Creating A Gay Community: The Hoover Street Commune

by Don Kilhefner

One of the important gay historical sites in Los Angeles is located at 1500 N. Hoover Street (at Sunset Drive), right behind the KCET public television studio. It was the home of the Hoover Street Commune, which existed from late 1970 until late 1972 — the place from which the creation of the gay community originated.

From its founding in September 1969, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) met erratically in various locations, causing problems with membership and continuity. In December 1969, I was able to rent the Peace and Freedom Party office at 477 N. Vermont for GLF. Morris Kight and I then began organizing GLF into an effective militant organization. By the end of 1970 we decided it was time to shift gears with our Gay Liberation work.

In April of 1970, I had organized and chaired within GLF the “Gay Survival Committee” (a name that tells you where we were as a people at the time) which began formulating a pioneering plan to provide counseling to gay and lesbian people suffering from oppression sickness. That committee was the seed out of which Los Angeles’ Gay Community Services Center grew (now called the Gay and Lesbian Center, with the highly significant words “community” and “service” inexcusably erased from its name). It was clear to me that if we were going to succeed, we could not just continue with radical political work per se, but that we needed, as Chairman Mao taught, to transform gay revolutionary consciousness into service to the people. There was a most critical need to create a visible, proud, defiant and organized gay community where none had ever existed. The plan was that the Gay Community Services Center would be the vehicle around which that community would be organized. It worked.

Late in 1970 we located a house on Hoover Street—a duplex which had been turned into one large house with many bedrooms. Active GLF members moved in. The communards included Stan Williams, Steve Beckwith, Ray Powers, John Platania, Randy Schrader and me. GLFers Lee Heflin, Dexter Price and Bruce Cristoff lived right next door. In and out (usually in) on a daily basis were Morris Kight, Tony DeRosa, June Herrle, Howard Fox, David Backstrom, John Coffland, Justin Dangerfield, John Murphy, beloved Luke Johnson and many more.

Virtually every evening there would be fifteen or more people sitting around our large communal table for supper-visiting gay liberationists, soon-to-be-famous filmmakers, writers and poets, lovers du jour, the Marlboro Man, mystics, future judges—engaged in animated and liberating discussions.

Sometimes Lucy would come down from the sky with her diamonds to visit. I had my long hippie hair put up into an elegant beehive hairdo to go shopping at the Safeway on Sunset. High Tea was poured every afternoon at 4 p.m. And so it went.

At the same time, much serious, groundbreaking community organizing occurred. After our large planning meetings, John Platania and I would write and type up the collective ideas. By March 1971 it had become an eighty page professional proposal with descriptions of programs, staffing, budget and phasing-in charts for the proposed Gay Community Services Center. This became an invaluable tool because it helped us to articulate every aspect of the future Center’s operation and it forewarned society that we were extremely determined. You must remember all of this was being done under the most difficult organizing conditions imaginable—the APA still had us labeled as psychopathological, the state had us listed as criminals and religion, as usual, called us sinful and an abomination.

GLF Legal Counsel Alan Gross and I wrote the Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws of the new organization, the first with the word “gay” in its title. The state approved us immediately as a non-profit corporation but we had to fight on for four years more until we finally succeeded in getting Nixon-era IRS tax-exempt status—a singular achievement.

Commune stalwart Stan Williams, with the assistance of Dexter Price and Bruce Cristoff, opened the Gaywill Funky Shoppe, a truly magnificent thrift store, where Griffith Park Boulevard and Sunset meet. It became an important source of survival income for the early Center along with our weekly Gay Funky Dance.

It was from the Hoover Street Commune that the Center’s first program was made operable in the Summer of 1971—a series of Liberation Houses in which we took stray gay and lesbian people off the streets, gave them a good meal and a place to sleep, conducted gay consciousness raising groups and helped them find jobs or get into school. By late summer of 1971 one of the commune members had found a Queen Anne house at 1614 Wilshire Blvd. for rent—which became the Center’s first home.

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Don Kilhefner, Ph.D., played a pioneering role in the creation of the Gay Liberation movement. He is also the co-founder (with Morris Kight) of Los Angeles’ Gay and Lesbian Center and the Van Ness Recovery House and (with Harry Hay) of the Radical Faeries, an international gay spirituality and consciousness movement. Don is a Jungian psychologist in West Hollywood and can be reached at donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net.