Looking back at the radical beginnings of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center.

By Stuart Timmons

The L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center celebrates its 35th anniversary this month. Amid the tuxedoed and sequined donors crowding into the Century Plaza Hotel, you'll probably not see a single bouffant hairdo. Not even on a man.

That's the least of the changes behind the oldest and largest gay and lesbian center in the world. The Center has changed in many ways since 1971 when it began as a radical community vision. Three of its founders were photographed in LIFE magazine that year, in wild hippie garb of semi-drag, including an over-sprayed, swirling up-do.

Center officials recently expressed interest in knowing more about the institution's history. They may be surprised by the record. The Center began as a passionate community project, the vision of radicals who saw gay rights as a vital segment of a larger transformation of humanity. Sex, drugs and a sketchy relationship with anything resembling authority were the order of that day. In those days in the gay world, Wild-West attitudes still rode the range.

Even before the Stonewall riot in New York, Los Angeles had created a substantial gay infrastructure. The Advocate (then known as the Los Angeles Advocate) had been in publication since 1967. The Metropolitan Community Church started the following year and ONE Incorporated, which got its start in 1952, still held regular meetings. Just as importantly, a counter-culture youth movement had been so active here that, in 1966, mobs of hippies migrating to the Sunset Strip had to be contained by authorities. When Stonewall exploded in 1969, the local ground was ripe for a radical gay movement.

That movement took the form of the Gay Liberation Front, which formed chapters in cities across the United States. Nationwide, lesbians and gays yearned for an organized method to channel years of simmering frustration, and in Los Angeles, where struggles with the police had been particularly bitter, the GLF chapter became, arguably, the most powerful in the county. Hundreds poured into meetings for a two-year frenzy of actions recalled by some as “a demonstration a day.” The pressure of riding this wave of activism sent some of the leadership out to the desert for monthly restoration of their visions—sometimes with “a tab or two” of chemical enhancement. To build their base and their freedom, the GLFers held gay-ins in Griffith Park, where thousands gathered to dance and commune, often for the first time with other gay people outside the smoky confines of a bar. (However, clouds of “medical marijuana,” as one GLFer retroactively called it, drifted over the outdoor celebrants.)

A special situation further pressured L.A.’s gay organizing: gay kids who had come to Tinseltown with stars in their eyes. If Hollywood’s “dream factory” made industrial waste, these kids were it. Thousands of them had no place to go and often fell victim to the hazards of street life, drug abuse and hustling. GLF, which was already forming a series of communes, began to instill a sense of immediate social service as part of its larger quest for social justice. A series of rental homes evolved into queer communes, with names like Liberation House and Revolution House. Most GLFers, who had already been involved with struggles for peace and civil rights, now attended radical demonstrations against “the establishment,” demanding an end to homophobia. The ceaseless demonstrations, however, did not seem to make a dent in a system that shut homosexuals out of services like medical or mental-health aid. If anything, it brought more gays into awareness that they too deserved services.

LIFE Comes Calling

Media attention became a priority of the burgeoning movement, and, one day, it seemed to knock at the door of the GLF house on Hoover Street in the form of a reporter and photographer from LIFE magazine. They wanted to do an article on L.A.’s famous Gay Liberation Movement. “We invited them to dinner and spent several hours explaining what we were about,” recalls Stanley Williams, a hair stylist who had recently moved from New York. He was concerned that the article would look like so many others, with hippies clenching their fists. Knowing the value of a good picture, he pointed them towards San Francisco, where a group called the Cockettes never failed to impress with a hallucinatory form of drag known as gender-fuck. However, the LIFE crew returned a week later, unable to find the Cockettes. Discouraged, they said that without a striking visual, they couldn’t command much space in the magazine. Williams told them to come back the next day, promising, “We would give them their pictures.”

After diving into the closets of Liberation House, the activists were ready for their close-ups. The result was a multi-page spread in LIFE, with a double-page photo of Llee Heflin bedecked in sashes and beads; Jon Platania in a “not-well fitting Joan Crawford ensemble” and Williams, who wore a thick beard, smiling joyfully beneath a towering bouffant that seemed to echo the clenched fist on his Gay Liberation T-shirt. (He was, after all, now a Hollywood hairdresser). The shocking picture made an indelible national impression. Williams, when asked to explain his outrageous persona, compared it to the man who hit his donkey on the head with a two-by-four to get his attention; the donkey, in this case, was the heterosexual world.

Forgotten Founder

Morris Kight and Donald Kilhefner are rightfully considered the primary pioneers of the Center. Bruce Reifel, who created spirited graphics for the early movement recalls, “GLF was Morris’ baby from the get-go.” But other activists in this collective effort deserve commemoration. Tony de Rosa is one, a swarthy and intense artist who also created some of the movement’s most powerful images. Another is Rand Schrader, a law student who became the first openly gay attorney in the city attorney’s office of L.A., the second openly gay judge in California and an effective activist throughout his extraordinary life.

