‘Boys Town’ at a Crossroad

At this point, the “Welcome to West Hollywood” signs are pointless. They have been replaced for all practical purposes by more direct sentiments--”Do Not Enter,” “Open Trench,” “Expect Delays,”--interrupted here and there with polite reminders and requests: “Businesses Open,” “Next Left Turn Five Blocks,” “Please Bear With Us.”

For months, backhoes and bulldozers have crunched and gnawed, shaking the ground like modern dinosaurs. In their wake, they have left spoor of gravel and dirt, and three miles of Santa Monica Boulevard, from La Brea Avenue to Doheny Drive, eviscerated beneath the summer’s steely sky.

Residents complain of wrecked paint jobs and constantly shifting single-lane traffic; merchants bemoan the loss of parking and dollars; tourists do a double take and try not to throw out the alignment of their rental cars, and everyone wonders what exactly it will all look like, what exactly it will mean.

With a price tag of $32 million, the boulevard reconstruction project had better look nice. The water-color renderings of the renovation are certainly lovely, full of spacious sidewalks and sun-dappled streets lined with jacaranda and elm trees. Lovely, and a bit disconcerting as well.

Because this is Santa Monica Boulevard, the heart of the country’s first openly gay-run city, home of the Gay pride parade and Halloween extravaganza. A town built on edgy politics and personal freedom. Where 11 p.m. any night throbs with an insistent techno beat and the funky familiar whiff of bar--all beer and sweat, cologne and smoke. “Boys Town,” from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Doheny Drive, where on weekends there are simply too many people--boys and girls now, but still mostly boys--and the sidewalk becomes one enormous patio, a cruisable feast.

It is hard to imagine this street as that future watercolored street, with its wide calm sidewalks and gentrified air. Yet the boulevard is changing, as West Hollywood is changing, as the gay community is changing. Sculpted and resculpted by a variety of forces--AIDS, rent control, the booming economy and changing social mores--the people and the place are different than they were five years ago, 10 years ago.

Visibly different. There are fewer noticeably sick men on the sidewalks, more strollers and Baby Bjorns, more Latinos and Asians, more women. At the proliferating coffeehouses there are fewer pink tank tops and cutoff ensembles, more Abercrombie & Fitch, more Prada. Apple martinis have replaced the Cape Cod and even the cosmopolitan. The bleach-blond standard remains the same despite the nighttime infusion of people of color, but the biceps seem bigger, the necks thicker. Where once stood Harleys, there are now SUVs. The club crowd seems young, perilously young, partly because clubs are ever for the young, and partly because many of those who would be middle-aged are now dead. Many of the survivors have given up the club scene for a more settled life, some with kids--participants in the new “gayby” boom.

Beyond the sidewalks, beyond the Look and the Scene, larger changes are occurring. More people are coming out and bringing with them a broadening spectrum of expectations and anxieties. Conversations about changes in West Hollywood, historically both crucible and mirror of gay life in America, draw forth a breathtaking variety of opinions: the city is selling out, growing up, getting it together. The gay rights movement is dead, is resting, is stronger than ever. But no matter the opinion, it is strongly held, dramatically voiced.

A ‘Spiritual’ Link for Gays, Lesbians

“West Hollywood has a spiritual connection for gays and lesbians,” says Mark Haile, for 11 years the special events coordinator at A Different Light bookstore. “And people are wondering if folks are not being subtly told, ‘This is not your neighborhood anymore,’ if the city is detaching itself from its proletarian roots and attaching itself more to posh consumerism. We’re calling ourselves East Beverly Hills,” he says, laughing.

“La Cienega to Doheny has gone drastically uphill,” says Stuart Gavert, who’s lived in the area so long he remembers when there was plenty of street parking. “It got nicer because a lot of gay money went into it. Then when AIDS hit, it went down again, and now it’s on its way up again. But a lot of the younger gays,” he adds, “are going to Silver Lake or Pomona. West Hollywood is still too white bread.”

Of course, many people like white bread.

