Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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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 tack in dealing with the LAPD. In a column with the byline “Mariposa de la Noche,” the paper noted that “summer is beach time,” and said that “cruising the beach studying the regional ‘wildlife’” was part of gay life—including “such little sea-beasties as crabs—a markedly unpopular subject; chicken-of-the-sea—constantly in great demand; and fish—popular mainly among biologists and dikes. Always a favorite study is anatomy. In fact many a bronzed body has been inspected and dissected on location, then picked up for further homework.” The paper recommended a “noteworthy Pacific playground catering to our royal society … Santa Monica State Beach, affectionately known as ‘Fag Beach.’ Whatever that means. Located cruisingly close to Chautauqua Blvd., State Beach offers much to the gay sea set … the attire is rather unrestricted.” But those cruising the beach had to be on alert for the LAPD: “The adjacent bathhouse is a definite no-no,” the column reported. “The Vice Squad has a fetish for tearooms, especially the one at State Beach.”17
Instead of boycotting Griffith Park, as Jerry Joachim and PRIDE requested in the first issue of the Advocate, a different group of activists—the Gay Liberation Front—declared the park the site for the first “Gay-In,” on May 30, 1968. The park had already been the site of a “Be-In” in February of the previous year, a public celebration of the counterculture—including a performance by the Doors. Now, instead of keeping the park the secret site of gay sex, it would become the public site of gay celebration. “Come and Cavort!” the leaflet said, “at the Gala Los Angeles Gay-In.” It identified the sponsors as the Los Angeles Advocate, One Incorporated (the publisher of ONE Magazine), Tangents, and a couple of lesser-known groups. And it called the event a “historic first, a gay day in the park.”18
Griffith Park is huge—4,000 acres—so the question for organizers was where to hold the Gay-In. They chose what one called the “stunningly liberationist” merry-go-round.19 The organizers intended the Gay-In as a “challenge to the police policy that effectively banned any public gathering of gays and lesbians.” Thus the Gay-In featured speeches and music and dancing, as well as booths where “professionals and activists offered free legal advice and other services designed to help gays and lesbians come out at work and home and fight … firing, eviction, or improper treatment by doctors and psychiatrists.”
The Advocate reported that “more than 1,000 Gays, and a number of startled straights, paid a visit to the event.” The group was “as diverse as gay life itself … There