Another key figure is Jon Platania, who, in the late 1960s, worked for the City of Los Angeles as an administrator. When a friend first mentioned this new Gay Liberation Front, he recalls answering, “What I do in the bedroom is my business. I don’t see the point of organizing politically.” Platania made a quick turn-around when his private life was made public by an LAPD arrest in Griffith Park. Already baptized with the fire of GLF, he refused to plea bargain, invited the public to his trial and won his case. “Overnight, I became a famous faggot,” he smiles.

Professionally skilled and personally charismatic, Platania quickly rose to prominence in the leaderless GLF as one of the key forces of its consensus planning. Laurence Harper recalled seeing Platania captivate a crowd of hundreds of men. “I was completely moved by him,” he recalls. Harper said that it was Jon who rented the GLF building on Wilshire Boulevard and Stan Williams who got the thrift shop going. (The Gaywill Funky Shoppe was the Center’s earliest source of revenue.) Platania recalls renting the original gay communal home, Liberation House, as well as the house that eventually became Van Ness Recovery House, which remains a GLBT sobriety facility to this day. To perpetuate the idea behind these houses and to plant a sign on Wilshire Boulevard as shocking as the picture in LIFE had been—one that said Gay Community Services Center—Platania began writing not a protest sign, but a business plan.

Storms and Roses

Programs at the Center were created from sheer need; many arose from a GLF group called the Survival Committee, which addressed the needs of indigent gay youth whose survival was in question. But one universal need quickly surfaced: The social environment every gay person had grown up in was so corrosive that it seemed necessary to address the damage. Kilhefner, Platania, June Herrle and Steve Berman were among the organizers who struggled to find language that would heal without admitting defect. They settled on “self development program.” They wanted to express “growth without pathology,” Platania recalls. So many people signed up for the self development program, and so many wanted to repeat it, that it became a mainstay.

When the Center first opened its doors at 1616 Wilshire Blvd., many in Los Angeles were ready for such an institution, and their appreciation showed as instant generosity. Platania, who retains poetic imagery in his speech, compared it to Saint Therese’s miraculous rain of roses: “When the Center opened, it rained roses. Money started coming from everywhere. We’d get one envelope with $5 and another with $2,500, even before we did our campaigning.” The GLF had been throwing dances at an old building in Hollywood called Trouper’s Hall, which would swell from hundreds to thousands, each contributing what they could to the Center. An air of abundance and serendipity seemed to fill every need.

But as the ecstatic vision of a lesbian and gay place became increasingly tangible, divisions emerged. In July 1971, a meeting was held to review a detailed proposal written by Platania, spelling out not only funding and staff for a gay center, but elements of its core philosophy. The ad hoc Gay Services Center Incorporation Committee and a pro tem board reviewed the plan. One of the latter group was Dr. Evelyn Hooker, whose board membership was coveted due to her status in academia as a champion of homosexual mental health. She had marked her copy of the “Gay Community Services Center Proposal,” next to a passage espousing a goal of the Gay Awareness Program, which would allow “professionals … to begin to deal with their own sexuality and, as a consequence, to broaden their conscious acceptance and ability to deal positively with a sexual manifestation not at all alien to their own nature.”

Hooker stopped the conversation. “Now, if you mean, by what you are saying, that until and unless somehow I and other heterosexuals are able to—as you say—‘act upon and even celebrate’ some sort of bisexuality that there is something pathological about us?” Platania affirmed that, adding, “If Gay Liberation means anything at all, it applies to everyone’s sexuality, not just to those of us who have gone to jail for expressing an impulse common to all people everywhere.”

Dr. Hooker, a tall woman, stood up. “If this is what the Gay Community Services Center is all about, I am afraid that I cannot lend my name to this enterprise,” she said. Some of the other board members objected to what they called a “political diatribe,” but Platania, urged on by Kight and Kilhefner, he recalls, persisted. “Freedom, Dr. Hooker, is something that we took. We are grateful for your work that affirms that we are not different than other ‘normal’ people. But this is not the point. Dr Hooker, we are not normal. If anything, we are on the cutting edge of our evolution as a species.” Despite that eruption, Dr. Hooker continued her association with the ever-evolving Center.

Timmons is the co-author of Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Powser Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. The L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center’s 35th Anniversary Gala and Auction takes place Nov. 18 at the Hyatt Regency Center Plaza, 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Century City. To join the festivities, get your tickets at www.anniversarygala.org or call (310) 996-1188.