Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics: A Review

My reading group just finished Daniel Hurewitz’ Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, which purports to explain the origins of the modern gay movement and identity politics as emerging in the community of Edendale, California, an artists’ colony in the Hollywood Hills of the early 20th Century (some of this area is now known as Silver Lake). Hurewitz’ last book was  Stepping Out :Nine Tours through New York City’s Gay and Lesbian Past; his current book gives one the same sense of stepping into the past of a community that a good tour guide can give you.

By John Everett Till

Hurewitz’ argument is that the artist’s colony of Edendale hosted two kinds of artists: a group of artists who experimented with form and technique and developed an “apolitical” art that was highly focused on provoking an emotional response from the viewer, and a more socially-engaged and often WPA-funded group of artists who dealt through their art with themes such as labor and racism.

People from both groups socialized together in Edendale homes and community spaces, and their seemly unrelated artistic ideals eventually converged. This happened through the emergence of a “politics of emotion” that germinated within local Communist Party circles, which drew its membership from many different artists and activists within Edendale.

(Bohemian Los Angeles) gives one the same sense of stepping into the past of a community that a good tour guide can give you

The local Communist Party cultivated a dense set of commitments, associations, practices, and forms of life among the artists and activists that joined its ranks, and the party was as involved in antiracist organizing (particularly in response to local racist campaigns against Latino youth), as it was in responding to labor issues. Communist Party members used class as a metaphor for explaining the politics of race. Race became another kind of class, and therefore a new kind of political subject.

This class-to-race metaphor in turn set the stage for another exchange, this time from race-to-sexuality, through which Edendale Communist Party member Harry Hay articulated a new politics of emotion, organizing people on the basis of a homosexual identity, and launching a gay organization based on this politics, the Mattachine Society.

Hurewitz sees Hay’s political innovation as the point of origin of today’s “identity politics.” Members of my reading group questioned whether it is useful to compare the politics of the Mattachine Society and early 20th Century US anti-racist and civil right struggles with an “identity politics” whose origins are usually associated with feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. Hurewitz’ argument is interesting, but hardly persuasive, as it fails to explain the prior emergence of same sex identities, communities, and politics in the UK and Germany in the late 19th and early 20th Century, as well as the parallel emergence of gay identities and communities in early 20th Century NYC, as documented in Chauncey’s Gay New York.

Purchase David Hurewitz’s books by clicking these links:

Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern

Stepping Out :Nine Tours through New York City’s Gay and Lesbian Past

Posted by Left Eye On Books on Aug 16 2010. Filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry