"On Veterans Day 1950, a handful of gay men hiked up a hillside in Los Angeles, in a neighborhood then called Eden Dale. Meeting in secret was risky. Being discovered could mean arrest, entrapment, a lost job, or a beating. Yet these men-led by the visionary activist Harry Hay-came together with a radical idea: what if queer people could see themselves as a community with rights, dignity, and solidarity?"
"The evening dives into the Mattachine story with images, rare archival materials, and even a John Wayne film clip-because, as the organizers point out, sometimes history is stranger than fiction. The lineup is made up of queer history all-stars: Devlyn Camp, creator of the podcast "Queer Serial"; Will Roscoe, editor of Radically Gay; Jim Van Buskirk, founding program manager of SFPL's James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center; and Joey Cain, longtime curator and researcher."
"All together, they'll unpack how a hillside meeting in LA helped set the stage for what would later unfold in San Francisco. Cain doesn't mince words about what Mattachine ignited. "The exhilaration of freedom," he says. "Freedom to live authentically and not on the false terms of religion, government, or society." That defiance was explosive in the days of McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare,"
On Veterans Day 1950, a small group of gay men met secretly on a Los Angeles hillside in Eden Dale, risking arrest, entrapment, job loss, or violence. Led by Harry Hay, they formed the Mattachine Society to imagine queer people as a community with rights, dignity, and solidarity. Mattachine helped launch the modern gay rights movement and influenced activism, law, culture, and community for generations. San Francisco marks the 75th anniversary with a one-night program at the Main Library featuring images, rare archival materials, a John Wayne film clip, and presentations by historians and curators.
Read at 48 hills
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]