Standing on the Shoulders of LA's Lesbian and Gay Pioneers

Originally designed to be an academic oral history project, Glenne McElhinney had no idea that the interviews of 11 Los Angeles gay-rights pioneers that she was conducting as part of the Impact Project would turn into On These Shoulders We Stand, a feature-length documentary screening at Outfest.

The 75-minute doc weaves together a series of interviews of 11 L.A. residents who played a prominent role in its LGBT history and is intended to tell the history of the city’s gay life and activism by the people who lived it: Ivy Bottini, Maria Dolores Diaz, Marsha Epstein, Miki Jackson, Don Norman, the Rev. Troy Perry, Dale Reynolds, Margo Strik, Kevin Thomas, Nancy Valverde and Mia Yamamoto.

Impact Stories proposes that the genesis of the gay-rights movement began before 1969’s Stonewall riots in New York. McElhinney, through first-person accounts from elderly members of California’s LGBT community, offers that its genesis began in the shadow of the Hollywood sign and traces the movement’s history through the “Golden Age”: starting in 1966 with the coalescing of the California Homophile Rights effort through 1981’s arrival of AIDS when a new era of activism was born.

The doc sheds light on the movement’s two main differences, according to LGBT oral historian McElhinney: L.A.’s repressed coverage of the movement in the press and lack of a strong, organized movement.

“In New York they got great coverage of all the Stonewall events — at the time — and a very organized and well-thought-out commemorative committee formed in the fall of 1969 and sent out calls and letters across the country,” she says. “New York was smart and able to follow through on celebrating the uprising right from the start. Here in L.A., every time the LGBT community tried something, the powers that be made sure it was suppressed.”

Through the interviews, McElhinney found that L.A.’s LGBT community started organizing “many years before Stonewall.”

“In L.A., a lot of groups that were nationally known early on actually started in Southern California,” she says. “A lot of the early homophile efforts and publications came out of L.A. Some of the interviewees knew about or participated in the early activism here, pre-Stonewall. There were protests about police raids and entrapment arrests. In the interviews, there is acknowledgement of statewide organizing of demonstrations and actions, all pre-Stonewall, here in L.A. A lot of the work the groups did here — and across the country — has been apparently eclipsed by the Stonewall myth that everything started in June of 1969.” 

McElhinney’s interviews, however, also show the similarities between the movements on each coast, which included “police repression, harassment and entrapment in the bars, criminalizing us. Humiliating treatment of drag queens and transgendered people. Naming people’s names in the papers after ‘morals’ arrests, or ‘lewd conduct’ arrests.  Both cities had very large and vibrant LGBT communities, both communities were constantly aware it was unsafe to be gay and one had to be careful when out in public. For Los Angeles there was also the homophobic undercurrent in Hollywood."

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