In a solitary gay-pride parade the other day, I trudged up the Mattachine Steps, a long, steep public staircase east of the Silver Lake Reservoir, in Los Angeles. The steps—one of many pedestrian shortcuts that interlace the hilly neighborhoods of Silver Lake, Los Feliz, and Echo Park—are named for the Mattachine Society, the first enduring American gay-rights organization. The group held its inaugural meeting on November 11, 1950, outside the home of the Communist activist Harry Hay, who lived at the top of the stairs. Five men sat together on the hillside in the late afternoon, imagining a world in which they did not have to hide.
Gay Angelenos like to remind their counterparts to the north and east that L.A. played a crucial, perhaps decisive, role in gay-rights history. In 1947 and 1948, Edythe Eyde, a secretary at R.K.O. Pictures, distributed a carbon-copied publication called Vice Versa: America’s Gayest Magazine, the first of its kind. The pioneering gay magazine ONE began publication in downtown L.A., in 1953; after battles with censorship, it won a landmark case at the Supreme Court, in 1958. A year later, gay patrons at a Cooper Do-Nuts shop, also downtown, reportedly responded to police harassment by throwing doughnuts at officers. And, in 1967, the Black Cat tavern, in Silver Lake, was the scene of a significant protest against police violence. The Stonewall riots, in New York, two years later, have gone down in legend as the great gay breakthrough, but organized efforts in both L.A. and San Francisco mattered just as much.
In the post-Stonewall era, the Mattachine Society has often been caricatured as a meek bunch of well-dressed squares who pursued respectability at all costs. Eric Cervini’s recent biography of Frank Kameny, the stalwart of the Washington, D.C., Mattachines, rejects that stereotype, portraying Kameny as one of the most fearless fighters that the gay movement has known. Mattachine’s first iteration, under Hay’s leadership, occupies a category entirely of its own. It was informed both by Communist Party tactics and by countercultural life styles. It grew from the radical bohemia of Edendale, as parts of Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park were once collectively known. Hay himself was a wholly original character who looked past the gay-straight divide to the multiplicities of contemporary queer culture.