The Grit and Glamour of Queer LA Subculture

Swish Alps Archive

Swish Alps Archives Guide

1. Oral Histories 

Short excerpts of the interviews open the previous sections in "The Swish Alps." Longer and edited audio files are forthcoming. We include here the biographies of our four oral history narrators.  We hope that future developers of Grit and Glamour are able to contribute more oral histories to this section on Silver Lake and that these documents eventually find a home at a major institution.

Biographies of Narrators

Joseph Fiorello was born in Miami, Florida in 1942 and eventually went to school in New York, where he primarily dated girls. Finding gay life by way of 1960's counterculture, he saw all sides of New York's swirling 70s nightlife. Moving to Los Angeles in 1979, Joseph worked as a real estate agent and established a private network of gay friends in and around Silver Lake while observing its thriving nightlife. Joseph’s life story weaves through crucial subcultures of the late twentieth century, charting sexual liberation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the development of Silver Lake as an important gayborhood in Los Angeles.

MW Cartozian Wilson is a trans guy who was raised as a girl in Silicon Valley. As a child, MW did not want to wear dresses. From an early age, MW knew that “there was something different about me,” what exactly was less clear. A gifted student athlete at a private girls' high school, who also haunted the San Francisco underworld, MW ended up going to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he met his first girlfriend. MW eventually got an MFA in film at UCLA and moved to Silver Lake, where in 2004 he took over the legendary dyke/trans/genderqueer club Shotgun, hosted weekly at the Eagle leather bar. 
  
Alvaro Vega grew up in a large Mexican American family in Arizona, knew he was gay when he was five, and first came out when he was in high school. He eventually moved to Silver Lake and immersed himself its gay culture. Alvaro first encountered HIV/AIDS in the local Kaiser hospital where he worked as a pulmonary technician. His oral history provides a view on over three decades of Silver Lake life.

Bill Tutton was born in 1963 and grew up in Buffalo, New York. He has played in bands since high school and came out to his family when he was twenty. In the 1980s, he moved to Los Angeles and gained national recognition in the 1990s as the bassist for The Geraldine Fibbers, a center piece of the Silver Lake music scene. He is married to Alvaro Vega. 

2. Matchbook Collection

The Swish Alps has uploaded the ONE Archive’s “Matchbook Collection” of LGBT* bars and bathhouses in LA. In addition to providing a poignant visual testimony to past queer spaces, this collection of ephemera has enabled Occidental College and the ONE Archive to produce a mapping project of queer LA and its subcultures. See the Matchbook Collection gallery. 

3. Sunset Junction Street Fair 

Also from the ONE Archive is the ephemera and photographs of the Sunset Junction Street Fair (1980-2010). The materials embedded in the Swish Alps chapter are gathered from the small digitized sample available in Online Archive of California (OAC). See the Sunset Junction Street Fair gallery.

4. Shotgun Club Collection

MW Wilson has afforded us access to his private collection of ephemera and photos from the Shotgun Club (2005-2009). We feature this uncatalogued collection here and likewise hope that future archivists take an interest in processing this rare collection. See the Shotgun Club Collection gallery. 

5. Map of Swish Alps

Our mapping project is still under development, but we feature a “beta” version here. Daniel Calzadillas used the information gathered during and after Oxy’s CTSJ 337 course to aid the ONE Archive in their broader mapping of queer LA. Future developers might layer this map with the “cruising” courses of oral history narrators’ lifeworlds. Go to the Map of Swish Alps. 
 

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