Conserving L.A.’s Queer Eden(dale)
Trudi Sandmeier [00:08]: Hello! This is Save As, a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier.
Cindy Olnick [00:18]: And I’m Cindy Olnick. So Trudi, today’s episode addresses LGBTQ heritage, which in itself isn’t really new to heritage conservation, but it manifests in such different ways in different cities. And it’s great to learn more about LA’s heritage specifically.
Trudi Sandmeier [00:35]: LA has a really interesting LGBTQ history, and Rafael is really the perfect person to try and talk about this issue. He is passionate about this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that he’s part of this community. And so in heritage conservation, we’ve only really recently begun to formalize the designation of LGBTQ landmarks and to really create a framework for understanding that history and being able to talk about it in a formalized way.
The first landmark on the National Register of Historic Places was only put there in 1999, and that was the Stonewall Inn in New York. And in fact a lot of the really important moments in LGBTQ history really happened in Los Angeles. So our story has been kind of under-told. And so Rafael’s thesis is great because he’s examining the path to formal designation for sites like this, ones that worked and ones that didn’t.
Cindy Olnick [01:44]: Yeah. I like how he not only talks about the heritage itself, but he discusses the complexities of designating LGBTQ sites at the local level specifically.
Trudi Sandmeier [01:54]: Here’s producer Willa Seidenberg in conversation with recent USC grad Rafael Fontes.
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Willa Seidenberg [02:02]: What led you to pursue the thesis topic that you did on preserving LGBTQ history in Los Angeles?
Rafael Fontes [02:12]: As a gay man, my lack of knowledge about LGBTQ history kept bothering me at some level and I really wanted to learn more about it. And I thought that choosing a thesis topic dealing with LGBTQ history or in this case, heritage conservation, would be a great way to really force myself to look closely at that kind of material and those kinds of stories and get a better understanding of it.
Willa Seidenberg [02:38]: Can you explain what Edendale is, because I don’t think most people would know what you mean by that term?
Rafael Fontes [02:44]: The word Edendale was a word that came up in the research and it really refers to a part of the city of Los Angeles that today most people know is Silver Lake and Echo Park. And it really is the area where most of my case studies are situated. I chose to do it, in large part because I was talking about a historical period or writing about a historical period where that name was still used. It was an appropriate name mostly because it was evocative as well. The fact that ‘Eden’ sort of implies that this is a place where something originates from, where something begins, was very useful. And it sounds really good.
Willa Seidenberg [03:28]: Exactly. I don’t know why we don’t still use it, it’s a nice term. So one of the things that you emphasize in your thesis is that doing research and trying to get LGBTQ sites preserved for the record is difficult because there hasn’t been a lot of research into the history of LGBTQ communities in Los Angeles, or I guess all over the country, and a lot of that history is sort of invisible. What kind of challenges did that have for you in trying to do the research?
Rafael Fontes [04:09]: You know, if I start my answer by saying everybody has a history, that’s not a statement that anybody would argue with, right? The issue really becomes when you’re looking at a certain area or if you’re going to talk about a certain community, you need to understand some communities have more access to the tools for recording their history than others, right? Or in the case of LGBTQ people and queer people generally, often times those histories are hidden in some cases for good reason. And so in some cases, those histories were suppressed, either by the people who lived them or in the instances where there is evidence or there are stories available, people who have come across them have either chosen to ignore them or have hidden them again because they either didn’t agree with what the subject matter was talking about or just out of a sense of not really believing that it was important enough to save.
Willa Seidenberg [05:11]: One of the things that really struck me in reading your thesis was the fact that other events in particularly places like San Francisco and New York have been much more recognized by a lot of people nationally and Los Angeles doesn’t necessarily figure into those publicly known events or places. Yet we have a really rich history and tradition of LGBTQ history here. Why do you think that is? Why do you think LA hasn’t had that recognition?
Rafael Fontes [05:52]: During the really intense period, and I’m referring specifically in this case to the gay liberation period of the late sixties running through the 1970s, a lot of the really big media centers were in New York. Los Angeles of course did have Hollywood, the issue is that Hollywood and television produced content that’s highly regulated and that usually is done for entertainment. And for a lot of those reasons I think LGBTQ issues were often avoided in movies, in films, of that period.
