We are driving up an almost vertical hill in a hip Los Angeles neighborhood, looking for one of the birthplaces of the gay civil rights movement. At the wheel is Roland Palencia, a gay activist who has lived and organized here for decades.
The Silver Lake Reservoir shines behind us, the hills around it crowded with bungalows. Silver Lake was once a Bohemian retreat, a neighborhood for artists and activists, and even, in the 40s and 50s, Communist party members. Now it’s impossible to buy the tiniest shack here for less than a million dollars.
The road dead ends at the bottom of a steep flight of concrete stairs. Immediately, it’s clear there is a problem.
“Where is the plaque?” Palencia asks. “The plaque was right here.”
The plaque in question commemorates the Mattachine Society, one of the first US “homophile” groups to openly advocate for acceptance. Palencia rolls down the car window and asks a man in Spanish if he knows where the sign has gone. Another man emerges and confirms that we’re in the right place. He pokes into the bushes by the stairs. Nothing.
“It’s erasure. Erasure of our history,” Palencia says. “This is where it all began, at least in modern times.”
We have been spending the afternoon touring some of the landmarks of queer organizing in Los Angeles, and seeing how well they are surviving the intense gentrification of Silver Lake. Today, the neighborhood is better known as a place to sip artisan coffee at farm-to-table cafes or buy an $18 smoothie at the influencer-approved Erewhon grocery store.
But over the past 70 years, these few miles around a palm-lined stretch of Sunset Boulevard have seen repeated key events in LGBTQ+ history. We were standing on the hill where the Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, and began to advocate for homosexuals not as sinners or perverts, but as an oppressed minority who deserved rights. Less than two miles away is the Black Cat Tavern, the site of one of the first public gay rights demonstrations, in 1967, protesting the Los Angeles police department’s brutal New Year’s Eve raid. By the 80s, Silver Lake was a center of queer life, especially queer Latino life, and, Palencia says, nearly every other storefront was a gay or lesbian bar, a leather store, a bookstore, or a community Aids organization.
“That’s pretty much gone,” Palencia says, though queer and Latino people still live in the neighborhood. Today, despite the rainbow flags flying along Sunset Boulevard, Silver Lake is being “de-gayed and de-Latinized”.
•••
Our queer history tour began at Silver Lake’s most famous gay landmark: the Black Cat Tavern. The protest outside the Black Cat took place in 1967, two years before New York’s Stonewall riot, which is often described as the foundational event of the US gay rights movement. Under new ownership, the historic bar is now a gastropub, currently operating in the shadow of a giant Shake Shack.
For Pride month, the fast food outlet was advertising 50-cent rainbow sprinkles, with proceeds donated to a LGBTQ+ organization. “Oh my God,” Palencia said.
A plaque outside the bar describes the protest there as an “LGBT civil rights demonstration”, not mentioning that it was organized as a protest against police violence, arbitrary arrests and entrapment everywhere in Los Angeles, in solidarity with East Los Angeles, Pacoima, Venice and Watts, where Black residents had staged a historic uprising against police violence and racism just two years before.
Today, postcards of the 1967 Silver Lake demonstration with young people holding signs denouncing “Blue Fascism” are given to patrons of the Black Cat Tavern with their bills. There’s no reference to the decades when the Black Cat building transformed into a series of different gay bars, including Le Barcito, which offered drag performances in Spanish, and Club Fuck! at Basgo’s Disco, which was famous for its art-punk aesthetic and BDSM performance art.
Along Sunset Boulevard, there are other holdouts from Silver Lake’s gayer past: Rough Trade, a leather and fetish shop, is a few doors down from the Black Cat. But Circus of Books, once a famous purveyor of gay porn, is now a cannabis store, Palencia noted. And A Different Light bookstore, part of a small national chain of LGBTQ+ bookstores and a place where his friends used to hold poetry readings, had been torn down, he said.
Off Sunset Boulevard, the neighborhood streets that were once destinations for gay cruising now have hardly any traffic, Palencia pointed out as we drove through. Most of the “no cruising” traffic signs that once filled the neighborhood are gone; one that remains is half-covered with graffiti.
Silver Lake’s history is personal for Palencia, 66, who has lived here and in nearby neighborhoods for most of the past 40 years. In 1980, in his early 20s, he moved into a tiny apartment on a hill above Sunset Boulevard that cost about $150 a month. (Today, one-bedrooms can easily reach $3,000.) For Palencia, who had immigrated from Guatemala as a teenager, the place had a “geographical symbolism” he appreciated.
“It’s right between East Los Angeles, which has traditionally been Latino, and West Hollywood, which became more gay,” he said. For young activists navigating their identities in a city that could be hostile to both queer people and Latinos, “this was the midpoint,” Palencia said. “This was home.”
Silver Lake, then a largely Latino neighborhood, became a haven for Palencia and his friends, who co-founded Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), an advocacy group focused on issues and people they felt white gay organizations and white feminist organizations ignored.
At restaurants like Crest, now a bar called 33 Taps, they organized events, flirted and argued. While there were tensions at the time between gay and lesbian organizers in LA, the gay men who started GLLU reached out to lesbian Latinas to get them involved as leaders in the group, as documented in Unidad, a new film about the group’s history. Palencia said this was crucial: “Politically, the lesbians were much more evolved in terms of their thinking of systems – like patriarchy, economic systems, sexism, even racism,” with an agenda “that went beyond sexual politics”.
