| Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection, 1920-1961 / USC Libraries Special Collections
Gay sex black a white series#
The coalition immediately passed a series of rent control measures and elected a city council with an openly gay majority, solidifying West Hollywood’s status as a visible symbol of gay Los Angeles.Ī view of the Biltmore Hotel overlooking Pershing Square in Los Angeles on Feb. In the mid 1980s, as rent prices skyrocketed and the expiration of L.A.’s rent-control protections threatened to price out longtime residents, a coalition of gay men and Russian Jewish émigrés banded together to officially incorporate the area as the City of West Hollywood. Tucked away from LAPD’s watchful eye, the area attracted a flourishing queer community seeking refuge from the police department’s draconian approach to policing "homosexual offenses." City of West Hollywoodīefore West Hollywood was designated an official city in 1984, the area was an unincorporated region of Los Angeles County, existing outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. Today, the Black Cat is a recognized Historic-Cultural Monument by the City of Los Angeles and continues to be a popular spot for classic cocktails and American tavern food. 11, 1967, demonstrators gathered outside the Black Cat to protest the police raid, preceding New York’s Stonewall Uprising by two years. On New Year’s Day 1967, as the clock struck midnight and rang in the new year, plain-clothed LAPD officers raided the tavern, beating and arresting 14 people who were charged with "lewd conduct" for same-sex kissing. protesting police brutality against the LGBTQ community. The Black Cat Tavern was the site of a brutal police raid that incited one of the first demonstrations in the U.S. There are no official reports or news coverage of the event, but author and eye-witness John Rechy recalls the "street was bustling with disobedience." The Black Cat Tavern As the patrons were ushered into a police car, a group of lesbians, transgender women, drag queens and gay men rushed to the streets, resisted the arrests, throwing donuts, paper plates and coffee cups. On May 1959, LAPD officers arrested five Cooper Do-nuts patrons - two drag queens, two male sex workers and one gay man - through such tactics. If their outward gender presentation didn't match their ID, they would be arrested. One form of LAPD's routine harassment included targeting well-known LGBTQ spaces and demanding identification from gender non-conforming patrons.
Nestled in between two gay bars, the Harold's and the Waldorf, the café was one of few establishments in the city to welcome trans customers at a time when many gay and lesbian bars turned them away in fear of LAPD targeting and persecuting transgender and gender non-conforming Angelenos. Cooper Do-nuts was a 24-hour café popular among the gay, lesbian and trans communities during the 1950s and '60s.