The guerrillas say they have been welcomed at all but one bar – a trendy spot that preferred a crowd that skewed heavily female.Īt Venice Beach, hardly anyone noticed that something was afoot. would probably require an armed insurgency. “The beach is a step toward a more radical agenda to take over spaces and then turn them into a block party with a predominantly gay crowd,” Poe said.Įxcept that “radical” in L.A. “This is very much coming from the spirit of young people saying they want to push the gates a bit more,” Timmons said.Īfter a successful year of bar invasions, the Los Angeles group decided this month that the time had come to expand. Stuart Timmons, an author of “Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians” (Basic Books, 2006), called the groups’ tactics “a new form of social activism.” The first gay party-insurgents surfaced in San Francisco in 2000 under the name “Guerrilla Queer Bar,” and since then similar groups have formed, disbanded and formed again, in cities like New York, Austin, Atlanta and Detroit. The group staged its first bar takeover last year in June and now draws up to 200 men and a few lesbian friends to its events, the organizers say. They pick targets based on the location’s perceived coolness – past choices included the Saddle Ranch restaurant on the Sunset Strip and Brennan’s Pub in Marina Del Rey – and take their roving gay bar to places where they would not go by themselves. So in the mode of flash mobs, the group shows up en masse at a straight site, mostly bars, once a month. “We want to suggest that the world is bigger than West Hollywood.” “There’s a place for gay bars, but we feel gay people have become so segregated that some of them don’t go out into the wider community anymore,” said Matthew Poe, an organizer and the box office manager for UCLA Live, a performing arts producer and presenter. The mission of Guerrilla Gay Bar is not to protest or to shock, but to plant a gay flag in any place they fancy.īut the real motivation, according to the group’s manifesto, is to overcome boredom with a “ghettoized and sub-ghettoized” gay scene – which in Los Angeles is synonymous with the club and bar circuit in West Hollywood. There was no chanting, no marching, no waving of signs. Upon arrival, most of the group plopped down to chat, read or doze, and some went off to build a moated sand castle. It took an hour or two for about 70 men to trickle into their predetermined spot near lifeguard station No.18, wearing a uniform of blue or red trunks and T-shirts with some of them carrying Harry Potter books, buckets and beach balls.
LOS ANGELES – In the annals of takeovers, it was among the mellowest.Ī group calling itself Guerrilla Gay Bar, gay men looking to crash straight hangouts with the intent of turning them predominantly gay for a moment in time, set its sights on Venice Beach one recent Saturday.īoth the weather and the water temperature were beach-perfect, so the target was teeming with swimmers, sunbathers and surfers.īut at the appointed hour of invasion,1 p.m., there wasn’t a single guerrilla in sight.