Henry Giardina

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The Fate of Damron Address Book

Before AIDS, Airbnb and Grindr changed the face of gay life forever, there were limited ways of finding your people, especially if you were a lone, gay man venturing into the unfamiliar territory of the West Coast.- Advertisement –

In the 1960s, a gay man named Bob Damron starting seeing America through a different lens. Where were the places that were gay-friendly in Butte, Montana? What about in Austin, Texas? Where were the bathhouses, the sex clubs, the diners and dive bars that would welcome queer folks with open arms? 

Damron was a bartender who’d explored the world of San Francisco in the 1960s before settling in L.A. 

He’d paved the way for gay enclaves like Castro Street and Christopher Street. He helped young men and women find their people and avoid getting into dangerous situations in rough, small towns and conservative cities.

Today, his legacy lives on. In an article by journalist Kate Sosin for L.A. Magazine, Publisher Gina Gatta recalls the founder of Damron Company, a business she now owns. 

“Like a Bible salesman, Bob would get on the road,” Gatta tells Sosin. “He would travel around, and he would find the gays, and he would find the bars and bathhouses.”

Competitor guide books developed along side of Damron’s book, but none of them survived the tumultuous period of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, when everything in American culture, from sex to movies to politics, was becoming redefined for a new audience. By the time the Internet came along, LGBTQ+ folks had their own printed travel guides and websites like Planet Out to help them find new destinations and stay safe on the road. 

But Gatta has been upholding Damron’s legacy since buying the company in 1989. Damron himself died of HIV in the early nineties. 

Gatta has been single-handedly keeping the book going year after year. But the problem of keeping the book in print is a problem all publishers face: how do you sell people on something they can get for free online?

Today, teens can learn about their sexuality online, by asking friends or joining forums, or even reading Wikipedia. 

If they want to find the nearest gay bar, it’s not hard to do. Still, there’s something romantic about holding a physical guidebook in your hand. 

For a generation that decided long ago it would have nothing more to do with the physical elements of travel, including maps and guidebooks, there’s something touching about the idea of a book that was built over the course of years. 

That someone was brave enough to find every bar, every hookup spot, and every dive bar where everybody could, feasibly, someday, know your name. 

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For the First Time, the L.A. Pride Parade Will Air on Live TV

When the first Los Angeles Pride parade hit the streets of Hollywood in 1970, the world was experiencing a crisis of contradictions. When it came to gay identity, things were changing. The Stonewall Riots of the year before gave way to protests all across the country, led by people who were sick of being treated like second-class citizens. The Black Cat demonstration in L.A. in 1967, along with the Cooper Donut riot of 1959, laid the groundwork for a new generation of activist gays who weren’t content to be shoved around, targeted and violently harassed by the police. – Advertisement –

Christopher Street West was formed, in part, as a response to the need for action and visibility. At a time when gay sex was still illegal in most parts of the country and the AIDS epidemic was still a decade away, America was trying to figure out how gayness, and openly gay identities, fit into its identity as a free speech-loving, yet vocally conservative, country. So the parade happened in Los Angeles, and then in New York. But these celebrations, as the surviving images show, were full of queens, leather daddies, go-go boys and folks generally unconcerned with respectability politics. Perhaps it was for this reason that the Pride parade was never televised. It couldn’t have been treated with the same level of interest, the same pomp and glamour and bizarre gaudiness as a Macy’s day parade. 

Today is another era, of course, and while the people currently running our country may wish to harken back to a simpler, straighter, whiter time that never, in fact, existed in America, the people who live here are ready for this yearly celebration of gayness to be broadcast out to the world. Or at least, to greater Los Angeles. 

In a historic deal with Southern California news station KABC, Christopher Street West has signed onto a three-year contract to televise the L.A. Pride festival, as well as the famous West Hollywood parade. 

The live coverage of the parade will be co-hosted by  the beloved (yet controversial) Raven-Symone, along with KABC regulars Ellen Leyva and Brandi Hitt for a special two-hour broadcast on June 9. 


A protestor fights against the controversial Briggs Initiative, a measure that would have made it illegal for LGBTQ+ teachers to work in schools, in 1978.

