Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (review)

The field of modern gay and lesbian American history emerged roughly in the late 1970s and has gradually matured over the past three decades. In the beginning we witnessed the appearance of sweeping accounts that tell national narratives, some of which are still analytically sophisticated and groundbreaking in terms of primary research. By the mid-1980s we already had Jonathan Ned Katz's collection Gay American History, Toby Marotta's The Politics of Homosexuality, and John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities.¹ By the early 1990s the literature had expanded to include Neil Miller's In Search of a Gay America, Alan Bérubé's Coming out under Fire, and Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers.²

Since then, however, the focus of the historiography has somewhat shifted to regional studies.³ In 1994 George Chauncey published a revised version of his doctoral dissertation, Gay New York, arguing that the heterosexual-homosexual binary is actually a "stunning recent creation" consolidated only by the mid-twentieth century.⁴ By reconstructing a vibrant and colorful gay male world in New York City prior to 1940, Chauncey has challenged the widespread assumption about the nonexistence of gay social life during the pre-Stonewall era. But many of us who are familiar with the literature would recall that, one year before the appearance of Chauncey's book, Elizabeth L. Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis had already published their study of the culture of working-class lesbian resistance in Buffalo, New York: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold.⁵

In the first decade of the twenty-first century we have, on the one hand, studies that continue to explore gay and lesbian communities in the northeastern regions of the United States: City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love by Marc Stein about Philadelphia and Provincetown by Karen Krahulik are two stellar examples.⁶ We have, on the other hand, studies that push the historiography in novel directions by looking at gay and lesbian life in other parts of the country. These include John Howard's Men like That about the American South, Peter Boag's Same-Sex Affairs about the Pacific Northwest, and Nan Boyd's Wide-Open Town about San Francisco.⁷ Both Boag's and Boyd's monographs unearth and contextualize the queer past on the West Coast. This "going west" historiographical preoccupation is most recently taken up by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons in their Gay L.A., a book for which many historians of sexuality have been waiting patiently since Chauncey's Gay New York.

Unlike Chauncey's work, however, readers will soon discover that a significant portion of Gay L.A. concentrates on the second half instead of the first half of the twentieth century. Also unlike Gay New York, Gay L.A. deals with both men and women. The book is divided into three parts, each containing four chapters, adding up to a total of twelve chapters plus a brief introduction and a short epilogue. The printed sources for the book include other secondary literatures and numerous archival materials such as old newspaper clippings, city council minutes, police ledgers, court transcripts, organizational papers, letters, pictures, and mementos. The book also significantly relies on interviews with approximately three hundred people, young and old and of many different races and ethnicities.

Based on a number of secondary sources, including clippings from the Los Angeles Times, the authors begin with a sweeping chapter about queer life in nineteenth-century L.A., with solid coverage of alternative gender practices in Native American tribes. But the book immediately moves into the 1930s Hollywood scene by the second chapter, which, despite the rush, actually sets up the tone of the book remarkably well. In this chapter we find a dazzling world of celebrity glamour and the historical origins of nonconforming gender and sexual orientations both on- and offstage in...