'Let Us Dance': When SoCal's Queer Nightlife Becomes a Place of Resistance
Southern California has long been a haven for the queer community. Its queer bars and clubs gave the LGBTQ+ community permission to be themselves and express their gender identity and sexuality freely.
"Straight people can go anywhere and be straight," Daniel Nardicio, an entrepreneur who has worked in the nightlife scene for over 25 years, told KCET. "Gay people pretty much only went to gay bars because they could have been attacked or hurt anywhere else. Gay bars literally provided a safe haven."
In the 20th century, when the queer rights movement was just surfacing, the queer nightlife scene coexisted as a safe haven as well as a place of resistance and activism.
The Black Cat Tavern, a bar in Silver Lake, is the site of one of the first documented queer civil rights demonstrations. In February of 1967, over 200 queer patrons protested police brutality against the LGBTQ+ community after LAPD officers raided the tavern on New Year's Eve of 1966. And, the Black Cat still stands to this day.
...nightlife is something that people hold dear and want to protect just because there's a sort of freedom to nightlife that might not exist [in other spaces.]Chris Belcher, Assistant Professor of Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California
At The Patch Bar in Wilmington, two patrons were arrested in 1968 for "lewd conduct." That arrest inspired the bar's patrons and owner, Lee Glaze, to do a peaceful "flower power" protest in the Harbor Division Police Station. Patrons and Glaze walked over to the station armed with carnations, roses, daisies and mums, waiting for their arrested friends' bails to post. Despite the police raid, the bar survived.
The Odyssey nightclub in West Hollywood got their dance license revoked by the Los Angeles Police Commission in 1985. So, people picketed outside the nightclub, marching up and down the street. While the club was burned down later that same year, its legacy and the sense of home that it provided to the queer community lingers.
Chris Belcher, an Assistant Professor of Writing and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California who has organized queer nightlife scenes in L.A., said that the catalyst to the uprisings that take place in queer spaces like The Black Cat Tavern is "always an infringement from the outside, whether it's a policing force of heteronormativity or the cops." Queer spaces function as places of refuge. Belcher said that they were also places where she learned from older queer people.
"For me, the queer bar is a space to be outside and away from all of those kinds of policing forces that can mark queer lives out in the rest of the world," Belcher said. "[Uprisings] were a backlash against the taking of a sacred space."
The queer nightlife scene has — and continues to — give way to politics.
"What we have access to and what we aim to protect, are those things that happen in nightlife," Belcher said. "And that's not to say that there aren't problems with nightlife. But, nightlife is something that people hold dear and want to protect just because there's a sort of freedom to nightlife that might not exist, even in a kind of space like an LGBT center, for instance."
Queer bars and clubs are records of queer history, being passed from person to person.
"The physical spaces of the queer bar where we can practice queerness and teach each other are really special," Belcher said. "They're a special kind of history that I really hope to see preserved."