“I am honored to be a part of this year’s Pride celebration,” Community Grand Marshall Phill Wilson said to CSW. “The LGBTQI community has come a long way in the last 50 years. It has not been without heartache, pain, sacrifice, and growth. I am humbled to be among such a powerful and diverse group of grand marshals. Together we represent how much stronger we are when we celebrate all of what we are.”

The Los Angeles LGBT Center, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year with the opening of a new Senior Campus, will take the role of Organizational Grand Marshal. 

“We are humbled and honored to have Phill Wilson and the Los Angeles LGBT Center serve as the Grand Marshals for LA Pride 2019.” said Estevan Montemayor, CSW Board President, in a press release. “Together, these people and the organizations they represent have made an indelible and important mark on the LGBTQ+ community that has improved and enriched the lives of many individuals who have faced so much adversity. Our grand marshals inspire us, empower us and are examples of how to unite our community. We are so excited that KABC is here to increase the awareness of our grand marshals and LA Pride.”

There’s no denying that the queer community has come a long way since the early days of the parade, when you could still get booked for a blow job. With queer and trans rights currently under attack by the Trump administration, the show of support, optimism and pride might be just what the community needs to see on small screens everywhere. 

“We’re proud to bring the L.A. Pride Parade celebration to viewers across Southern California,” Cheryl Fair, president and general manager of KABC, told Deadline. “Our collaboration with LA Pride is a commitment to reflecting and serving the diverse communities that represent our audience.”

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GAY LA: When Lesbian Visibility Was an L.A. Specialty

In 2017, West Hollywood’s Plummer Park hosted an exhibit titled Lesbians to Watch Out For: ’90s Queer L.A. Activism. – Advertisement –

On display were banners, pamphlets, radical texts and street flyers that told of a time gone by in Los Angeles: a time when the lesbian scene wasn’t just thriving but on the verge of creating major social change. Though it’s disheartening to think about how the city has changed in regard to holding and maintaining lesbian spaces, it’s something we shouldn’t allow ourselves to gloss over and forget. At least, not if we want the community to thrive.

Before the Internet came and rapidly commodified all queer identities, L.A. was more than just a lesbian hub. It was a lesbian destination spot. It’s difficult to take into account just how prevalent gay girl identity was before the bars started closing and the neighborhoods started closing themselves off to more radical, less commercially-viable ways of fighting against the Man. From the Girlbar L.A. dance party (possibly the inspiration for “The L Word’s” ‘Shebar”) to 1940s and ‘50s favorites like Joani Presents and The Star Room, this town was chock full of places where ladies could be in the company of ladies (and more than a few drag kings.) Needless to say, the glory days of the lesbian bar have come and gone. In a recent Twitter thread between L.A. writer and editor Trish Bendix and novelist Roxane Gay, the lack of lesbian bars in the city was starkly exposed. 

“Are there any lesbian bars in L.A.?” Gay tweeted. “If this was something I could find with Google I wouldn’t have asked. Guess what? There aren’t any. So it’s not a crazy question.”

“Just pop-up parties,” Bendix replied, “weeklies and monthlies or other sporadic events. There’s not a go-to spot where you’re guaranteed to find queer women en masse on any given day. But if you want to come play dominoes with a group of dykes tonight in Eagle Rock, I got you.”

How did it come to this? How did Los Angeles change from a dyke mecca to a town where you have to settle for Domino night?

Perhaps the answer lies in some of the artifacts from the past. If you can get past the initial depression brought on by the constant reminder of better days long past, you’ll be able to see not just the sheer volume of lesbian activism and social activities on offer, you’ll also get a sense of just how diverse it was. A flyer from Lesbian Visibility Week in 1990 promotes a “Dykes and Their Dogs” pet show. Notices from the late ‘80s and ‘90s promote marches, ACT UP meetings, all-girl dance parties, and get-togethers that do what dykes do best: promote social justice and activism while having an amazingly hot time on the dance floor. 

So what happened to the ground-breaking feminism of the early ‘90s? What happened to the protest signs reading “Dykes Reclaim the Universe” and “Eat Pussy, Not Cow?” While queer activism hasn’t died, it looks a whole lot different in this century. While queer spaces and events like Folklore Salon, Cuties, Project Q, Lez Croix, and Dyke Day exist to provide social justice-oriented queer folks with a community, many of the specifically lesbian-identified events only pop up a few times a year, usually during Pride Week. If you want to go to a lesbian bar, you’ll have to hit Long Beach or settle for a few more fluid options in Los Angeles proper, such as Akbar or Oil Can Harry’s. 

