Bohemian Los Angeles: And the Making of Modern Politics - Paperback

by Daniel Hurewitz (Author)

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.

Front Jacket

A beautifully-crafted book that will serve as a benchmark work for years to come.--Vicki Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America

"In beautiful style, Hurewitz engages the history of sexuality writ large. He provides a fascinating look at the development of bohemian Los Angeles, its overlap of artists and activists, and presents this material in a new light that tells the story of the emergence of homosexual civil rights movements through the art and politics of the day. This will certainly impact the direction of the field."--Nan Alamilla Boyd, author of Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965

"An important and highly original book. It is at once a history of homosexual and homosocial thought and behavior, modernism and modernist expression, and radical political engagement. Its restorative, poignant character allows the reader to visit lost neighborhoods where social and political threads brought together a compelling group of people."--William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past

"Hurewitz truly opens Los Angeles' closet door in this stunning history of the 'Red Hills' above Silver Lake where radical countercultures dreamed, cavorted, and agitated for a better world."--Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

Author Biography

Daniel Hurewitz is Assistant Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York, and author of Stepping Out: Nine Walks through New York's Gay and Lesbian Past.