Out & About :: The History of Gay LA
Have you ever wondered where the term ’Lipstick Lesbian’ came from? Perhaps you’d like to know the location of the bathhouse where closeted Hollywood stars from the past met to satisfy their urges? What about the tragic outcome of the transsexual solicited by Eddie Murphy? Did you know that one of the first gay movement meetings was held not in West Hollywood - known in LA as "BoysTown" - but the much sleepier east-side neighborhood of Silverlake?
If you’ve ever found yourself pondering the history of gay LA - or in need of cocktail-party-homo-trivia - you’ll love the highly entertaining and hugely informative Out & About Tour.
Having made its Hollywood debut around Halloween 2009, the gay-centric Out & About Tour escorts "pink" participants (and our interested friends and families) through West Hollywood, making its way to downtown Los Angeles, with pokes into the nearby Echo Park and Silverlake areas. Throughout the trip, tour-goers learn about the history of gay Los Angeles - things that happened long before many of us ever stepped foot in LA (or, in some cases, were even born!) - through important and entertaining facts and stories... and perhaps a Mimosa!
Always up for expanding our base of knowledge EDGE got a firsthand look at the tour, along with an interview with Out & About founder, Jim Anzide, who also served as the tour guide. Far from your typically boring history lesson, Anzide has effectively created a three-hour excursion that not only leaves participants with a bit more knowledge about the city’s - and their - gay roots, but also leaves them entertained.
Inspired by politics... and traffic!
After the emotional rollercoaster following the 2008 Presidential election and Proposition 8 debacle (the voters of California narrowly passed a law taking away the right of same-sex couples to marry), Anzide realized how much recent political events "just changed people’s lives, because we were fighting for our very existence as homosexuals." And then there was the infamous - and always challenging - LA traffic.
"It was January of (2009) and I was literally sitting at an intersection in Hollywood, and found myself looking at a Starline tour bus, a Hollywood Star bus, and the hearse that does the Hollywood Death tour. I just looked around and said ’Why don’t the gays have their own fucking tour?’ I was so angry at that point; I felt like gays were being mistreated in every way, shape and form."
The idea for a tour focused entirely on gay history in Los Angeles may have been born at a Hollywood intersection, but Anzide was still skeptical about making it a reality.
"I thought maybe there wasn’t enough gay information in Los Angeles but then I was blown away by the sheer amount of it. We barely scratch the surface in a three-hour tour."
One source that proved invaluable was the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, which is located on the University of Southern California campus and the largest research library and archive devoted to the concerns of the LGBT community.
"It’s unreal. (The Archives) literally have all the memorabilia, like the FAGOTS STAY OUT sign - misspelling and all! - from Barney’s Beanery, notes from the first Mattachine meeting at Harry Hay’s house, anything and everything you can imagine is there."
Another important artifact housed at ONE is the original Damron guides, written by Bob Damron. Anzide told EDGE that when he was doing research for the tour, he discovered that Damron was shocked at how far those guides have come since their creation.
"When you see the evolution of something like that, where it was really underground secret society stuff, and now it’s one of the biggest, well-published gay travel books in the world, but it started out as like a matchbook-size, secret little pocketbook, and you could hope that the cops wouldn’t find it if you got picked up."
Anzide dove into the research and found more than he ever could have imagined; he likened launching the first tour last fall as giving birth to a child.
"I literally did the research from January [2009] straight through. I’m always reading stuff, but the bulk of it was done over nine months. It was a real gay pregnancy and we birthed it on Halloween."
Next page :: More gay history... and cocktails!