Maybe we’ll never get back to the glory days of Dyke activism. But one thing’s for certain: When it comes to the L.A. social scene, there should always be at least a handful of places for girls who love girls to hang out in, party in and change the world in. 

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GAY L.A. –Crossdressing Tales of the “Ambisextrous” Julian Eltinge




Photos: Wikipedia. Julian Eltinge was a high-paid drag performer in the 1910s.

A closer look at L.A.’s OG drag queen.

Once upon a time, in a place that bears a faint resemblance to the Los Angeles we know today, there was a city full of crossdressers, queers and vaudevillians trying to make it in the entertainment industry. When the nascent film industry came to town in the early 20th century, it created a reason for performers of all kinds to come to the City of Angels to make their name, no matter how bizarre or localized their stage acts might have been.- Advertisement –

One of these people was named Julian Eltinge. When the Massachusetts-born actor, originally named William Julian Dalton, realized he had a knack for female impersonation at an early age, there wasn’t exactly a booming market for it. While some might have kept their skills under wraps during the puritanical first few decades of the 20th century, Eltinge quickly found a way to capitalize on his skill. 

He made his name in Boston starring in an American play based on “Charley’s Aunt,” a British sensation which had been making the rounds in London due to its juicy lead role for a male comedian. The plot of “Charley” hinges on a college man who must – for convoluted, nonsensical reasons –  impersonate his friend’s elderly aunt. The role, played by Charlie’s older brother Syd Chaplin in the 1925 filmed version, was a perfect fit for Eltinge, whose ability to “pass” was applauded by critics early on.

Though the American political climate in the early 20th century was decidedly conservative, the entertainment world had free license to let its freak flag fly during the 1920s and early 30s, up until the passage of the Hays Code, which would prohibit queer visibility in films almost until the end of the studio system, unless queer characters were soundly punished by the final curtain. Though Eltinge was primarily a stage performer, the same social mores that changed Hollywood from a giddy free-for-all to a prudish hit machine in those years affected him just as much during his time on stage, whether he was playing a matronly aunt in “Charley” or a coquettish seductress in “The Fascinating Widow.” Dubbed “Mr. Lillian Russell” for the glamour he was able to channel during his performances, Eltinge soon had L.A. hooked on his act. 

But the 1920s soon made way for the more conservative, depressed 1930s in Hollywood. While Eltinge had always been adamant about his heterosexuality in order to quash career-ending rumors about his craft, the staged bar fights and public displays of butchness didn’t do much to dissociate Eltinge from the queerness of his craft. To describe Eltinge’s comfort switching between the sexes (both onstage and off) Dorothy Parker coined the term “ambisextrous.”

Unlike actual trans performers like Billy Tipton and Wilmer Broadnax, Eltinge was able to leave his act onstage rather than having to go stealth to survive. Still, during a time where wearing more than one article of clothing belonging to the opposite sex was enough to get you thrown in jail, Eltinge’s entire existence seems like a kind of miracle. For Angelenos, there’s one part of Eltinge’s legacy that can still be enjoyed today. His lavish estate, Silver Lake’s Villa Capistrano, still stands tall, even if few who pass it know the complicated, brave history of the man who erected it in the first place.

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GAY L.A. – In 1958, Gay Rights Won For the First Time

Before the 1950s, America didn’t have any gay publications. While there may have been pulpy Gay and Lesbian fiction for folks to read and a few movies about gay life playing in cinemas (1936’s “These Three” and 1944’s “Laura” come to mind,) there weren’t any magazines or even pamphlets that queer folks could pick up to read about gay life. To put out an out-and-out gay magazine was just too risky, and while Lisa Ben, the RKO staffer who put out the country’s first lesbian magazine-cum-newspaper in the 1940s, was responsible for penning entire issues of “Vice Versa,” she had to keep it quiet. – Advertisement –

Then the 1950s happened. The Mattachine Society, started up by Harry Hay and a few other prominent gay men in Los Angeles in 1950, decided to start up its own publication: Something that would cover serious political issues concerning LGBT rights as well as topical subjects and happenings. The first issue of ONE magazine came out in January 1953, and while the Los Angeles gay community was happy about it, law enforcement was not.

