Bohemian Los Angeles and The Making of Modern Politics (review)

Daniel Hurewitz's book is an example of scholars' multiple uses of oral history and the diverse ways they employ oral history methodology: sometimes central to the project, other times peripherally. While oral history is pivotal for documenting the affective or "inner lives" of people in communities, Hurewitz's narrators facilitate his project's larger history without his addressing oral history's importance. In the beginning of the book, he writes that interviews unexpectedly led him to the story of Julian Eltinge (a famous early-nineteenth-century female impersonator and vaudeville actor) as he attempted to learn about gay activists of the fifties. However, there is not any mention throughout the text of oral history as a method of research. This omission could have been intentional or perhaps irrelevant, if in the author's eyes the project is not necessarily oral history. Hurewitz's approach to oral history may not be orthodox, but it does help him construct a valuable rendition of Los Angeles and the development of radical politics.

Bohemian Los Angeles contends that identity politics originated before the Student Civil Rights Movement with the politicization of homosexuality and the rise of gay politics in Los Angeles, and it points to the Mattachine Society as one of the groups that began to see the connection between identity and politics. Hurewitz highlights the relationship between place, space, geography, and identity politics, examining how homosexual desire and politics came together through negotiations of the self and the politicization of sexual identity.

Seeing them as integral to the rise of this "bohemian" or deviant culture that so threatened, as he tells us, the fabric of Los Angeles, Hurewitz analyzes three developing communities: (1) the arts community, (2) the leftist community, specifically communist, and (3) "homosexuals." He focuses on Edendale, which he argues served as a third space, a bohemia or a marginal space, within the city boundaries. But Hurewitz only superficially refers to other areas of Los Angeles which may have also contributed to the overall development of a so-called "bohemian" culture in that city. Discussing the criminalization of queers and how Los Angeles functioned as a micro-example of the way queers became the enemy of the state, Hurewitz argues that the alleged dangers of communism became woven into Los Angeles political life, creating a political linkage between communism and perversion and instigating city-sponsored terrorism against queers. When Hollywood began silencing and censoring queers, inspiring the political valiancy of queer men in its social landscape, he demonstrates that leftist activism had deep roots in Los Angeles, and gay and lesbians were a part of that. Importantly, Hurewitz frames the development of a community identity within the spatial parameters of geography, reminding us of the often forgotten reality of a thriving and resisting gay community in Los Angeles.

Despite the claim (on the jacket) that Bohemian Los Angeles incorporates "fascinating oral histories," their usage is not explicit. Evidently, the interviews animate Hurewitz's project, and in conjunction with letters, legal documents, and photographs, the stories serve as a portal to the connection between these protagonists' inner lives and political lives. Without a clear methodology section, Hurewitz leaves questions of methods on the sidelines. Only in the epilogue does he engage the actual interview process that took place with some of his narrators, like Sueo Serisawa, Dorothy Healey, and Harry Hay. Here he shares some of the thoughts they had on the potentially ephemeral character of history and the deceptiveness of the present. In his Acknowledgments, he thanks the men and women who shared their tape-recorded stories: "Not all of them will live to see this book in print but I am hopeful that some portion of their memories continue in these pages" (343). Here Hurewitz references the importance that memory plays in telling community history, but the importance of those life histories and how they give shape to his story arrive too late in the...