DISCOVERING LONG BEACH’S UNKNOWN QUEER HISTORY
Hamburger Mary’s
Long Beach
October 5, 2024
The rich queer history of Los Angeles has long been overshadowed by that of San Francisco and New York. That misperception is rapidly changing, thanks to documentaries such as L.A.: A Queer History (2021), historical publications such as Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons’s Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (2009), and now Circa, the nation’s “first and only Queer Histories Festival,” which is currently in its second year and features events in and around the city throughout October.
But if Los Angeles’s queer history has been undervalued, that goes twofold for its neighboring city, Long Beach. Often an afterthought for queer historians, Long Beach’s queer legacy is perhaps best known for tragedy — the firebombing of the city’s first gay dance club, Ripples, in 1973 — but the city has also been the setting for some of the nation’s most storied acts of queer resistance, home to many significant queer figures, and the site of “the third largest Pride festival and parade in California” and “six neighborhoods with the highest concentration of same-sex couples” in the L.A. region. In April, the City of Long Beach released its LGBTQ+ Cultural District Strategic Improvement Plan, a blueprint for the long-awaited district along the Broadway corridor, which will highlight the city’s storied queer history with commemorative plaques. And, on October 5, a small crowd gathered at Hamburger Mary’s to be regaled with details of that history in a Circa event, Discovering Long Beach’s Unknown Queer History.
The event began with “Queer History with Jewels”: a rotation of short clips from Q Voice News, a queer digital news platform developed by Phillip Zonkel, the first journalist to cover the LGBTQ+ beat in Long Beach. Narrated by drag performer Jewels—also the moderator for the panel to follow — the video segments uncovered little-known histories such as that of LB baseball legend and former Dodger Glenn Burke, who was the first MLBplayer to come out as gay, and the 1968 Flower Power Protest led by Long Beach resident Lee Glaze after his Wilmington gay bar, the Patch, was raided by police for violating an ordinance banning same-sex dancing.
The video clips were followed by the main event, a panel featuring Zonkel, history professor Jerome Hunt of Long Beach City College, and Long Beach’s “Grand Lesbrarian” Carolyn Weathers, who co-founded the lesbian publishing company Clothespin Fever Press—and who, alongside other Gay Liberation Front (GLF) members, helped orchestrate the 1970 Biltmore Invasion.
Zonkel detailed the Patch raid and subsequent protest, explaining how Glaze led a group of queer protesters to the police barracks to demand the release of those arrested for “lewd conduct” under California’s anti-masquerading ordinance. Zonkel noted that the protest was significant for its directness — protesters objected to the unjust law rather than the allegations that they were gay — as well as its date, 10 months before New York’s Stonewall rebellion launched the modern LGBT rights movement. He also situated the action within a century of queer oppression by the Long Beach Police Department, beginning with the 1914 construction of a “deviant task force” and ending with a 2016 ruling that led to the restructuring of the local force.
Weathers provided a firsthand account of the Biltmore Invasion, a direct action protest in which activists stormed the stage at the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Behavior Modification Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where attendees were preparing to view a video promoting the use of electroshock treatments as a “cure” for homosexuality. As the activists stated their case, the audience tried to drown them out, but GLF flipped the script by stomping on the floor whenever they were interrupted; eventually, Weathers explained with a sly smile, “they learned to stop interrupting.” The agitation was a great success, as APAmembers invited GLF leaders to return the following day for further discussion. Hunt weighed in on the historical significance of the protest, calling it a successful infiltration of an authoritative institution, utilizing the politics of visibility to change minds. Weathers recalled one psychiatrist saying, “This is the first time I’ve ever seen a happy homosexual!” The Invasion is credited with driving the APA to depathologize homosexuality.
Additional Circa: Queer Histories Festival events are scheduled throughout the month of October. Tickets are available through One Institute.
