Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians
March 12, 2010 by
Filed under Lesbian Literature
- ISBN13: 9780520260610
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
The exhortation to “Go West!” has always sparked the American imagination. But for gays, lesbians, and transgendered people, the City of Angels provided a special home and gave rise to one of the most influential gay cultures in the world. Drawing on rare archives and photographs as well as more than three hundred interviews, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons chart L.A.’s unique gay history, from the first missionary encounters with Native American cross-gendered … More >>
Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians
I read this mainly as a Hollywood historian. Many many parts of this book are quite interesting, but unfortunately it contains the usual outing of the dead with little or no evidence to support it, just a lot of hopeful rumors from wishful thinkers. “So and so may have been,” “everything says he was” etc.
One of the reviewers said that people who are alive and can sue are spared this type of statement in the book. I really don’t know why because it shouldn’t be libel to say someone is gay – perhaps that’s just my opinion, having been in show business and having gay friends. My understanding of the libel laws are that the truth is your best defense. So why isn’t the author outing living people? Why is it always the dead who are discussed, with the stories growing more and more exaggerated with each passing year?
One blatant inaccuracy is the suggestion that Tyrone Power may have been “kept” in his earlier days. I’d like to know what earlier days these are, as he lived with his mother, cousin Bob and his sister until he got married in 1939. If somebody kept him, they did a lousy job because before he got to Hollywood, he didn’t have red cent and had holes in his shoes. I don’t know how a responsible writer has the nerve to print something like that when Power has a large, living family who can dispute it, as is being done right now.
I worked and lived in Hollywood. I know a lot of people, now deceased, who were gay. None of them – and I mean none of them – have ever been mentioned in a book. If you want to keep something secret, you do. Everybody and their mother doesn’t know it; otherwise, these actors would have been blackmailed within an inch of their lives and, I might add, be subject to books by former lovers. If a hairdresser can claim an affair with Humphrey Bogart, and a woman can write a book about her affair with Cary Grant, where are all these gay lovers and their books? Besides, of course, Rock Hudson’s.
Rating: 1 / 5
I learned a lot about gay history in LA. Would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. Very thorough.
Rating: 5 / 5
Gay L.A. is fascinating from beginning to end, from the history of gay and lesbian actors in the 1920s to the LGBT community’s political power and media visibility today. A surprising number of gay and lesbian cultural institutions had their start in Los Angeles: the Advocate magazine, churches and synagogues, groups representing the diverse ethnic communities in L.A., and countless others.
The history of oppression in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s is especially chilling. Gay men and women in the post-war era could be arrested simply on suspicion of being gay. Gay activists were hindered by a legal system that forbade the mailing of any kind of publication that mentioned homosexuality until 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled they too had freedom of speech and press, something a lower court had denied.
If you read the sections on the mid-20th century along with books about that era like The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the DecadesBefore Roe v. Wade, about pregnant unmarried women who were forced to leave home to give birth and relinquish their children, it becomes clearer why nuclear families seemed ubiquitous during the 1950s: Everyone else had been silenced or exiled.
Rating: 5 / 5
Gay culture and books in too many cases are full of fiction, undocumented info. and just made up stuff. I have never met nor have ever heard of this book’s authors Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons. If they decide to expand on this book, hopefully they will do the unusual in this gay-literature realm and actually talk to me. I am not a gay activist, as I am referenced (though I am a community activist) and their depiction of the Black community parade I was involved in is absolutely incorrect.
Rating: 1 / 5
Lillian Faderman has done it again. She has done her research well and has written a very readable history of gays in LA.
Rating: 5 / 5