LA's overlooked LGBT history

[2 articles]

Film highlights LA's overlooked LGBT history

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php?sec=news&article=4845

by Matthew S. Bajko
m.bajko@ebar.com
June 10, 2010

Each year LGBT people the world over celebrate the anniversary of the
Stonewall Inn riots in New York City. The June 28, 1969 spontaneous
protest against police harassment of LGBT bar patrons is roundly
credited with sparking the modern gay rights movement.

The Greenwich Village protests did give birth to San Francisco's
annual Pride Parade 40 years ago. They also gave rise to Los Angeles'
four-decade-old Pride festival, whose nonprofit parent is named
Christopher Street West Association Inc. after the Manhattan street
the Stonewall bar calls home.

Yet, like their counterparts in the city by the bay, whose LGBT
citizens had begun protesting police harassment and taking on
political campaigns early in the 1960s, gay Los Angelenos had also
begun standing up for their rights at the start of the turbulent
Sixties decade.

Only now, though, is that history reaching a larger audience outside
the Los Angeles area. Following on the success of Lillian Faderman's
and Stuart Timmons's 2006 nonfiction book Gay L.A.: A History of
Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians comes a new
documentary by California oral historian Glenne McElhinney that is
bringing this largely overlooked chapter in the gay rights movement
to the big screen.

Called On These Shoulders We Stand, McElhinney's 75-minute movie
showcases the lives of 11 LGBT LA elders who had a hand in shaping
the fate of the local LGBT movement.

"I was always a little bit insulted we were overlooked when we were
busy long before Stonewall," said Donald "Don" Norman, one of the
people profiled in the film. "Finally, people are acknowledging that
here on the Pacific Coast we were helping out this whole movement. We
weren't waiting on our hands waiting for someone to tell us it was
okay to be gay. We were busy being gay."

Norman, 74, who is gay and African American, grew up in a segregated
Los Angeles. As a young man he began to explore the city's
underground gay life. Unlike during the 1950s in San Francisco, where
gay bars clustered in North Beach were relatively safe and attracted
straight tourists, Norman said Los Angeles gay bars were routinely
raided by the police.

"Whereas San Francisco was kind of known as a place you could go to
Finnochio's and other places ... there was nothing like that here,"
said Norman. "We were determined to be gay, I know that."

The other interviewees include Los Angeles Times film critic Kevin
Thomas; the Reverend Troy Perry, who founded the gay Metropolitan
Community Church; and Ivy Bottini, who helped found the first chapter
of the National Organization for Women in 1966.

The film project grew out of McElhinney's gay oral history project
called Impact Stories. Since 2007 McElhinney, who splits her time
between the Bay Area and Los Angeles and Palm Springs, has traveled
to senior centers and nursing homes throughout California to record
the personal recollections of the Golden State's LGBT seniors.

Having helped start San Francisco's Pride Parade back in the 1970s,
McElhinney said she was especially struck by the stories she heard
from residents of Triangle Square, an LGBT senior housing complex in
Los Angeles, who recounted how difficult it was to be gay in LA back
in their youth.

"These Hollywood seniors had these incredible stories," said
McElhinney. "It was a real eye opener. I had no idea how difficult it
was back then in Los Angeles versus San Francisco."

Initially, McElhinney planned to post vignettes from her interview
subjects on YouTube to help educate younger generations of LGBT
people what their forebears went through in Los Angeles fighting
against a hostile police department, anti-gay city leaders, and
homophobic coverage in the L.A. Times. But after showing the material
to other historians, she was encouraged to turn the footage into a documentary.

"I emptied my savings account. I emptied my bank account," said
McElhinney, who worked with a cinematographer she met on the 2008
AIDS LifeCycle ride. "We put it together in five months."

Clips from the interviews are interspersed between archival news
footage and old photographs. It cost more than $300,000 to produce.

"We made it on purpose to connect with audiences to bring forth the
importance of LA gay history to the national movement. We also made
it to show the importance of our LGBT seniors and their contribution
to our social rights movement," said McElhinney. "The film shows that
individuals can stand up. You don't have to be a 'gay leader.'"

The film has been traveling the LGBT film festival circuit,
premiering at last year's Outfest where it won the LA-based LGBT film
festival's Freedom Award. It also won plaudits from the audience at
the Palm Springs International Film Festival in January.

Norman said he is grateful that audiences have embraced the film and
hopes LGBT people from outside southern California will watch it and
learn about another piece to the LGBT community's collective history.

"Because it pertains to everybody who is gay and lesbian. It pertains
to the whole country and how we all had to live through this time
when it was so unpleasant to be gay," said Norman. "I think it is
important for people to know we were here in LA working just as hard
as they were. Everybody put an effort forward; our effort should be
acknowledged."

The documentary will screen during this year's Frameline LGBT film
festival in San Francisco at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, June 19 at the Roxie
Theater on 16th Street.

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L.A. Gay Pride Co-Founder Morris Kight Remembered

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/queer-town/la-gay-pride-co-founder-morris/

By Patrick Range McDonald
Jun. 11 2010

Forty years ago, Christopher Street West, which oversees this
weekend's L.A. Gay Pride Parade, was co-founded by the late gay
rights pioneer Morris Kight, who also started up the Gay Liberation
Front in Los Angeles in 1969 and the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center in
1971 -- back then, it was known as the Gay Community Services Center.

We asked Miki Jackson, a close friend and colleague of Kight's, who
met him when she was a teenager in the 1960s, about what he stood for
as a person, his proudest achievement, and a funny story about a man
who leaned on his sense of humor to get him and other gay folks
through some very rough-and-tumble times in L.A.

Born in 1919 in Comanche County, Texas, Kight arrived in Los Angeles
in 1958 when he was almost 40. He had been working for social justice
causes since the early 1940s, and suddenly he found himself, like
many other gays and lesbians in L.A., dealing with the brutal ways of
the Los Angeles Police Department.

"He focused his work on GLBT people," says Jackson, "but he was a
dedicated civil rights proponent and had long and deep ties with that
movement. Peace. Non-violence. He was a doctrinaire Gandhian
pacifist. He had taken a personal oath of poverty -- and lived on
very little money."

In the end, says Jackson, Kight wanted people "to live an open and
free life without fear of persecution."

To make that happen, Kight was relentlessly organizing and protesting
and winning all sorts of battles. Yet his proudest achievement, says
Jackson, was the founding of the Gay Community Services Center, later
to be known as the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.

"It pained him when 'Community Services' was taken from the name,"
says Jackson. "He thought it signaled hubris and an emphasis on a
corporate-like culture and money."

Jackson met Kight in the late-1960s at an anti-war rally at MacArthur
Park. She soon worked closely with him, and remembered the time when
Kight had opened the Center in 1971 -- a time when gays and lesbians
were still extremely cautious about living openly gay lives.

"The Center was first housed in two, and finally three, ramshackle
Queen Ann buildings on Wilshire Boulevard," says Jackson. "Right
after the opening, Morris was standing on the rickety front porch of
the main building under the home made-looking sign -- "Gay Community
Services Center" -- with several of us. One man said, "Morris, you
are going to get us all killed with that sign." Morris looked at him
and said in a very soft voice, "Well, dear, then don't stand under the sign.""

Unquestionably one of the most important and effective gay rights
figures in the United States, Kight passed away in 2003.
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Contact Patrick Range McDonald at pmcdonald@laweekly.com.

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