Coverage of the global street art scene would lead you to believe it’s largely the domain of straight, cis men, but as a queer street art movement spreads across the country, Los Angeles has become a prominent locus. While some of the work is aggressively homoerotic, many of the pieces are coy winks to queer […]
How the Boulet Brothers Made Space for Freaky, Femme Energy in L.A.’s Queer Party Scene
On Friday, wearing identical spectral pink gowns, pale pink wigs, and pupil-concealing contacts, the twincestuous the Boulet Brothers presided over the final edition of Queen Kong, their weekly queer cabaret hosted at DTLA gay bar Precinct. The alt-drag power couple chose to end the recurring party in order to focus on the new season of […]
A Landmark Book on Gay History Has Been Updated and Re-Released for a New Generation
The Stonewall uprising and AIDS epidemic are most frequently cited as the two most influential moments in gay American history. But as the author and journalist Charles Kaiser outlines in his award-winning book The Gay Metropolis, first released in 1997, there’s a lot more the story of the gay liberation movement. “Originally, I wrote the […]
In Circus of Books, a Filmmaker Explores How Gay Porn Became Her Family’s Business
In her new documentary, Circus of Books, filmmaker and artist Rachel Mason asks her parents, Karen and Barry, owners of the defunct West Hollywood institution for which the movie was named, to describe their business. After awkwardly glancing at her husband, Karen calls it a “bookstore and hardcore gay adult business.” Later, we see mom […]
Legendary Author John Rechy Recalls L.A.’s Oft-Forgotten Gay Uprising
At 88 years old, John Rechy is the grand seigneur, or perhaps the grand outlaw, of Los Angeles fine letters—the author of 18 titles, whose name appears on many lists of banned books. In his late 20s, Rechy wrote the groundbreaking 1963 novel City of Night, a thinly veiled roman-a-clef about a gay male hustler […]
The Damron Address Book, a Green Book for Gays, Kept a Generation of Men in the Know
The story of Bob Damron’s The Address Book begins, like so many others, with one guy and a full tank of gas cutting down the California coast. Picture him pulling out of the Castro in San Francisco, a notebook seated next to him, sun glinting off the rims of a wood-paneled station wagon. Maybe he […]