In doing so, they are rattling long-held perceptions that Los Angeles is gay playland and, outside of a handful of people, not to be taken very seriously. Whether raising millions of dollars for AIDS in the grip of the worst regional recession since the 1930s, nipping at Hollywood’s heels, taking to the streets by the thousands for raucous protests or raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Clinton campaign, the gay men and women of Los Angeles are shaping the national agenda of the gay rights movement and forging a new sense of themselves.
Impossible to ignore, the center is an apt metaphor for the local gay community, which is asserting itself as never before, defying cherished stereotypes and, in some ways, upstaging the traditional gay power centers of New York and San Francisco. is claimed by gigantic gay pride banners. For it was here that the agency’s founders came 22 years ago to ask the startled bureaucrats of the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status, one of the first such requests ever made in the nation for an explicitly homosexual organization. All the more ironic that the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center had bought this particular building for its new home. A staff of more than 150 oversees everything from a youth shelter to artist-in-residence and mediation programs, serving thousands of clients a month. Nowhere else in the country is there an institution quite like it-nothing so big, so rich-dedicated to serving the social-service needs of gay people. They were there to mark its transformation into something that could have barely been imagined three decades ago, a $7-million center for the gay men and lesbians of Greater Los Angeles.
ON A RAINY SUNDAY LAST DECEMBER, A CROWD OF NEARLY A thousand people gathered around the corner from Frederick’s of Hollywood in front of a bland ‘60s building.