Masked balls and gay uprisings: Queer Maps is a guide to 150 years of LGBTQ history

A theater for masquerade balls and “vile orgies”. An all-night diner where gay teens once gathered. A bar for black lesbians who called themselves “hard dressers”.

These are some of the 800 historic LGBTQ institutionsthat have found new life this week with the launch of Queer Maps, an interactive website that has catalogued 150 years of gay history in the Los Angeles region.

Drawing on materials from a wide range of archives, the mapping tool documents the region’s queer bars, nightclubs, organizations, religious institutions, cruising spots and other landmarks from 1871 to the present with locations, historical facts, quotes and images.

The tool launches at a time of growing concern about the disappearance of queer bars in cities across the country – LA’s last remaining lesbian bar closed in 2017. It honors world-famous institutions alongside little-known haunts that quietly thrived during eras when being gay was criminalized and dangerous.

The map is a project of Chris Cruse, a local DJ and nightlife producer who has for years hosted underground queer dance parties in LA.

“It’s important to be able to tell the people who come after us where we came from,” said Cruse. “It’s powerful to me to know that we’ve been here for a long time, and it makes me feel like we have to continue patronizing places that are currently open and stay active and vigilant.”

The idea for Queer Maps came in 2014, when Cruse and other nightlife organizers wanted to host an alternative Pride celebration, outside of the mainstream parade in West Hollywood, and began researching events in Silver Lake, the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood to the east.

The neighborhood has a vibrant gay history. On New Year’s Day in 1967, undercover officers assaulted patrons at the neighborhood’s Black Cat gay tavern, arresting 14 people, and charging them with lewd conduct for kissing. A group called Personal Rights in Defense and Education (Pride) later arranged a major protest of the police raid – two years before the Stonewall riot in New York.

Silver Lake was also where the Mattachine Society, considered one of the first national gay rights groups in the US, was born in 1950. The neighborhood was home to a gay cabaret restaurant that was bombed in a 1980 hate crime, a short-lived “fuck club” in an industrial space in 1982, and a number of beloved bars, bathhouses and other now shuttered spots.

“I knew Silver Lake was a queer zip code,” said Kim Anh, a local DJ who worked with Cruse on the alternative Pride event and has long lived in the neighborhood. “But I didn’t realize how nearly every other corner was once actually a queer space.”

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The Pride organizers resolved to revive some of the lost institutions for a single-day pride celebration, a kind of queer bar hop, Anh recalled. They ultimately had difficulties getting the permits they needed, but the archival research laid the groundwork for Queer Maps.

Cruse started making a database of historical spots, using the One National Gay and Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California and historic LA LGBTQ periodicals and guides, such as Bob Damron’s Guide, Lesbian Tide, Data-Boy and Ciao! magazine. Eventually, a professional developer helped him build QueerMaps.org.

The site is free to use and allows people to submit entries. Cruse said he was eager to see it grow to better represent the histories of trans people, queer people of color, lesbians and other more marginalized LGBTQ groups. He also wants it to become more interactive, allowing people to look up historic spots based on their locations.

Cruse sought to revive some vanished spots during Queer Maps’ launch party on Friday night at Navel, a renovated loft space in downtown LA. Artists re-created Circus Disco, considered the oldest and longest-running LGBTQ Latinx nightclub in LA.

Another room was set up to resemble Basic Plumbing, a bathhouse shut down in 2001 after angry neighbors complained about cruising. Inside the dark and steamy room, partygoers wrapped towels around themselves and sat on benches.

“I felt lifted by the spirits of everyone. It felt like we knew we were coming with the purpose of respecting and remembering our culture, because we are the only ones who can keep it alive,” said Freckle, an actor and LA native who sang at the launch, standing under a sign that said Jane Jones’ Little Club, the name of a 1930s lesbian nightclub that was raided by police. “To think of these little safe spaces for queer people to let their hair down and have a cocktail and then be shut down by police, it’s just so dehumanizing.”

The artist Adrian Gilliland installed an homage to cruising at Griffith Park, a park with a deep queer history, setting up trees and foliage and putting up infamous “No Cruising” signs.

“It’s really easy to forget what it was like to be a gay person, even ten years ago,” said Gilliland. “We’re almost spoiled with our ability to connect with people on the internet.”

Gilliland said he wanted people to feel temporarily transported: “Take a walk down memory lane and realize all of these things existed in our city.”

At the center of the space, Gabriela Ruiz and Karla Ekatherine Canseco cooked homemade tortillas in front of the crowd and rubbed each other in dough – a piece inspired by Ruiz’s teenage memories of being called a tortillera, a pejorative slang for lesbians. The performance art was also a nod to her memories of sneaking into the now closed Oxwood Inn lesbian bar when she was underage.

“I just wanted to have a space where I could be myself and meet other people like me,” she recalled, adding that the map project had made her reflect on the surviving queer institutions: “The reality of LA is everything is getting gentrified. You have a gem here, but it won’t be here in the next five years. So appreciate your community.”