“I haven’t walked down [the boulevard] in about six months,” says longtime resident writer-director Don Roos. “I’m too gay to get dusty walking down the street. It definitely has gotten very yuppie, but I’m a yuppie, so I like all that stuff--Coffee Tea & Bean Leaf, Baja Fresh. I only hope it doesn’t push the older folks out.”

Many fear that the elderly, who make up almost 20% of the city, as well as recent immigrants and the poor, will be crushed beneath the rolling wheels of prosperity. “I don’t begrudge anyone a return on their real estate investment,” says Haile, “and probably this will all be fabulous. But the price of fabulousness is that often the people that created it get pushed out.”

It is hard to imagine Santa Monica Boulevard in the same league as the Third Street Promenade or Old Town Pasadena--all red bricks and Z Gallerie. So what if the street was full of potholes and no two bits of sidewalk looked the same? Where else could you get a cup of coffee, a tattoo, a set of keys, a puppy and sex aids all in the same block?

The redevelopment began as a Caltrans project. As Mayor Jeffrey Prang explains, the street’s infrastructure was a disaster and the state was going to make repairs regardless; the city opted to add money to the pot and take control. And most everyone agrees that much of the reconstruction--the wider sidewalks, the thousand new trees, the median greenbelt, the bike lanes--will be a nice change, just as most everyone agrees that some businesses won’t survive the pressures created by the construction.

Despite the construction, the commercial and cultural centers of this community--bars including Rage, Revolver, Micky’s, the Palms--still draw cheek-to-cheek crowds on weeknights and lines around the block on weekends. Still, when residents describe what they think the new boulevard will be like, one word comes up over and over: “mainstream.”

“You can still walk anywhere, but the people who lived here used to understand art and architecture. But so many of them are dead. And the Gen-X gays have no manners, no taste,” says bartender and longtime resident Jeff Softley. “The scene is so mainstream, they don’t even need a [gay pride] parade.” “It’s going to look great, but they’re playing it way too safe,” says five-year resident Christian Satrustequi. “There are more straight people coming in now, which I think is great, the more the merrier, but that is why they’re playing it so safe. To make it easily digestible for them.”

To a certain extent, this use of the word “mainstream” is only applicable in the context of an urban center with a thriving gay community. Here still are drag queens and leather daddies, the multiply-pierced, the retro-punked, the hand-holding “married” couples and the restless cruisers. A recent outbreak of syphilis has many concerned that the safe-sex lessons of the AIDS epidemic are being ignored, but even when the sex is safe, it is still there, as basic and necessary as electricity, lighting up the gyms, the clubs, the boulevard nights.

In a way, the new, mainstreamed street serves as a metaphor for a change that is occurring throughout the gay community. As even advertisers have grasped, most gays and lesbians do not look or live or make purchases much differently than their heterosexual counterparts.

“There are more people ‘out’ than there ever were,” says Gavert. “It used to be, ‘We’re out,’ was such a big thing. Now, you see a bunch of drag queens walking down the street, it’s like, ‘Yawn. Next.’ ”

“As more people come out, the spectrum broadens,” agrees Gwen Baldwin, director of the Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood. “People who are more Home Depot and Gap-going folk are now embracing their queerness, so the community looks different. As long as we don’t lose sight of who came first--the drag queens and transgender who pushed the envelope, who started it all.”

Hebrew Schools and Straight Hangouts

There have always been a lot of straight people living in West Hollywood; Baldwin puts the ratio at about 50/50 these days. A Jewish community in the 1930s and ‘40s, the eastern stretches of Santa Monica Boulevard are returning to their roots, with a Russian twist. Here the delis sell figs and homemade borscht from behind windows etched with words that, to a non-Russian speaker, look like ancient magical spells. Women in flowered dresses and hats saunter in pairs past the pawn shops and auto parts stores, not missing a beat when their path takes them past the Tomkat Theater.

These are the blocks once owned by the hookers, now paced by Sabbath-observing families and children on the way to Hebrew school. Some of the newly arrived venture further west, but mostly the straight people hanging out at the WeHo Lounge or the Abbey are upscale types, traveling in groups to hang with their gay friends.