To put things in a bit of context: This was before Stonewall, before the Black Cat protests in Silverlake, even before the Cooper’s Donuts riot in 1958 where rent boys and drag queens headed off the cops at a late-night hangout in L.A.’s “gay ghetto.” The world may have been ready for ONE magazine’s frank treatment of civil rights, social justice and gay life, but the U.S. Postal Service was not. A magazine boasting the headline “Something About Sailors” simply wasn’t going to go unnoticed by the world at large.

According to Matt Baume, who hosts the podcast “The Sewers of Paris,” ONE tried to come out quietly in the early years, featuring:

“No matchmaking ads; no racy photos; no descriptions of physical intimacy—even cuddling. But the following year, an issue contained ads for sheer pajamas and a short story that involved some touching, which led the Post Office to seize the issue.”

The Post Office refused to mail issues of ONE through the mail. While issues were mostly sold in bars, it was being mailed enough to get under the skin of Los Angeles Postmaster Otto Olesen. ONE found itself on the wrong side of the law, with no one, not even the L.A. ACLU to help out. ONE’s attorney Eric Julber had a long journey ahead of him. He not only had to convince the Supreme Court that ONE wasn’t “filthy.” He had to make a strong case that a publication dealing frankly with homosexuality isn’t the same thing an obscene or pornographic publication.

And miracle of miracles, he won. After losing out in court the first time, Julber got a swift reversal in 1958, thanks to the fact that previous cases dealing with nudity and “polygamy” had eventually won. While this victory might seem small to us, it set an important precedent. Even before the official start of the Gay Rights Movement, ONE was making history, right here in L.A.

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GAY L.A.: The Last Los Angeles Bathhouse

“To the left of me,” wrote David Colker for the Los Angeles Times in a 1994 article, “four men were having sex. Only two of them were actually looking at each other.”

So begins most bathhouse stories of the time. At the Compound, one of the Valley’s oldest establishments, porn would screen on the walls while patrons got it on in public (or private) rooms below. But not for long. Even in 1994, the gay bathhouse’s days were numbered.

“A decade ago,” Colker writes, “Los Angeles boasted slick, high-tech bathhouses famous throughout the gay world. But as the specter of AIDS darkened the mid-1980s, the baths came under fire as places where unsafe, multi-partner sex spread the disease.”

The Compound wasn’t the only spa coming under attack. It seemed that the more sexually open the bathhouse was, the more it would be targeted by law enforcement and political officials.

“The Corral Club…” according to the L.A. Times “had a community ‘orgy room’ with a small stage where live sex shows took place, and several private rooms containing chains with wrist and ankle straps hanging from the ceilings.”

Photo: Hollywood Spa.
When Hollywood’s oldest bathhouse closed its doors in 2014, it marked the end of an era.

Whether or not the baths were at fault for these crimes, the scene soon shut down, leaving only a few houses remaining in L.A. by the late ‘90s. In 2014, the oldest of these, Ivar Avenue’s Hollywood Spa, closed its doors for good. The spa was originally opened by Scott Goulet in 1974, when bathhouse culture was booming in the city. The owner’s death by AIDS-related complications came only three years after the spa was included in a lawsuit filed against the then-L.A. District Attorney for encouraging the spreading of HIV/AIDS through unprotected sex.

“We’re going to fight this thing. As far as we’re concerned, we’re the good guys,” co-owner John Ferry, told the Los Angeles Times at the time. “We consider the Hollywood Spa to be an important asset in terms of being a place for gay men to socialize, be educated about health issues and be free from homophobic attacks such as this lawsuit.”

Little did he know that the spa would end up shutting down decades later due to factors as basic as a declining patronage and a rent increase.

While a few bathhouses still exist that cater to a Gay clientele – FLEX Spa and North Hollywood Spa to name a few – the fact that the bathhouse has gone the way of the dodo says more about trends in law enforcement and national prudishness than anything else. When these bathhouses first opened, they had to fight against an openly homophobic government and a culture still viewed gay sex as deviant. Today, in a more outwardly liberal era, bathhouse culture hasn’t had a real renaissance.