So if you had newspapers writing about, for instance, a gay riot in the case of Stonewall in New York, that received media attention right away because it happened in New York. And my second case study centers on a protest that was held in response to an instance of police brutality. The Los Angeles Times would not cover it, essentially the only newspapers that covered that were the LA Free Press, which was kind of a leftist or progressive outlet.
Even as the twentieth century drew to a close, I think again, by that point, New York and San Francisco had sort of taken hold of the narrative. And in most people’s minds, when they associated LGBTQ people with a movement or as a group in general, they were already now thinking of Greenwich Village or the Castro, because that’s kind of where a lot of media attention after the gay liberation period really centered. Certainly before the advent of the internet, most people could only depend on what they read in the news.
Willa Seidenberg [07:41]: So that gives true meaning to that phrase that journalism is the first draft of history.
Rafael Fontes [07:48]: Sure, absolutely. Yeah.
Willa Seidenberg [07:50]: In Los Angeles, West Hollywood has been known as sort of the center of gay life, but you didn’t choose to focus on that part of the city. How come?
Rafael Fontes [08:02]: Well initially, when I sort of decided to commit to this topic, I almost assumed that I would write about West Hollywood if only because, like you said, and whenever I sort of mentioned this to other people, immediately West Hollywood would come up, and at the time there was another colleague in our program who was already doing research that was going in that direction. So that was one reason why I sort of took a step back and thought, well, LA is a huge city, and now that I found myself here, I realized that actually there’s a lot more to this city than just one sort of specific area. The city is large and multicentric.
If LGBTQ life is informed by the broader society around it, it occurred to me that I would find other stories if I looked and the more I began to read, the more that became really clear to me, is that much of the early history didn’t really happen in West Hollywood. That a lot of the West Hollywood history really I wouldn’t describe so much as mid-century as late twentieth century. Which, if we talk about heritage conservation in relation to preservation, at the national level there’s that 50-year rule that, well it’s not a perfect rule, it does seem to indicate that you do need a little bit of time to provide hindsight, to understand if events and places and people were really significant within that context, because then you can judge what the effect was half a century later, more or less.
[Music Interlude]
Willa Seidenberg [09:57]: In your research, you decided to focus on three case studies. Can you briefly describe each of them?
Rafael Fontes [10:07]: The first one is the Harry Hay Residence, and it really is the site of the founding of the first sustained gay rights movement nationwide. The second site is The Black Cat tavern, and it’s the site where really we find the first documented evidence of LGBTQ defiance in the face of police brutality. The third site is the Tom of Finland House, and it really deals with a specific artist by the name of Tom of Finland, for whom this house was a place where he could really be his true self. And it was a really a creative Mecca for him and continues to be for other LGBTQ artists today.
Willa Seidenberg [10:51]: So tell us a little bit about who Harry Hay was, because I don’t think outside of the LGBTQ community that a lot of people know that name.
Rafael Fontes [11:00]: Yeah. He was really a polyglot. I don’t know if there’s any better word to describe him. He dabbled in everything. He was the son of a well-to-do family that had built their money off of mining. But he always sort of rebelled against his domineering father. And from a very young age he sort of was aware of himself as different. And while he was critically interested in the arts and made a living off of acting for a long time, and he was an LA native so he grew up sort of taking advantage of that early period where a lot of artists were coming to Los Angeles to take advantage of Hollywood, which was still kind of in its infancy in the 1920s and ’30s.
Later on in his life, as his marriage was failing, and he was married, he was also a very politically active person, he was active in the Communist Party and that experience with both arts and activism informed ultimately his ideas about how LGBTQ people should even begin to think about themselves as a minority and as something distinct from people who were, what we would call today, straight. And that sort of led to his ideas about creating basically a movement for emancipation for people we would today call queer, LGBTQ. At the time he and his contemporaries came up with the word ‘homophile’, which is what they used. And it became the dominant term for a good decade or two after he founded the Mattachine Society.
Willa Seidenberg [12:40]: And what was that society and what were its goals?
Rafael Fontes [12:45]: It had a lot of goals that shifted and changed depending on who was in charge, but it was really Harry Hay’s creation initially. And its structure is really pretty opaque because everything about it, how it worked, really depended on maintaining secrecy that anybody was interested in being involved with it had to be able to trust that they wouldn’t be found out to be associated with a homosexual organization, because that was still very, well it was still illegal in many states just to even be homosexual, much less to engage in a homosexual act, although most of these laws were referred to at the time as ‘sodomy laws.’
