A Thousand Stories

Sitting at her Royal typewriter in 1947, Lisa Ben secretly created “Vice Versa,” the first known American magazine for lesbians. No one at the Hollywood movie studio where the 26-year-old secretary worked knew she was a lesbian; Ben, now 80, cleverly invented her name, an anagram of “lesbian” that she has kept to this day. But the women at two North Hollywood lesbian bars--If Club and Joanie Presents--eagerly read and passed around Ben’s free publication, all 10 copies typed on carbon paper.

Nine issues later, the magazine of essays, poems and book reviews folded when Ben changed jobs. In those days, Ben couldn’t very well take her magazine to a printer without getting arrested, says the cat-loving San Fernando Valley recluse, who doesn’t leave her home or receive visitors much these days because of a neurological muscular disorder that makes her shake. She is hard of hearing and enjoys--make that demands--her privacy. But through a friend, Flo Fleischman, 71, also a gay rights pioneer, Ben relays, “I’ve done my part and I did it with pride, not fear.”

Now, 54 years later, Ben’s proud story is publicly displayed at ONE Institute and Archives, a vast collection of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender historical material that opens next Sunday. Organizers describe the new Los Angeles library, museum and art gallery as the world’s largest gay archive among some 103 collections known to exist primarily in New York, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, Philadelphia and parts of the Southwest.

Literally thousands of stories like Ben’s--of courage and celebration, of pain and panic--can be found in the files, diaries, letters, books, periodicals, photographs, artwork and memorabilia in a building USC provides along with utilities and security. The institute owns the contents.

Located just two blocks from the campus, the two-story building is a former Delta Tau Delta fraternity house built in the 1950s by Wa Smith, himself a gay Long Beach architect, now 96. To many, it may seem paradoxical that USC, with its conservative reputation, agreed to house such a liberal archive; its staff is all volunteer except for two librarians funded by the institute through grants.

But Walter Williams, USC professor of anthropology and gender studies, says the university is positioning itself as a leading academic research center through its “affiliation with a real cutting-edge academic library that the institute represents.”

The author and activist says the institute’s opening comes at a time when gay and lesbian studies--which slowly began drawing interest in the 1970s, a time when civil rights, feminism and ethnic studies also became research topics--are becoming increasingly popular in academia. Today, students at universities such as USC, Yale and San Francisco State have extensive gay and lesbian study programs.

“We have so many ‘out’ students on campus that want these classes, and the other big thing is the great demand for books on gay and lesbian studies that lots of scholars have published,” explains Williams, who has taught at USC for 17 years.

Lisa Ben’s experience may not be as widely known to a younger generation as the Stonewall riot of 1969 in New York, considered the flash point for gay militancy. In fact, the gay rights movement was spearheaded in Los Angeles two decades earlier.

L.A. has had a powerful and momentous role in the struggle for gay rights. The Mattachine Society, considered the first major gay men’s group in the country, began in Silver Lake in 1950 under the guidance of Harry Hay. With the help of Mattachine members in 1952, author Dale Jennings (who wrote “The Cowboys,” later made into a movie with John Wayne) won the first court battle against a California law that police used to harass and entrap gays. That same year, a group of Mattachine members formed a gay education and research group called ONE Inc. and immediately began publishing ONE magazine. The publication won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1958 that ordered the Postal Service to send the magazine through the mail and opened the way for a flourishing gay and lesbian press. In 1968, Troy Perry founded the Metropolitan Community Church in Huntington Park to cater to a largely gay congregation.

One of Perry’s religious robes is on display at the institute, which is designed as a resource center for students, lawyers, artists, writers and thinkers, and family members of gay sons and daughters, fathers and mothers.

Student Troy Morgan, who will graduate from USC on May 11 with a degree in psychology, is “surprised, almost shocked” by the scope of the collections he has seen. A few hours a week he helps out with the institute’s online Gay and Lesbian Review of literature. He’s also amazed that “there is so much about the gay and lesbian history of Los Angeles. People of my generation don’t know this. They look at the gay movement in the context of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, in terms of San Francisco and New York.”

He’s also impressed by the “technological online type stuff, whether it was intentional or not in trying to target my generation.” More than anything, he and the friends he has brought to the center as volunteers prepare for the big opening are “strengthened in our self-confidence” by what they have seen. “I know that I’m not alone--not after experiencing such a vault of memories.”

