Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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or workers or women.” But it also meant forming coalitions, recognizing that “not every straight is our enemy. And face it: we can’t change Amerika alone … it’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.” As for the anti-war movement, he wrote, “we can look forward” to working with them “if they are able to transcend their anti-gay and male chauvinist patterns. We support [anti-war protestors], but only as a group.” Wittman’s “Manifesto” concluded that the “imperatives for gay liberation” started with “free[ing] ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self defense and political activity, initiate counter community institutions.” That’s exactly what the gay movement in L.A. was doing.
A year and a half after the Black Cat Tavern protest, in August 1968—but still a year before Stonewall—gays in L.A. organized another, bolder, protest against the LAPD: a flower power march on the police station where men arrested in another bar raid were being held. The Patch was a gay bar in Wilmington, run by Lee Glaze, a comedian known as “The Blond Darling.” The police had told Glaze he had to prohibit “not only drag but also groping, male-male dancing, and more than one person at a time in the restrooms.” Glaze would play “God Save the Queen” on the jukebox to warn customers whenever the cops showed up. But one weekend night, when the bar was “packed with 500 patrons and the dancing was wild,” the vice squad “burst in with half a dozen uniformed policemen behind them.” They stopped the music, demanded IDs, and started arresting men they said had been dancing together. Glaze jumped up on the stage and shouted, “It’s not against the law to be homosexual, and it’s not a crime to be in a gay bar!” The raid, the Advocate reported, had become a political rally, mostly because of “the solid display of defiance … by Lee Glaze,” whose speech was “a minor masterpiece” that “infected the audience with some of his own courage.” Glaze announced the bar would pay bail and provide a lawyer for the two men who had been arrested, and a dozen marchers set out for the jail.32
The marchers stopped along the way at a flower shop run by one of the bar patrons, and, Faderman and Timmons report, they left with “all the gladioli, mums, carnations, roses, and daisies.” They arrived at the LAPD Harbor Division station bearing huge bouquets and posed for pictures under the “Los Angeles Police Department” sign. One of the marchers later recalled: “When we arrived at the police station, Lee told the officer at the desk, ‘We’re here to get our sisters out.’ The officer asked, ‘What are your sisters’ names?’ When Lee said, ‘Tony Valdez and Bill Hasting,’ the officer had this surprised look on his face—and called for backup.”33
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There was another fruit of the protests against the LAPD raid on the Glade: two months later, Troy Perry, one of the participants, who had been a Southern Pentecostal minister, started the world’s first openly gay religious congregation—the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). “Lee showed me you don’t have to be afraid of the police,” Perry said. “Once that happened, it encouraged me to become a gay activist.” And it started when a friend of Troy Perry named Tony got arrested by the LAPD at the Patch. The two had been dancing to “La Bamba,” when the police arrived and handcuffed Tony and another man. Both were charged with lewd conduct and hauled off to jail. Perry recalled his feeling at the time: “It was so unjust.”34
“It took me until 5:30 AM to get Tony released,” Perry recalled. “It was all due to delaying tactics by the police. The booking procedure, the mug shots, the fingerprinting, just took hours. It was part of the harassment that took place far too often against the gay community in those days.” When Tony got out, he told Perry, “I’ve never been arrested before for anything in my life. Never! And I’m 26 years old now. The police kept telling me they are going to call my employer and tell him I’m gay. I’ll probably lose my job. You know, Troy, I’ve learned one thing from this experience: People don’t really care. Nobody likes a queer.”
“I tried to be helpful,” Perry recalled, telling Tony, “Even if people don’t, I’m still convinced that God cares about you.” But Tony “just laughed bitterly. ‘Come on, Troy,’ he said. ‘God doesn’t care about me.’” Troy Perry went home alone, and prayed: “Lord, we need a special church … if you want such a church started, just let me know when.” Then, “a still, small voice in my mind’s ear spoke, and the voice said, ‘Now.’”35
Thus the MCC was founded to respond to the deeper emotional damage done by the LAPD. Starting with a group of twelve in Los Angeles in October 1968, by 2011 it had 172 churches throughout the world, including parishes in forty-six of the fifty states. It owns $100 million worth of property, and “is probably the world’s largest employer of gays and lesbians.”36
Perry announced its foundation in an ad in the Advocate, and the first gay worship service was held in his living room in Huntington Park in October, 1968. At that first service he told the gathering what MCC “was going to be”: a “three-pronged Gospel” consisting of “Salvation,” “Community,” and “Christian Social Action.” “We would stand up for all our rights, secular and religious, and we would start fighting the many forms of tyranny that oppressed us.” Thus from the first the MCC was committed to action. A parishioner later recalled, “Someone would call a protest, against … the Hollywood police for discriminatory policies—and then our telephone trees would be buzzing, and 80 per cent of the people who showed up at the demonstration would be from the Metropolitan Community Church.”37
Another 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