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.