Bohemian Los Angeles

and the Making of Modern Politics

Daniel Hurewitz

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780520249257
• eBook ISBN: 9780520941694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Bohemian Los Angeles brings to life a vibrant and all-but forgotten milieu of artists, leftists, and gay men and women whose story played out over the first half of the twentieth century and continues to shape the entire American landscape. It is the story of a hidden corner of Los Angeles, where the personal first became the political, where the nation's first enduring gay rights movement emerged, and where the broad spectrum of what we now think of as identity politics was born. Portraying life over a period of more than forty years in the hilly enclave of Edendale, near downtown Los Angeles, Daniel Hurewitz considers the work of painters and printmakers, looks inside the Communist Party's intimate cultural scene, and examines the social world of gay men. In this vividly written narrative, he discovers why and how these communities, inspiring both one another and the city as a whole, transformed American notions of political identity with their ideas about self-expression, political engagement, and race relations. Bohemian Los Angeles, incorporating fascinating oral histories, personal letters, police records, and rare photographs, shifts our focus from gay and bohemian New York to the west coast with significant implications for twentieth-century U.S. history and politics.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• Introduction: Traversing the Hills of Edendale
• Prologue: A World Left Behind
• 1 “A Most Lascivious Picture of Impatient Desire”
• 2 Together against the World: Self, Community, and Expression among the Artists of Edendale
• 3 1930s Containment: Identity by State Dictate
• 4 Left of Edendale: The Deep Politics of Communist Community
• 5 The United Nations in a City: Racial Ideas in Edendale, on the Left, and in Wartime Los Angeles
• 6 Getting Some Identity: Mattachine and the Politics of Sexual Identity Construction
• Conclusion: The Struggle of Identity Politics
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INDEX