GLLU members supported Latino labor organizers and the United Farm Workers, and prominent labor activists, including Dolores Huerta, marched alongside them in a 1983 Pride parade.
The West Hollywood gay scene, in contrast, was sometimes explicitly racist and misogynistic: Studio One, a prominent club, sparked protests for its exclusion of men of color and of women, and its obvious preference for wealthier white male patrons.
But Silver Lake could also be dangerous, Palencia said: there were gay-bashing attacks carried out by local Latino gang members. One of his close friends was kidnapped and stuffed into a car.
To address the tensions between gay and Latino residents without turning to “mass incarceration,” organizers started a free local music festival, the Sunset Junction street fair, in 1980, which had activities for kids and bands to appeal to a wide range of cultural interests. The festival continued until 2011. “We wanted to make sure that everyone was included, including gang members, so they became the security [for the fair], and it was such a smart move,” Palencia said.
Tacos Delta, founded in 1981, was located in the middle of the festival, and the family-owned restaurant is still busy and in business: “Tacos never went out of style,” Palencia said.
But the mid-1980s brought a new crisis: Aids deaths were rising, and communities of color, including Latinos, were disproportionately affected. The epidemic had a huge effect in Silver Lake. “A lot of people, especially gay men who lived here, they died,” Palencia said. “A depopulation happened because of that.”
Gay organizations led by white activists in Los Angeles often neglected outreach to people of color, including Latino community members, failing even to offer crucial information in Spanish. As described in the Unidad documentary, now streaming on PBS, GLLU responded by creating their own Latino-focused community health organization, Bienestar Human Services, to do HIV and Aids outreach, even as they were losing some of their own leaders to the disease. One of Bienestar’s early offices, Palencia said, was upstairs in a building that is now an Intelligentsia coffee shop, crowded with patrons on MacBooks working on their scripts.
Silver Lake today reminds Palencia of how, “when the Spaniards came to the Americas, they actually used the stones of the Aztec temples to build the churches”, he said. “Gentrification was built on the back, so to speak, of what went before.”
During the height of the Aids crisis, Flamingo, a Latina lesbian bar on Sunset Boulevard with a big outdoor patio, transformed into the headquarters of Being Alive, a community organization for people with HIV to support each other.
Today the building has become Bacari, a fancy tapas place. The backyard is crowded with cafe tables and is a coveted date night spot. Palencia came to Bacari recently to celebrate his retirement. Only the trees are the same, Palencia said, but the tapas are very good.
•••
After seeing so many queer establishments that had been whitewashed, mainstreamed, or completely erased, we needed a break. Palencia drove a few blocks off Sunset Boulevard to what he called a “little oasis that’s still the same as what it’s been in the past decades”.
Casita del Campo, an iconic Mexican restaurant in a bright pink building, has been a refuge for gay patrons since its founding in 1962, and it’s still owned by the same Hollywood showbiz family.
Rudy Del Campo, who started the restaurant, had been a dancer featured in films like West Side Story, an American in Paris, and A Star is Born, and his old friends and colleagues became his new patrons – including, of course, many gay people. His wife, Nina del Campo, a charismatic blonde from Colombia, would have loved to act in Hollywood, but her accent was too strong, a disqualification at the time. Instead, her son said, the restaurant became her stage.
In the early days, closeted gay Hollywood celebrities like Rock Hudson, one of the most prominent people to die early in the Aids crisis, frequented the restaurant, which had dark booths with curtains on the windows, so that patrons could dine without scrutiny from outside. Rudy’s son, Robert del Campo, and his wife, Gina, who currently own and run the restaurant, both worked there when they were younger. The restaurant’s central room used to feature crowds of gay men, there to see and be seen, they said. Some of the restaurant’s regulars even had their names painted on the backs of chairs.
The Aids epidemic hit the restaurant hard. There was funeral after funeral for the regulars, and for the restaurant’s staff. Other longtime customers came in gaunt, or skeletal, battling the virus but still trying to live a normal life.
In the aftermath of so much loss, “it became quiet for a few years,” Robert said. By the early 2000s, more families were coming in to eat, and the cars driving in the streets were shinier and more expensive. Gentrification had fully arrived. Many other Mexican restaurants around Casita del Campo ended up closing. Big name chain stores moved in.
What has kept Casita del Campo from being turned into “the world’s biggest Chipotle”, as Robert put it? In part, the fact that the family owns the building, which Rudy del Campo bought in the 1960s. They also credit the restaurant’s enduring culture, which remains defiantly cheerful and very local. Hollywood figures and queer celebrities like Katy Perry, Robert Pattinson, Gwen Stefani, and St Vincent still stop by, especially to the drag shows hosted at the Cavern Club, a theater within the restaurant. One of Robert and Gina’s sons came out to them as gay while sitting in one of the booths once popular with closeted celebrities.
The restaurant host when we visited was 18-year-old Logan Wynn, who has lived in the neighborhood his whole life, and who chatted amiably with us about the restaurant’s gay history and his memories of eating here as a kid.
“I love the diversity here,” he said. “Especially now that it’s been getting gentrified in Silver Lake. This place has always stayed the same. It’s always true to everyone.”
