A Guide to Gay Los Angeles, 965

Written for the Hungry He who is everywhere is nowhere. - Seneca the Younger

Before there was Grindr, there was The Address Book.

This guidebook, like all guidebooks, was written for the hungry. Its slogan, See America. Find a friend, hinted at the exact nature of its readers' appetites while skirting the particularities.

Friends of Dorothy, and Sappho, turned to The Address Book, which debuted in 1965, to map their pursuits. The baedeker advertised via mail order, in-the-know bars sold it, and the initiated flung their bedraggled copies into the hands of the desperate. Butterflies must've fluttered in many a hopeful reader's stomach as they skimmed the guidebook's list of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs: these addresses offered potential antidotes to sadness.

The guidebook's author, Bob Damron, gave gay readers hope by fleshing out worlds that would've otherwise remained unknowable. His list confirmed that a gay America existed and that within this quasi-nation, many smaller gay Americas proliferated. Each one was bound by unique affinities whose siren songs went muffled. With tact, Damron amplified these calls. His guidebook told where to find doorways flowing towards danger and joyful possibility. It pinpointed thresholds leading to family, community, sex, and love.

Pages from The Address Book (1965). Courtesy of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

King of the Bars Like many American revolutionaries, Damron worked in the alcohol industry. Men who knew him painted the barkeep as a pioneer who embodied both stud and sissy.

Hal Call partnered with Damron to publish The Address Book's first few editions. Call, long-time president of the Mattachine Society, characterized Damron as LGBT royalty. Bookstore owner Ron Ernst said Damron belonged to a macho breed of homo entrepreneur that refused to kowtow to civic authorities, especially cops attempting to extort gayola. Drag performer Larry Buttwinick described Damron as energetic, ambitious, and, above all, a hell of a good bridge player.

During the 1950s, Damron ran a Hollywood bar, Melrose Avenue's the Red Raven. Its moniker followed the homosexual place-naming practice of pairing a color with an animal. San Francisco's now-defunct White Swallow bar best, and most tastefully, exemplifies this camp tradition.

At the Red Raven, men wearing pinky rings and loafers swallowed rum and cola. Eyes sought eyes. The scent of weenies grilling around the corner, at Pink's hot dog stand, wafted beneath nostrils. Good-looking bait disguised in pinky rings and loafers leaned against Damron's counter, gazing at clientele, waiting for somebody to make his move.

Plainclothes cops watched the plants. Their fingers stroked hidden black jacks. They waited to trounce.

Police raids of the Red Raven are well documented. Anecdotes suggest that the LAPD sometimes used down-on-their-luck actors or especially good-looking cops to entrap men, and among those arrested during one Red Raven snare was a retired callboy, Bill Rau, and an editor of a chemical trade journal, Richard Mitch. The event galvanized the lovers and the couple went on to transform the small activist newsletter they ran into The Advocate, the nation's leading LGBT publication.

Although early and mid-20th century descriptions typify Los Angeles as teeming with gays (poet Hart Crane gushed that the number of faggots he saw cruising Pershing Square as legion ), locating a place like the Red Raven required more than observation. Seekers depended on word-of-mouth references. Lists unintended for commercial consumption also supplied interested parties with addresses. In 1955, before partnering with Damron to create their official guide, Call produced such a document.

I made up a mimeographed list, he said, as quoted in James T. Sears' Behind the Mask of the Mattachine. It had thirty-five gay bars. We had people sign for it because we didn't want it to fall into the hands of police. The list was so valuable, and potentially incriminating, that Call numbered each copy to track its circulation.

About Damron's method of collecting entries, Call said, [Bob got] the opportunity to travel the United States and to be welcomed in all of the gay bars. He would go to the main cities and find out from those gay bars where there were homosexual bars elsewhere in the state. He was treated like a king. The image of Damron as a tall, strapping figure Lewis and Clarking his way from beach to hinterland allies the guidebook's shaky origin story with American frontier lore.

The cover of the first, 1965 edition of Bob Damrons Address Book. Courtesy of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries.

And Now, Its a Chipotle Despite The Address Book's reputation as the gold standard among homosexual baedekers, it's important to note that as a pre-Stonewall (1969) document it conceived of gay space in ways that would be dismissed now.

Danny Jauregui, an art professor at Whittier College, says Damron didn't visit and vet every site he listed. In fact, The Address Book was more of a gossipy collaboration created via people sharing their trysts with [Damron]. If a guy got lucky at a restaurant, it got included. Jauregui waxes poetic about The Address Book, calling it sexual memory told by spaces.

Gentrification pushed Jauregui to discover The Address Book. It became his muse.

While living with his boyfriend in Silverlake, Jauregui had noticed his neighborhood changing. What had seemed a gay place when they moved there was becoming less so. This straight shift coincided with the Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage in California. The campaign leased a Silver Lake storefront Jauregui regularly drove past, and witnessing his neighborhood's transformation gave Jaure

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