In an effort to purge the neighborhood of its anti-gay past, officials in Los Angeles removed the last of the district’s traffic signs this week.
The ones with the words, “No cruising.” Avoid making U-turns. In an effort to stop gay men from cruising the streets looking for partners, signs reading “Midnight to 6 am” were put up across the Silver Lake neighborhood in 1997, according to The Los Angeles Times.
This week, the signs were decommissioned in preparation for PRIDE month.
“Los Angeles has a rich history of welcoming the LGBTQIA+ community, but there has also been real and present homophobia — which at times has been inscribed into the city’s physical spaces, as with these no-U-turn signs,” Councilmember Nithya Raman stated.
Printed guidebooks, which specified public places where gay men might find love, sex, and community without coming out as homosexual, were occasionally used by gay men in the late 1990s. West Hollywood and Griffith Park Boulevard in Silver Lake were two of the sites mentioned.
Councilman Higo Soto-Martinez wrote on X on Tuesday, referencing one of the first protests against police brutality against LGBT people in the United States that took place before the Stonewall riots in New York City.
“This type of homophobia persisted in Silver Lake 30 years after the Black Cat protests, and the physical remnants of that bigotry remained on our streets until yesterday, when we joined @nithyavraman to finally take the signs down,” Soto-Martinez wrote.
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He said that the LGBTQ+ group was the target of the signs’ persecution.
“I never would have found [those signs] because I was not aware of them,” stated Pickle, the first drag queen laureate of West Hollywood.
The Silver Lake Neighborhood Council voted in 2011 to remove the initial “No Cruising” signage. The remaining “No U-turn” signs and other signs with time limits were left in place and almost completely ignored.
The council members said that Silver Lake resident Donovan Daughtry brought up the matter after listening to a podcast segment about the neighborhood’s LGBT past.
Albert LeBarron, co-owner of the homosexual bar Akbar, said, “People driving around at night with the radios playing Madonna was probably not conducive to a quiet neighborhood like Silver Lake and the rowdiness inside the bars sometimes spilled outside. But in all honesty, a lot of us are people walking or driving or kind of hanging out because they had nowhere else to go.”