“Behind the walls of a bathhouse lies a totally homosexual world unlike anywhere on the outside.” Colter wrote in his article. “Even on the streets of gay enclaves such as West Hollywood, there are billboards showing heterosexual couples, straight love songs on the radio and plenty of reminders ranging from magazine covers to movie posters that to be gay in this society is to be different.”

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Queer Origins of America’s Favorite Holidays

Historically, humans have found ways of dealing with winter, that gross time of year when it’s bitter cold, dark at 5 p.m., and depressing as all hell. Not only ways of dealing with it: we’ve found ways of turning into the best time of year.

The span of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is filled with excitement, consumerist fervor and eustress for many an American, no matter how bruised and battered we get during the contact sport that is the Black Friday to Cyber Monday stretch. The last months of the year are our designated time to chill, hang with family, eat a ton of food, and do practically nothing. But believe it or not, the holidays weren’t always so PG. In fact, both Thanksgiving and Christmas have some gay-as-hell origins.

Let’s start with Turkey Day. In addition to being a controversial holiday celebrating the brutal colonization of the Northeast, Thanksgiving is also kind of gay. We may think of it as a fun time to hang out with family (biological or chosen) eat a ton of gross food and get super drunk. But the pilgrims…well, they did all that too. But with a twist.

According to a 2015 Vice essay entitled, “The Pilgrims Were Queer,” more than a handful of early colonizers were having a real fun time on that city on the hill. While the Pilgrims came over as an exiled hyper-religious sext, there were still a few of them who were thrilled by the freer interpretation of gender roles set forth by indigenous folks in the American northeast. In a small town called Merrymount, some pretty advanced stuff went down.

Per Vice: “Thomas Morton’s founding of Merrymount remains among the most vivid: Merrymount denizens are described as having rejected the strict rules of the Puritans, declaring all servants and slaves to be free and encouraging intermingling with indigenous Algonquin people. Morton declared himself “Lord of Misrule” and his people were described by Nathaniel Hawthorne as a “crew of Comus,” a reference to a mythological figure during whose ceremonies men and women exchanged clothing.”

A depiction of a homoerotic Roman Saturnalia festival.

The gayness going on was frowned upon and, in many cases, prosecuted. However, the pilgrim’s anti-sodomy laws were a far cry from the English ones. Instead of using far-fetched religious arguments to talk about the impurity of the act, Pilgrims simply forbade sex that didn’t lead to procreation. But that didn’t stop anybody from getting with it.

“My reading of this is that the Puritans were like, ‘people do this stuff, but it really shouldn’t be public,’” Michael Bronski, a Professor of Practice in Media and Activism in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard told Vice. “‘We don’t want to go too far punishing them, because that would hurt the community.’ The most important thing is to keep the community stable.”

But let’s dial it back a bit. If the Pilgrims were gay, they were nothing compared to the Romans, who didn’t simply look the other way when guys were getting it on. More often than not, they joined right in. The origin of the holiday we know today as Christmas came from the Greeks and Romans, who had their own way of celebrating the solstice and ringing in the New Year. And it involved some sex. To the Romans, December 25 didn’t represent the birth of Jesus. It represented the birth of the sun, and thus became a day to pay tribute to the Sun god Sol Invictus. Before that, however, there was Saturnalia, a festival spanning roughly from the 17th to the 23rd of December honoring the mischievous God through copious drinking, carousing, and rabble-rousing. And would it be a Roman party without boys?

One emperor got seriously into the spirit of the thing. Elagabalus, a 220 A.D.-era guy who loved wearing dresses and described himself as his male lover’s “queen,” threw lavish parties involving boys, booze, violets, and pet tigers.

You know, your typical Roman night out. Saturnalia was also a time for gifts. But instead of doing what we do during the weeks before Christmas (namely searching frantically for last-minute gifts for people we forgot about) the Romans exchanged, according to Gay Star News, “statuettes of beautiful youths and ‘hermaphrodites’, phallic cakes, books of filthy epigrams, cosmetics and hair extensions for either sex.”