Many business owners cannot understand why anyone would criticize a trend of prosperity and beautification. “The crowd is very mixed. But I haven’t heard anyone complaining that there are straight people here or that there are too many women,” says David Coole, owner of the Abbey coffeehouse.

“Our regulars are still predominantly gay,” says Rudy Coblentz, manager of Marix Tex-Mex Cafe. “But now we see couples with kids, older couples. Frankly, I don’t see what anyone is complaining about. There was a time I wouldn’t have been caught dead on the boulevard, the bars and restaurants were so cheesy. What’s wrong with being able to take your parents out to lunch and not have them gasp, ‘Oh, my god, you live here?’ ”

But others are concerned that West Hollywood is losing its identity, that younger gays and lesbians, particularly nonwhites, are choosing to live elsewhere. Many of the charming bungalows on the leafy side streets are being snapped up by people who seem shocked every time they get cruised.

“It’s already breeder central,” says Softley. “Everywhere you look are strollers. Anyone who says West Hollywood is gay hasn’t been here in five years.”

Getting Priced Out of Their ‘Hood

The recent defanging of the city’s rent-control laws compounds this inevitable turnover effect of gentrification. The state’s 1996 Costa-Hawkins law makes it possible for landlords to raise rents after a tenant leaves, a change that is causing rents to double and triple to $1,400, $1,600. A city that was built on tenant rights and the politics of inclusion is already seeing some of its oldest and most fragile citizens priced out of the neighborhood.

“This is really affecting our clients,” says Craig E. Thompson, executive director of Aids Project Los Angeles. West Hollywood, he says, still has the highest population of people living with HIV in L.A. County. “This is devastation for them.”

Mayor Prang agrees there is a housing crisis. “We can no longer guarantee the affordable housing that allows us to maintain the social diversity that has made our city such a desirable place. It is very disconcerting; we are the victim of our own success. And to a certain extent we are powerless.”

The city, however, remains dedicated to providing social services to its residents--$3 million worth this year for a population of 37,600--and Prang says the City Council is committed to preserving the community’s identity any way it can.

While no one in West Hollywood is going to get in the way of anyone’s good time, some feel that the basic core of the gay rights movement is being forgotten. “We have become very complacent,” says Thompson. “And that is very dangerous for us. The AIDs crisis is far from over, but there seems to be the feeling among younger gays that ‘Someone else is taking care of that.’ ”

Many residents have complained that in recent years, the gay pride parade has become too commercial, and lately some members of Christopher Street West, which organizes the event, have been pushing to return the event to its political roots.

For Torie Osborn, former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and now executive director of Liberty Hill Foundation, the same could be said of the gay community. “We’re 30 now, and 30 is a good time to grow up,” she says. “And this is a time of assimilation and mainstreaming. It’s good to see people doing well. . . . But the community is at a crossroad. We have to decide whether we are going to continue identifying with big success, and risk being dazzled by money, or if we are going to maintain connectedness with other social issues.”

West Hollywood is, she says, a city still in mourning. The loss of so many men has had a profound effect on those left. “To be around the dying is a profound spiritual experience,” she says. “And I think we are feeling a little lost now. The community is searching for its soul.”

The haven the city was it continues to be. As one resident puts it: “As long as there are 19-year-olds living in small towns who have just discovered they are gay, there will always be a West Hollywood.” Refugees from small-town America are not the only people seeking acceptance as the growing numbers of Latino and Asian men hitting the clubs prove.

“People from Asian and Hispanic communities are still coming out of cultures of oppression,” says Gavert. “And when you’re just coming out, and you walk down Santa Monica . . . you just can’t believe that you are not alone anymore.”

“People get nostalgic for the way it was,” says writer-director Roos. “But if they actually lived here in the ‘80s, with the hookers and the crime and bars on the windows, it wasn’t very nice at all. It was colorful, but personally I prefer valet parking and air-conditioning.”

But if ever there was a place you could have street life and hot and cold running cappuccino, it would be here. Where, oblivious to the scorching sun and rising grit one early afternoon, a tiny old woman stopped mid-crosswalk to talk to a large man in black leather pants strung with multiple chains, who stood hands on hips, laughing with her.

So very West Hollywood.

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.