The field of gay and lesbian history has grown dramatically since the publication of George Chauncey's Gay New York in 1994.1 This landmark work, which describes the rich, complex, and surprisingly visible gay male subcultures in early-twentieth-century New York City, brought homosexuals into the mainstream of American social history and spurred a cavalcade of dissertations and monographs on gay and lesbian topics. Chauncey was not the first gay historian to adopt the case study methodology to recover the lost history of gay men and lesbians, but Gay New York's success influenced scholars in LGBT history to widely adopt the same approach. Since the early 1990s, scholars have produced studies describing the gay pasts of Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, Fire Island, Washington D.C., Chicago, Memphis, Lexington, Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle, and San Francisco, as well as regional histories of the South and the Pacific Northwest.2 Los Angeles represents the last frontier in this historiography. The significance of Los Angeles in LGBT history has been suggested in many books, especially those describing the birth of the American gay rights movement.3 Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, by Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, and Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, by Daniel Hurewitz, are the first historical urban case studies to focus squarely on the development and growth of gay and lesbian identities, communities, and politics in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is not often associated with serious civil rights activism, but these books powerfully demonstrate the myriad ways that gay men and lesbians in Los Angeles have led the nation in cultivating a politicized gay consciousness and building gay