While there are a lot of things the Romans weren’t great at, we can certainly commend them for treating the end of the year like an extended bachelorette party of the highest order. So this holiday season, forget about decking the halls with boughs of holly.

Let’s all take the time to focus on making Christmas gay again.

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Remembering L.A.’s Last Great Piano Bar

Earlier this month, the New York Times ran a profile of Steve Ross, one of the city’s last great Cabaret artists. Ross has been playing at piano bars across the city since the 1980s, bringing the camp classics of the Great American Songbooks to newer, younger audiences at venues from the Algonquin to Birdland.

While New York has always had a history of small, intimate bars built around a piano, L.A.’s relationship to the classic queer cabaret bar has been different. While the opening of Tramp Stamp Granny’s in Hollywood sparked a type of renaissance for that certain type of New York-style bar that’s so adept at mixing show tune singalongs with boozing and debauchery, there’s still nothing that can replace L.A.’s classic piano bar “The Other Side,” which closed in 2012.

Before Silver Lake was the collection hipster eateries and cafes that we know and love today, it was kind of a dive. It was also pretty gay. Back in the early 2010s, the Silver Lake community was composed of, according to writer Besha Rodell, “a couple of single mothers raising teenagers, older gay couples, a Perry Farrell-like dude named Adam who created and tended to the neighborhood’s famous chandelier tree… a neighborhood of artists and outsiders, people who had left small towns to find a home more suited to their needs for freedom and creativity.”

In Rodell’s recent article about “The Other Side” for Punch Magazine, she cites the bar as being the glue that held this small, queer community together.

When the bar first opened in 1967, L.A. had plenty of piano bars to speak of. Richard Little told Rodell that Silver Lake, at that time, was like no other part of the city. “There was no place like it.” He said. “West Hollywood did not have the kind of diversity you’d find in Silver Lake. We ranged in age from old to young; various ethnic groups were welcomed. West Hollywood was never like that.”

While this description might fit a broader swath of today’s queer L.A., there’s still something special about the memory of a place where queer folks could go not to be anonymous, but to be truly intimate. To coexist in the presence of other singing queers and a grand piano. While Silver Lake is still home to Akbar, one of the last historic gay bars in the city, nothing has come up to truly take the place of “The Other Side,” with its funky interior, community-oriented vibe, and frequent singalongs. There are many factors that may have contributed to this. Was it the fact that AIDS came along and laid claim to so many lives? Was it the creation of hook-up apps that made it unnecessary to seek out human company? The rising cost of rent in the newly-hip neighborhood? Most likely a combination of all three.

Even in the midst of so many historic closures of gay bars across the country, L.A. hasn’t suffered nearly as much as some smaller cities. But during the holiday season, when queer folks want to drink, revel, and escape their relatives, it’s nice to remember a place where everybody sang your name.

 

 

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“Nanette” Special Faces Up to Reality

Comedy, at its best, is supposed to stare down the truth. Once a fairly simple task, any kind of reckoning with “truth” becomes slightly more complicated in today’s world, where there are as many truths to one story as there are people who lived it, witnessed it, and hear about it. It’s a comedian’s job, in the world of #MeToo, to figure out how to poke fun at trauma while actually taking it very, very seriously. No one has yet managed to walk this line better than the gay Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, whose stand-up show “Nanette” recently started streaming on Netflix.

Gadsby has been in a few Australian shows and comedy specials, namely the magnificent “Please Like Me,” where she played a frankly suicidal and self-hating woman in recovery. “Nanette” draws on aspects of her fictional character in “Please Like Me” as well as her career as a stand-up comic to talk about why she’s giving up comedy for good. Or at least, a certain kind of comedy. Self-deprecating comedy, Gadsby starts out by saying in “Nanette,” may be the go-to style for comedians who are in a recognized minority. However, for those who aren’t in power, self-deprecation “isn’t humility,” said Gadsby. “It’s humiliating.”