But the Mattachine Society really was a sort of decentralized network of friendship circles, basically affinity circles, where people would meet at each other’s homes and just talk about these issues, basically in a non-judgmental environment. Much of the research I encountered really just describes people trying to come to terms with their own feelings about themselves, their sexuality, their gender, just trying to really first off, not feel alone, but also trying to really understand who they were.
Willa Seidenberg [14:06]: One of the first attempts to landmark in Los Angeles an LGBTQ site was his house in Silver Lake.
Rafael Fontes [14:17]: Yeah. The initial attempt to landmark Harry Hay’s residence, the founding site for the Mattachine Society, largely failed because of lack of historical context. I argue that oftentimes books and articles about significant events are used by preservationists or people interested in heritage conservation to establish significance for a place. And that’s how you can make the argument that we should landmark this site because something important happened here or somebody important lived here.
I think ultimately it was too early. A lot of the books just hadn’t been written yet. When activists became aware of that failed attempt to landmark the site, they insisted on trying to at least leave behind some sort of indication that something significant had happened there. And serendipitously enough, the house where this important event took place was right next to a publicly accessible feature, which in Silver Lake and parts of Echo Park you have these public stairs, which are just concrete stairs that are extensions of the public right of way. That was the option that preservationists in this era really chose to go with. Because in this case, a set of steps led directly up to the house, they chose to name these steps the Mattachine Steps.
Willa Seidenberg [15:40]: Let’s move on to The Black Cat, because it’s so interesting that there was a protest at that gay bar before Stonewall, which is what we really consider, most people consider, the beginning of the gay rights movement. But what’s interesting about The Black Cat is it’s still a bar and it’s still a place in the community where people go, it’s not a gay bar, but it is still there. Can you talk about how the bar is giving a nod to its history?
Rafael Fontes [16:15]: Yeah. Well, first and foremost, the bar itself, the current business that’s there is a revived version of the original business that existed during the period of significance. And that original bar was raided by the LAPD on New Year’s Eve going into 1967. Within the following months, demonstrations that took place there have proved, with hindsight, to be significant enough to merit landmarking. And really The Black Cat is that foothold that I reference in my title, it’s that first successful attempt to landmark a site because of its LGBTQ history.
That designation for preserving the structure in its place did not necessarily extend to any businesses that happen to be in that structure. At the time there was an active gay bar, the site was landmarked in 2008. A few years later, the economy was not doing very good. This was the Great Recession, and that gay bar eventually shuttered and the owners were interested in having another tenant move in. They found a sympathetic entrepreneur who wanted to work with the history and honor that history, which is from a preservationist lens, ideal. I would say even from a heritage conservation lens, and that The Black Cat bar currently is very open about its history.
It chose not only to keep the name and revive and restore the original signage from the period of significance, but also to allow groups to come in and have events there. So they really do create time and space for preservationists to come to talk about the history that happened there. It’s a much nicer bar than what existed in the original time period for sure, but that said there is space there where you do see images of the original protest that do exist in archives today.
Willa Seidenberg [18:14]: Gay bars, they represent a significant part, it seems like, of queer history because those were the few places that people could gather and maybe be themselves and be with other people like them in a way, as you’ve pointed out, that was not possible in the greater society. So I’m just wondering how the evolution of gay bars sort of affected the movement for gay liberation and gay rights.
Rafael Fontes [18:49]: Yeah, well, you’re correct in all those points, because almost every scholar I encounter really credits gay bars as being really the crucible of gay liberation. Gay bars have existed perhaps much longer than any documented evidence we have for them. They did really quickly begin to double as places for networking, places for people to begin to organize, to begin to coalesce, to begin to think of themselves as part of a network. I sort of know that because when we talk about heritage conservation and how certain histories and sites are remembered, over time that memory shifts, especially as people who no longer relate to those spaces the same way begin to perceive those spaces differently. And when I refer to that, I guess I’m really thinking about generational differences.
For instance, I’m a 30-year-old man. Many other LGBTQ people I meet, my age or younger, we’ve all spent time in gay bars in my experience, but we also have access to the internet and many of us grew up with that access. And in many cases, most of our initial experiences of just trying to find out anything about ourselves did begin to happen outside of any physical space. And so that already changes our relationship to gay bars pretty drastically, I feel. So while I do note that gay bars served all of these different sort of purposes and many of them were incredibly important and crucial, they were also dangerous places because, certainly in the postwar period, you might meet somebody who you think is relating to you very well, and they might reveal themselves to be a cop and arrest you, and your life could suddenly be ruined. Most people who spent time in gay bars at that period were aware of that; that was a pervasive enough issue for them to be aware of that.
