“One of Them” is all about you. More community than column, this space is where we’ll be speaking to friends and idols, history-makers of the past and present, and those who inspire us, challenge us, and dare us to ask for more from this world. It is where we can be together. Read more here.
There are certain cities that seem to have a gravitational pull on history, drawing artists and scholars into their orbit and spinning out a different world as a result. Berkeley, California has always been one of those places. My grandmother, Jennifer, moved there from New York in the 1970s. In a shock to her puritanical upbringing, she divorced my grandfather — a charismatic pastor with a penchant for extra-marital flirtationships — to craft a life of her own.
One of the women contributing to Berkeley’s aura of radical possibility was the academic and activist Lillian Faderman, who arrived from Los Angeles to the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. If stories about queer communities in the 20th century now thrive in college classrooms, it is in part due to Faderman’s work. After graduating from Berkeley, Faderman co-led the creation of Fresno State University’s Gender Studies department. There, she combined her experiences as a working-class lesbian, literature obsessive, and former stripper to craft curricula that demanded space for the overlooked and erased.
In recent years, the 83-year-old historian has worked to document the queer bars and clubs that defined her youth in Los Angeles as part of Queer Maps LA. In that project, she recounts the lushness of places such as Club Laurel and The Palms, where people picked each other up in custom velvet suits, chipped nail polish, and silk button-downs.
As I interviewed Lillian, I couldn’t help but think about what her life has made possible for me: the nights I’ve spent dancing with my lover or studying queer history at UCLA. All of our lives are the product of our ancestor's bravery, which shapes the way we talk, dream, and dance. And sometimes, if we’re lucky, we have a chance to speak with our elders before they become ancestors—allowing their wisdom to become a bridge that guides us through the present.
Below, we discuss what queer bars were like in the 1950s, the impact of McCarthy-era policies on those spaces, and celebrating the wins of our ancestors.
When did the first inklings of queerness begin for you?
From the time I was 11 to the time I was 15, I was madly in love with a woman named Eileen who was the director of this tiny little acting school in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. I had ambitions to be a child actress and she taught the classes. It was just a huge crush and I would be so puzzled by it. I actually went to the library and found books on adolescent psychology. I don't know where I heard the word “homosexuality,” for the first time, but I would be so reassured when the book said things like, "It's normal for an adolescent girl to have crushes on other females,” but I did not think of myself as homosexual until later.
When did that understanding start to come about?
I had a friend, Eddie, who was three years older than I was. One day when I was 16, he called and said that he's discovered “these places.” I don't remember what his language was, but it was to the effect of bars where men meet men, and he asked if I would like to go. We went to a couple of male gay bars but I can’t remember how the guys reacted to me.
What I do remember is when he said, “There are places like this for girls, too.” So he took me to a place on 8th and Vermont called The Open Door. We walked in and I was really confused because I thought, “What's he talking about? There are boys and girls here.” But the boys turned out to be butches, as we said in the ‘50s.
It was like something just crystallized. It was an epiphany. I realized, “This is where I want to be. This is who I am.” And so with the phony ID that Eddie gave me, I returned on my own. I couldn’t drive, so I would take two or three buses to get there. I would stay late enough so that it would be hard to get public transportation, but somebody would always give me a lift home.
Across the street from The Open Door, there was another bar that had a sign that said “This place is off limits to military personnel.” It was 1956 and it was the height of the McCarthy era, which I didn't understand back then. Of course, homosexuals were witch hunted out of the military, the government, and all aspects of public life.
Were there other bars or clubs you liked to go to?
It wasn't a bar, it was a cocktail lounge and it was called The Club Laurel on Ventura in North Hollywood. The singer was Beverly Shaw. She was fabulous and I became a regular. She would sit on the piano bar and caress the wire of the microphone while she sang to us. I think all the women were in love with her, and her style was incredible. I think you describe it as a men's jacket, although later, of course, women were wearing tailored jackets, but not in the 1950s. So a men's jacket and a bow tie, a skirt and high heels. I thought it was just incredible.
In the past few decades, there has been a steep decline of these types of lesbian spaces and bars. Why do you think that’s happened?
I think they disappeared because lesbians have so many choices now that didn't exist back then. Today, you can meet someone online or in the Sierra club [laughs]. I think we would have given anything in the 1950s to have so many choices, but our choice back then if we wanted to meet someone was a lesbian bar or, if you were athletic, a softball team because chances were that it would be full of lesbians. That was the only possibility. Lesbian bars were, in some cases, like community centers. Now every big city has what they call an LGBTQ+ Community Center.
But there are nine new lesbian bars around the country. They are coming back, so it'll be fascinating to me as an observer of the community to see if these bars do make it and if they proliferate. I think every generation figures it out for themselves.
What was it like going back through those archives and memories as part of Queer Maps LA?
For queer people, having a history is crucial. When I came out into The Open Door — and coming out in those days did not mean to make a public statement, it meant to recognize to yourself and to close friends that you are homosexual, as the operative term was in those days — it was like we had invented this stuff. I had no idea that there were generations before me.
Because I was very literary even as a teenager, I went to the library, but what I found instead of history were people who pathologized us. I also found pulp novels, which were wonderful until the conclusion where the lesbians always had to drown in a well of loneliness or commit suicide. That was called the “redeeming social purpose.” You couldn’t get published unless that’s how the novel ended. When I was a child, there was no history. That's all there was.
Unfortunately, there’s a history of transphobia within the lesbian community, marked by periods of intense and painful exclusion. Where do you think that stems from and how has it evolved?
If we go back to the 1950s, the word “trans” didn’t exist in the same way. What I found, personally, in the bars was that people identified as butches, but butch could be anything from a woman who liked to wear tailored shirts to a person who really identified as male and could pass as such. At that time, there was little resistance to that idea of gender openness.
I used to love the Club Laurel. One night there was an absolutely beautiful woman inside. I loved her outfit and started talking with her; I was flirting. I think I touched her, I don’t know, my usual… [laughs]. At one point, my friends asked if we wanted to go to another bar. I asked if she wanted to come and she said yes. We walked out to the car, and just as the woman was about to get in, she said “I have to tell you something: I used to be a man,” was the word she used. And we all said, it doesn’t matter, get in the car!
That shifted in the 1970s. This certainly was not true for everyone — many lesbians welcomed trans women into our spaces — but there became this very “essentialist” perspective. At the Michigan Women's Festival, for example, I know many, many trans women felt left out and it’s a shame that’s how it had to be. The hostility dates from that era.
What would it look like to heal that relationship?
You know, I’m not a philosopher, so I wish I could give you a better answer. But I am very interested in all of the LGBTQ+ Centers around the country, and it’s heartening that they’re working very hard to help trans people and in particular trans people of color. There is an organized movement to help, which is as it should be.
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Why is it so important for us as younger generations to study that history?
I think we need to know that we've had enemies before and that we figured out how to organize and fight. And if you fight, you can be victorious. It’s vital to know that. It's important to know that Ron DeSantis is not the first person in Florida who wants to get rid of us. Florida is fascinating to me, because in the 1950s and '60s, there was the Johns Committee formed from the Florida legislature. They actually funded a legislative committee who hired spies to investigate teachers to find and get rid of them if they were homosexual.
But we overcame it. We were victorious against the Johns Committee ultimately. I think it's important to identify the heroes of the past, to take them as role models, to know that people can fight against what seems to be insurmountable odds and be victorious.
If you forget that history, you do yourself a disservice. We used to think at The Open Door that nobody had ever been like us before. I think it's important to take pride in the struggles and the victories of your ancestors, too.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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