all levels was an even more important factor.
In achieving their objective of becoming a strong institution that provided a wide array of social services to Los Angeles gays and lesbians, the center’s founders were well served by their choice to seek and accept state funding. By 1976, the center consisted of three buildings: one for a temporary residential program for gay parolees, another for the center’s residential rehabilitation program, and the third housing the actual center. In addition, the center offered a wide and growing set of more than two dozen services ranging from health clinics to rap groups to job training and placement programs to a secondhand store.58 In 1975 the center served over one thousand people. Patron demographics show that the center attracted people of nearly every age and race with roughly 40 percent of service recipients being female.59 By 1978, the men’s VD clinic alone accounted for more than fifteen thousand visits annually to the center.60
The center’s combination of radical politics and conventional structure proved a potent political elixir for Los Angeles because of the local political meanings and tactics associated with gay liberation. Bolstered by a radical, robust, and preexisting politics, the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center