I think gay bars have been crucial and continue to be very important, but there’s a lot of talk today about this notion that they might be disappearing, that they seem to be going away. And that nobody’s really sure what their status will be in the next few years, much less two or three decades from now.
Willa Seidenberg [21:21]: So let’s talk a little bit about Tom of Finland.
Rafael Fontes [21:24]: Tom of Finland really was a Finnish man. He was born Touko Laaksonen in Finland. He served during World War II. His experience as a soldier in Helsinki at the time was really critical in informing his experience of a gay male world, which at that period was completely in that time and place, certainly was completely clandestine. And he had a daylight career, I suppose, really he moonlighted as Tom of Finland up until he came to LA. And that really for the most part is what makes this site significant, what makes this case study significant, not because Tom of Finland was born there or spent his entire life there, but because he could come to Los Angeles, he could reside in this house and really be himself, really be Tom of Finland.
At least that’s how I understood it when I went to the house and interviewed the owner-occupants who reside there and manage the foundation that preserves and advocates and pushes for reinterpretations and new understandings of his work. Tom of Finland’s work was drawn and disseminated through publications that were largely based here in Los Angeles. And again, that’s partially what drew Tom of Finland to come out here. For many gay men in the mid-century period we know that Tom of Finland’s work was very, very critical in helping them sort of understand their own inner feelings and understand really what the kind of affirming and positive relationships that they wanted to have.
I think one of the big takeaways from his work is that gay male sexuality is healthy. It is not just okay, it’s a positive affirming thing. I think just that alone has continued to impact and influence subsequent LGBTQ artists, and the house today really hosts a rich life of LGBTQ artists who reside there for extended periods of time, produce work or reexamine Tom of Finland’s work, reexamine their own work, and just try and keep continuing exploring their own artistic impulses, which is a very, I think, rich heritage to kind of continue and partially why I like the Tom of Finland House so much. Not just because it has achieved this landmark status and been recognized by the community around it, but also because it continues to sort of host this queer life.
Willa Seidenberg [24:15]: So of the three case studies, it is the one that continues to serve the same purpose as its period of significance?
Rafael Fontes [24:25]: I would say. While its purpose has evolved and broadened, I think at its heart, it still really functions as a supportive community that’s really LGBTQ focused, and I stress every letter in this instance, because artists of all gender identities and ethnicities are welcome. It truly struck me as a very, very welcoming place.
[Music Interlude]
Willa Seidenberg [25:03]: Do you think that there is an easier process in being able to recognize the role of a place that’s associated with an artistic outlet, like Tom of Finland’s house, as opposed to Harry Hay’s house, that was much more about a political and social movement?
Rafael Fontes [25:25]: If I think the Tom of Finland House had an easier time becoming a landmark, I would largely credit that to its current occupants, who really knew why the house was significant to Tom of Finland and could really make that argument. I do think it can be trickier with an activist like Harry Hay, because when we’re talking about social movements and political movements, you certainly have catalytic figures and originating figures. And I would say Harry Hay was both, but to credit the entire movement to him would not really do that justice. And I think much of the history being written now is trying to look beyond just falling into, I think really what is sometimes kind of a trope of the great man narrative or the great man sort of archetype, which can be effective. It certainly is useful to highlight an individual and try to understand how the entirety of their life has contributed to certain achievements, but movements live in groups of people, from what I can tell.
Willa Seidenberg [26:35]: And of course, one of the things that’s missing in these three case studies are lesbians, gay people of color. Talk a little bit about how you address that.
Rafael Fontes [26:48]: Yeah, I mean it’s an unfortunate reality that history is not fully inclusive and to a certain extent that is reflective of that time period. Women had a much harder go of it, even still today I would argue, but certainly in the postwar period. Especially once the 1950s really began in earnest and there was really strong expectations placed on women in terms of that they would get married, that they would have children. And that any woman who did not immediately just sort of jump into that way of life was in many ways viewed to be suspect.