The institute, at 909 W. Adams Blvd., marks a milestone in bringing together the three collections of early and major gay activists who sometimes were at odds with each other. For years, they competed for funds and community support, which kept them apart and diluted their impact.

As gays and lesbians age, it is critical to ensure that their documents are kept for prosperity and not thrown away, according to Williams, who is credited with merging the three collections and bringing in USC in 1994, with the help of Lynn Sipe, USC associate dean for faculty affairs and the institute’s board president.

Still, it took years to find the right location amid some political wrangling among the institute’s organizers. Less than two years ago, Mark Thompson, the former senior editor for the Advocate magazine, which began in L.A., became concerned with the institute’s completion. He formed a committee, which included author and Episcopal priest Malcolm Boyd, historian Stuart Timmons and lesbian activists Ivy Bottini and Jeanne Cordova to bring new life to the then-stalled project. Thompson, now a board member, is an organizer for the Sunday opening.

The three major collections that are now under one roof:

* The International Gay and Lesbian Archives kept by the late ONE columnist Jim Kepner, who started collecting in 1942.

* The ONE Inc. collection of papers from its founders, who included Dorr Legg, well-known for his “Homophile” lectures, Jennings, USC graduate Don Slater and Antonio Reyes, the only surviving founding member, who now lives in Colorado.

* The Homosexual Information Center begun by Slater in 1965, after he split from ONE Inc. over ideological differences about the group’s mission. He hired a truck and took half of ONE’s collection with him in an incident known as “the heist” by other gays.

In all, the institute contains more than 2 million individual archival pieces, including 100,000 photographs, 30,000 books, 5,000 gay and lesbian magazines in more than 20 foreign languages, drawers of buttons, stickers and signs, military artifacts, gay pride parade banners and innumerable personal and public papers on just about every imaginable gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issue and topic.

The institute also houses the Lesbian Legacy Collection, curated by Yolanda Retter, a part-time institute librarian; the Performing Arts Collection, handled by Bill Kaiser; and the AIDS History Collection, curated by Lee Mentley. There’s an upstairs museum and art gallery brimming with paintings--some erotic--depicting gay life. Art exhibits will change from time to time. For next Sunday’s opening, an exhibit of the costumes and memorabilia of female impersonator Charles Pierce, who performed at the Pasadena Playhouse regularly beginning in the 1950s and always had to wear trousers under his gowns or risk arrest, will be on display.

The institute also operates a Web site for archival information (https://www.oneinstitute.org) and a separate Web site for the International Gay and Lesbian Review (https://www.onepress.org) that features thousands of book reviews and abstracts or summaries of works. Internet access provides the institute with worldwide reach.

In file cabinets, on bookshelves, on walls and in display cases is the history of the fight against police repression and isolation, the press toward achieving equal rights and the joy of just being gay. Pink leather chaps worn in a gay pride parade adorn a mannequin. Others wear military uniforms once worn by gay men and women.

In a photograph, the epitaph on the gravestone of Nell Johnny Phelps, a lesbian and assistant to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower during World War II, reads: “My name will be first.” Williams said that was Phelps’ quick reply to the general when he cracked, “We’re gonna get rid of all the lesbians. Gimme a list.” She is said to have answered, “OK, sir, I’ll make a list, but my name will be first.” The story goes that Eisenhower looked shocked, then fell into silence. “Forget that order,” he told Phelps, according to Williams.

Across the room is a deflated tent-sized condom that was blown up in 1991 by ACT UP, a radical gay activist group, and placed in Sen. Jesse Helms’ frontyard because he was blocking funds for AIDS education.

On a wall is a parade poster with Hay’s face on it, in another room a collage of photographs of him through the decades. Hay, 89, moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco two years ago. He would like to attend next week’s opening, but health problems--including recent cataract surgery, emphysema, the use of an oxygen machine at all times and being confined to a wheelchair, prevent him from such a visit.

“So many gays, not just the younger generation, but those men and women who are in their 40s and 50s, don’t know about the past struggles for gay and lesbian equal rights, or they’ve forgotten,” says Hay. The institute, he says, is not just a historical treasure, but also a cultural one.