This is the thesis of “Nanette,” a special that Gadsby named before she knew what it was going to be about. The name is used as a sort of throwaway joke in the beginning of a show: A relationship didn’t work out with a “fascinating” woman named Nanette. Gadsby used the name as inspiration before she knew how that relationship would end. Though it seems like a good way to name a comedy special that really can’t be summarized in a name (what do you call an hour-long treatise on the sins of patriarchy?) it’s also perfectly emblematic of what Gadsby is doing in her half-comic, half-tragic one-woman show. She’s talking about a relationship that didn’t work out: Her relationship with comedy, which presumably ends with “Nanette,” her greatest, most critically-acclaimed triumph. How many artists can say goodbye to the art form to which they’ve dedicated their life with such a bang? And how many can give a farewell to comedy show that ends with a 12-minute soliloquy that could not be more serious, in which Gadsby details her own rape, abuse, and humiliation at the hands of a patriarchal society?

If this account doesn’t seem to make “Nanette” cohere, all the better. “Nanette” is not, and should not be, about narrative coherence. It tells the story of one woman’s continuing, semi-abusive relationship with comedy, with the world, with mental health, in an attempt to turn pain and sadness into outward, righteous anger. It succeeds, and it tears us apart in the process. “Nanette” must be seen to be believed, it must be seen to be understood as the great work of art that it is. In short, it must be seen.

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Thousands Turned Away in L.A. Pride Fiasco

With chart-topping pop stars like Kehlani and Tove Lo headlining this year’s L.A. Pride Festival, no one could have been surprised by an unusually high turnout. However, during this year’s Pride, the City of West Hollywood, along with the Pride organizers of Christopher Street West, saw an unexpected number of ticket sales and flooded streets on Saturday, June 9, causing parade-goers to be turned away by the thousands.

No one saw it coming. Especially not the ticket holders who showed up from all around the country to participate in the legendary Pride festival. Alisha Broome came out from Florida to attend.

“It was my first time coming to Pride. I came out over two years ago.” Broome said over the phone. “It was really exciting. We purchased the tickets way in advance. When we got there, we were told it was sold out, they weren’t letting anyone through. Once we got up to the front of the line, we were told it was a fire hazard. They were at full capacity. There was no information given about how we would go about getting refunded.”

Before any of the performances began, helicopters circled in the sky, and thousands of ticket-buyers were being told by the L.A. Fire Department that the venue was full.

“There was no direct contact information to get ahold of anyone in regard to ticket sales or refunds.” Said Broome. “It was just a lot.”

Other would-be Pride participators agreed. After the festival began turning people away, Twitter blew up with angry responses from ticket holders who were left with no information about how to get their money back or how to move forward.

“F*** LA Pride.” Tweeted user @OCNew. “They took our money, said you could pick up tix at will call. You couldn’t. Cops saying leave or get locked up. Then Pacific Design Center charging $25 for parking and giving no refunds. Sooooo I paid all that money just to drive to WEHO!”

“LA Pride was so horrible.” Another user, @mkygod, tweeted after being denied entry. “Waited almost 2 hours in line only for the line to stop at the gate due to full capacity. Then they made people wait another hour before telling everyone in line to go home via helicopter.”

Some attendees found that the disorganization of Pride created not just unpleasant, but outright dangerous situations of the same type that Christopher Street West and the LAPD were trying to prevent.

“Extreme ticket overselling, dangerous overcrowding, police with pellet guns, and a scary near miss with a girl attempting to jump off the parking structure (which went unnoticed by authorities,)” tweeted @wondermIm. “#lapride should. have. done. Better.”

Even pop star Kehlani, one of L.A. Pride’s headliners, spoke out about her disappointment in regard to the festival’s organization. With Pride being advertised and sold more like a music festival than a community event, West Hollywood and the Pride organizers quickly had trouble on their hands.

On Monday, June 11, the City of West Hollywood put out a statement addressing the overbooked festival. Estevan Montemayor, CSW/LA Pride Board President, later spoke on the unprecedented event, stating:

“The LA PRIDE festival sold out both nights for the first time in our nearly 50-year history.  The event has grown from a small community gathering into something completely unique: a safe and inclusive space where tens of thousands of people can gather to embrace everyone for who they are.   With the obvious increase in demand for the LA PRIDE festival, we will be working with the City of West Hollywood and the community to continue to improve and evolve the festival.”

Attendees who were denied entry are urged to request a refund by emailing help@seetickets.us or calling 323.908.0607.

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