Long before there was a visible, established gay movement, the many bisexual and gay people working in the film industry, both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, made Los Angeles a very queer town. But gay life wasn’t limited to Greta Garbo and George Cukor, Hollywood’s rich and famous. Like other major port cities, Los Angeles was a popular destination for gay service personnel returning from World War II. Other lesbians and gay men, too, came to Los Angeles and similar urban areas after the war to find freedom from parents and family members.

Edith Eyde arrived in L.A. in 1945 from Northern California and discovered a community of “gay gals” who socialized at same-sex clubs. In her down time as a secretary at a movie studio, Eyde (under the pseudonym Lisa Ben, an anagram of “lesbian”) started publishing the first U.S. lesbian magazine, which she called Vice Versa. She wrote all the content, typed out 10 copies using carbon paper, and distributed the issues to her friends, instructing them to pass them on to other lesbians. In her fourth issue in September 1947, she wrote that “never before have circumstances and conditions been so suitable for those of lesbian tendencies.”

The first gay male publication in the country (not counting two issues of Friendship and Freedom, published in Chicago in the 1920s) came out of Los Angeles a few years after Vice Versa. ONE got started in 1953, publishing an essay by Dale Jennings, a local activist, who had fought his entrapment in a Los Angeles park by a plainclothes policeman and was acquitted in a landmark trial. A few years later, ONE was itself the object of a historic trial. The magazine was harassed by the U.S. postal service, which in 1954 confiscated all its copies for being “obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy.” The seizure and subsequent trial led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision four years later, preventing the postal service from censoring homophile publications.

Almost a decade later, in 1967, Los Angeles was once again the birthplace of an important gay publication, The Advocate. The magazine began as the newsletter of a local homophile group called PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education), but by 1970 it had gone national in its coverage and circulation.

In addition to fostering gay publications, L.A. was home to some significant early gay political organizing. In 1950, four gay men began meeting at the Silver Lake home of Harry Hay, a married man who had recently begun acting on his homosexual desires. Hay, his lover Rudi Gernreich (later famous as the designer of the topless swimsuit), Chuck Rowland, and Bob Hull founded the Mattachine Society, one of the country’s first gay organizations. By 1954, Mattachine had spread to other cities around the country, providing the base of gay-rights activism until the Stonewall Rebellion 15 years later.

Following Stonewall, there was an explosion of local gay-rights groups and organizations in L.A., including a local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front and the first successful gay community center in the country. But tensions between gay men and lesbians also led to the creation of a separate, vibrant lesbian community in the area. L.A. lesbians founded not only women-only coffeehouses, publications, a bookstore, and health services, but also the landmark Women’s Building, a feminist cultural space that opened in 1973 and was the site of a groundbreaking exhibit of lesbian artwork seven years later-the Great American Lesbian Art Show.

Perhaps gay Los Angeles is best-known, though, for the incorporation of the city of West Hollywood. The neighborhood had once been home to silent-film stars like Alla Nazimova, whose famous residential colony, the Garden of Allah, was located there. Later, in the 1960s, West Hollywood’s cheap rents drew members of the hippie counterculture and the rock music scene. Gay men (and some lesbians) active in the gay liberation movement started migrating there in the 1970s, attracted by the affordable housing and the neighborhood’s unincorporated status, which placed it beyond the reach of the Los Angeles Police Department. By mid-decade, West Hollywood had become a bona fide gay ghetto nicknamed “Boystown,” home to more than three-quarters of all of L.A.’s gay-owned businesses, by some estimates. In 1984, West Hollywood officially incorporated as a separate city, electing a largely gay city council and an openly lesbian mayor.

Also in the mid-’80s, with the presence of the film and television industries in Los Angeles, the local gay and lesbian community emerged at the forefront of gay media activism. ACT UP/Los Angeles (joined in the ‘90s by Queer Nation) staged several high-profile protests of “AIDSphobia” in films during the Academy Awards ceremonies. In addition, the Los Angeles chapter of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (which started in New York to protest antigay print coverage) worked to bring more positive depictions of gay people to the big and small screens.

For further reading:

D’Emilio, John. 1983. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kenney, Moira Rachel. 2001. Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.