Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

replied that it was not a freedom of the press case, but rather a stolen property case. In July 1970, the jury convicted the two of receiving stolen property, a felony, and the judge sentenced them to three years’ probation plus fines of $1,000 for Kunkin and $500 for Applebaum.⁴⁵ By the end of the year, the Freep settled the obstruction of justice case by agreeing to a payment of $10,000; according to Peck, “a larger deal was made with the agents.” Kunkin and Applebaum appealed their criminal convictions, winning their cases in April 1973 when the state supreme court ruled unanimously that the prosecution had not established that the defendants had received property knowing it was stolen.⁴⁶ And, according to Peck, “the narcs never received the money.”⁴⁷

      The paper began a downhill editorial slide with its enthusiastic defense of Charles Manson, arrested in October 1969. Starting in January 1970, the Freep featured Manson on its front page for three weeks in a row: “Manson Can Go Free!” “M. D. On Manson’s Sex Life!” “Manson Interview! Exclusive Exclusive!” Then the paper began a weekly column by Manson written from jail.⁴⁸ Several dozen “news” stories followed. Rolling Stone tried to explain: The Freep was “undoubtedly hypersensitive to the relentless gloating of the cops who, after a five-year search, finally found a longhaired devil you could love to hate.”⁴⁹ To others it looked like Kunkin was choosing sensationalism over New Left politics.

      In the meantime, in 1969, the company that printed the Freep had refused to continue—Kunkin said the prosecutors in the narcs case had told the owner he too would be sued unless he quit printing the paper. No other Southern California printer would take the job, and Kunkin was forced to print the paper in the Bay Area and put the new issues on the train to L.A. To end his reliance on fearful printing companies, Kunkin bought his own printing plant and a new state-of-the-art press—a monster twenty feet high, printing sixteen tabloid pages at a time (most presses at that point did eight). It cost a quarter of a million dollars but promised independence and freedom—and he could make money printing for other newspapers. But, he said, “the press didn’t work!”

      The expense bankrupted Kunkin. The staff quit and started their own paper, the Staff, which didn’t last long. Kunkin was forced to sell the Free Press and its crippled printing operation to two pornographers, remaining as editor while becoming an employee. In July 1973, he was fired from the paper he had founded ten years earlier.⁵⁰ For the rest of the Seventies, it published mostly sex ads.

11

       Before Stonewall: Gay L.A. (1964–70)

      The crime: kissing at midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1967; fourteen men arrested by the LAPD vice squad. The place: the Black Cat, a gay bar on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park. The charge: “lewd conduct.”

      Police raids on bars had been a familiar part of gay life for decades, but this one had a sequel that made history. Five weeks later, several hundred people—perhaps 500 or more—gathered in the bar’s parking lot to protest the raid. Marchers on Sunset Boulevard carried signs reading “No More Abuse of Our Rights and Dignity,” “Abolish Arbitrary Arrests,” “Stop Illegal Search and Seizure,” “End Illegal Entrapment,” and “Blue Fascism Must Go!” It was February 11, 1967, more than two years before the Stonewall Uprising in New York (June 28, 1969): the first gay rally against police violence in America, the earliest gay street demonstration, and the historic beginning of the gay liberation movement.¹

      The demonstration had been called by PRIDE, a group founded in L.A. in 1966—the name was originally an acronym for “Personal Rights in Defense and Education.” They called their meetings “Pride Night” and the bar where they met “Pride Hall.” According to historians Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, it was “probably the first application of the word to gay politics”—another “before Stonewall” moment.²

      The LAPD actions that provoked the first gay street protest in America were described in a leaflet circulated by Tangents, an LA gay magazine founded in 1966. That New Year’s Eve,

      12 vice-squad officers—plainclothesmen—started beating patrons to the floor about 5 minutes after midnight. They did not identify themselves except by their weapons. After beating the patrons, the 14 to be arrested were laid face down on the sidewalk outside the bar. 5 patrol cars, containing 2 uniformed officers each, were brought from a near-by side street where they had been parked for some time and the individuals arrested were taken to the newly opened Rampart St. Police Station. Three bartenders were among those arrested.³

      The LA Free Press immediately saw that the Black Cat Tavern protest was a transformative moment for gay people. “All over the city, homosexuals are determined that they will no longer ‘cop out’ to the lesser charge if they are arrested. And when someone else is arrested, they will come forward as witnesses, even though police may bring pressure on their employers.”⁴

      One more thing: the same night as the Black Cat protest—February 11—the Sunset Strip protests a few miles to the west were reaching a climax—80,000 leaflets had been distributed calling for a demonstration that night, which “saturated the clubs and made their way clandestinely through every high school in the county.” “One of the most interesting and pace-setting” developments in the Sunset Strip protests, the Freep noted, “came from homosexual organizations who are currently up in arms about New Year’s Eve police raids on a number of Silver Lake area gay bars.” PRIDE, while organizing its own protest for that night, also endorsed the February 11 Sunset Strip demonstration. The kids there carried one of the same signs as the gay demonstrators outside the Black Cat: “Stop Blue Fascism.”

      PRIDE founder Steve Ginsberg explained PRIDE’s attitude in the Freep: PRIDE wanted to “take to the streets,” unlike the “prissy little old ladies of some of the older groups.”⁵ The “older groups” against which the new libertarians were rebelling started with the Mattachine Society, an L.A. LGBT organization founded by Harry Hay in 1950. Given the temper of the times, the Mattachine founders had had as their goal the quiet integration of gays and lesbians into the mainstream, not loud street protests confronting the cops. Hay himself was a member of the Communist Party and a talented organizer; he organized the Mattachine Society, named after the medieval French secret societies of masked men, into cells that did not know each other’s membership or leadership—a system he had learned from the Communist Party’s experience with fascism in Europe and now with the rise of McCarthyism in the United States. The Mattachine Society organized the first national movement of what they called “homophiles.” Starting out small and fearful, in the basement of L.A.’s First Unitarian Church, they took their first great leap forward in 1952 when the group challenged a vice squad arrest of Dale Jennings, a core member. They raised money for an attorney, who won an acquittal by arguing that Jennings had been entrapped—the first acquittal of an admitted homosexual charged with morals violations.⁶

      But as the group blossomed, the red-baiters went after Harry Hay. The LA Daily Mirror published a column in 1953 charging that Mattachine had Communist ties, and at the group’s convention that summer, Harry Hay and other founders, including his partner Rudi Gernreich (later a famous fashion designer), resigned when the convention denounced them as Communists “who would disgrace us all.”⁷ The irony was deep: Harry Hay had been expelled from L.A.’s Communist Party in 1948 because leaders feared gay party members could be blackmailed into informing for the FBI. As Dorothy Healey recalled: “I personally met with Harry Hay to tell him we were going to have to drop him from the Party rolls. I made it clear to him that this was not a moralistic judgment by the Party, and he could see the logic of the argument.” Nevertheless, she wrote in her 1990 memoir, expelling Harry Hay and other gays was “a self-inflicted wound” on the party in L.A.⁸

      Mattachine “never recovered from the loss of its founders,” Faderman and Timmons report. The same convention that