At the same time, some historians have made the point that women were not always subject to the same levels of overt suppression that gay men were, in large part because many police departments would use entrapment to sort of catch gay men preemptively and arrest them for, you know, essentially propositioning somebody. The sources I looked at cannot find any evidence that police departments used women to entrap other women. That simply wasn’t done, in large part because a lot of police departments didn’t really hire women to begin with. So when I was looking at these case studies and trying to understand, okay, these were the first resources to really be dealt with. When I really look at the history that is centered or the narratives that are centered on each resource, what does that tell me as somebody who’s trying to understand how this history is being remembered? And as you pointed out, it tells me that a lot of people are being left out.
But one of the primary issues, of course, is that many of the scholars who were beginning to look back at this history and try and highlight sites important to LGBTQ people were having more trouble corroborating stories that dealt with queer women or that dealt with queer people of color in large part because perhaps they didn’t have access to the same resources for preserving their own stories, or many of them were simply not welcome and did not receive a very great treatment within these movements as they began to evolve and define themselves. In the case of queer women in Los Angeles, certainly many tried to found their own spaces and were largely successful to a certain extent, but they did not always have the same monetary resources as gay men, certainly gay white men.
And in many communities, especially communities of color, to come out as a queer person you faced a double stigma of a broader social stigma of being either Black or brown or just a queer person of color and being LGBTQ. And that form of stigma could often be really felt more explicitly in LGBTQ spaces, especially if the majority of queer people you’re encountering are white queer people who may be sympathetic but don’t know your struggle or may be downright unsympathetic or unwilling to sort of acknowledge your perspective.
Willa Seidenberg [30:02]: So, you know, all of that goes to the point that there’s still a lot of work to be done. And what do you see are, or should be, some of the next steps for preserving LGBTQ history in Los Angeles?
Rafael Fontes [30:16]: Well, I think the first step would probably be to move beyond just the context statement that we have, which has been immensely helpful but has no real agency in terms of navigating a really complex development environment. And when we talk about the disappearance of not just LGBTQ resources, but historic resources in general, I think what is even more difficult is not only preserving the built historic fabric that will have LGBTQ heritage attached to it, but also many of the programs that are relevant to those communities still today.
The closest attempt I have seen so far to any sort of attempt to address it outright is in San Francisco. They’ve begun this program, what they refer to as cultural districts basically, and their policy tools designed to incentivize the preservation of long-term businesses, long-term community entities that have been serving specific populations related to specific parts of the city. And I believe the last I checked they have about seven of these cultural heritage districts. Four of them outright sort of deal with their center LGBTQ heritage.
So when it comes to Los Angeles, I think first and foremost, a lot more research needs to be done specific to certain areas. And I think it’s worth engaging really these very prominent and powerful institutions that do exist in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles LGBTQ Center, they really tend to focus on serving the direct needs of the community. I would argue of course from my perspective that preserving history, preserving historical sites, is related to the life of LGBTQ people in this city, in this region. And from my perspective [it] has value in and of itself, but also needs to be sort of coupled with the really intense and ongoing needs of the community today.
While I acknowledge that it seems unlikely that we’ll be finding a bounty of new resources like the kinds I already discussed in my case studies, what I think we will find certainly moving forward is the work of sites and structures that were designed and produced by LGBTQ people. That’s probably going to be, I think one of the next steps that’s already beginning to be confronted in preservation.
Willa Seidenberg [33:06]: So I want to wrap up with a somewhat personal question. In what ways did researching this topic for as long as you spent on it, how did it affect your understanding or identity as a gay man?
Rafael Fontes [33:24]: Aside from the fact that it gave me a lot more perspective, I think it has pushed me to sort of at the very least try and put aside my own prejudices. It’s easy to pass judgment on people who may not look so great in hindsight. And sometimes I did have to confront that, that certainly as a multiracial gay man, certainly with respect to gay people of color, I think I felt that pretty strongly as I was looking at examples where significant sites were kind of just pushed to the side, especially with respect to the Latino or the Latinx community. That many of the needs of that community in the broader sense are still really unmet. That just because the broader gay rights movement had achieved marriage equality in the last half decade, that doesn’t mean that all these problems have been fixed. So I think those kinds of things I couldn’t help, but, you know, keep returning to.
Willa Seidenberg [34:27]: Well I feel like we only scratched the surface, but I want to thank you for your insights and this incredible work and this incredible contribution.
Rafael Fontes [34:39]: Well, thank you again. This was really a great experience to be able to talk about this research in hindsight.
