The importance of thick mapping for me is to resurrect the voices of the queer in order to provide oxygen for their desires, even if they remained hidden in the shadows. Thick mapping of queer lives--queer history--demands a rewriting of the master narrative of history. The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York City is accepted as the birth of the modern LGBT movement. However, queer activists were organizing in Silverlake as early as 1951. As the pictures above illustrate, there were several rebellions against police brutality at the Black Cat bar here in Los Angeles. Why is this rebellions not considered the birth of the queer movement? Who decides such things? I demand a maternity/paternity test of the Stonewall birth. Even respected scholars like Jose Esteban Munoz (RIP) repeat these "truths" that are ahistorical. In Queering Utopia, Munoz mentions the Stonewall Inn as the site of the birth of the queer movement. I would think someone as respected as him would not fall prey to repeating mis-truths. This might be a minute error in some people's eyes, but it actually makes me livid. Since reading that passage in Queering Utopia, I do not hold his theories in the same regard as I had before. This may seem harsh, but what many people believe this drivel! Again, I revert back to the original, original gangster of queer letters, Rechy, who wrote about the Black Cat rebellions many years ago. This writing can be found in his collection of essay, Beneath the Skin. Munoz's ahistorical error reinforces the my belief that I must start with Rechy. His corpus is marginalized as a relic or an artifact not worth studying and examining from multiple perspectives but this is a tragedy. Ultimately, this stresses the importance of thick mapping for me. The third picture is a matchbook cover of a gay bar on the Sunset trip in the 1940s. Until I found it, I had never heard of Cafe Gala. More lives to be resurrected.
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