Pride Is Over
Queer resistance is not
Valley Girl is on hiatus for Fourth of July in the United States. We will resume with new essays on Thursday, July 9th. This week’s digest focuses on the Valley’s queer history across lesbian and transgender identities.
The modern San Fernando Valley may have been marketed as a white, heterosexual middle-class haven for the nuclear family, but the archives suggest another dimension entirely. For decades, the Valley was a coveted destination for middle-class lesbians, a place where they could enact normative values across affordable housing and better-paying jobs. In tandem, the Valley was also home to two prominent middle-class lesbian bars, Club Laurel in Studio City and Joani Presents in North Hollywood. Their prominence in the 1950s and 1960s effectively queers the Valley Girl1, a symbol of a very heterocentric femininity both then and now.
This queering did not stop at the gender binary. Two decades later, the drag bar Queen Mary, in Studio City, would become a well-known destination for transgender people. The back room, known as the King’s Den, was nationally recognized in trans circles as a space specifically for gender-expansive people and their “admirers,” according to one former Queen Mary performer. Among them was Whitney, a 1980s trans valley girl2 from Mississippi who had moved to Los Angeles with aspirations to become an actress. In 1986, at 22 years old, she spoke candidly about her gender identity, telling the Los Angeles Times, “I consider myself a woman with a surgically correctable birth defect.”
Around this same time, trans icon and activist Marsha P. Johnson was known to frequent a swimming pool in Calabasas. A part-time valley girl, Marsha sought out rest and recuperation here in Los Angeles from her activism on the East Coast. But even in her down time, Marsha assisted in organizing the first AIDS walk in the United States, lending her touch to a legacy that continues in Los Angeles today.
Much of this history of underground networks, secret information, and shared knowledge affirms for me what has always been true about queer people: if you know, you know. And if you don’t, you better ask somebody.🌴
Next week: Backrooms.
No Valley Girl Office Hours this week to accommodate the Fourth of July holiday in the United States. Office Hours will resume Friday, July 10th for the accompanying piece.
Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.
Lowercase “valley girl” to indicate a female-identified or pangender individual who happens to be from or inhabits the San Fernando Valley.