LA Gay Bar Designated as Historical Monument

From thepoliticalcesspool.org:

The City of Los Angeles has honored a bar where the nation’s first gay rights protests took place with a designation as a historical monument:

The old, illuminated sign of a black and white smiling cat still beckons patrons into a small windowless bar, the site of one of the nation’s earliest gay rights protests four decades ago.

Just last week, after thousands flooded the streets of Sunset Junction rallying for the rights of same-sex couples to marry, some demonstrators rested their placards under the sign and crowded into the Silver Lake bar now called Le Barcito.

Forty-one years earlier, the Black Cat, as it was known then, offered a rare gathering place for Los Angeles gays. But it was no safe haven: Police commonly raided taverns, targeting patrons for their sexual orientation.

In 1967, a police raid at the Black Cat touched off protests that predated by two years the historic Stonewall riots in New York City. The 1969 Stonewall riots, in which gays and lesbians fought back against the police for several nights, are commonly said to have sparked the gay rights movement.

Last week in Los Angeles, the Black Cat cemented its place in history with a city designation as a historic-cultural monument.

A Boardroom Revolution: It Pays to be Gay

When Angela Mason began her 10-year directorship of the Stonewall gay lobby group in 1992, she had a friend in the corporate world who had two phones in his house. One he used to take personal calls for him and his partner. The other was for the office. When it came to being out and proud in the workplace, few and far between was the employee who would happily step out of the closet and declare: “I’m gay, let’s do business.”

“People used to genuinely fear that they would lose their jobs if they were outed, and many did,” Mason remembers. “If you were found out it was absolutely the end.”

It was with some sense of satisfaction, therefore, that Ms Mason read the news this week that MI5 was finally going to step out of the closet itself and begin openly recruiting people from within the gay community.

One of the last bastions of the British establishment, a place that, until the early 1990s, had actually banned hiring gays because of fears that outed spies could be blackmailed, had finally capitulated and realised that if you want to hire the best talent, you have to look at all sections of society. The days of the Oxbridge don giving white, male graduates a tap on the shoulder and a nod towards Thames House were truly over.

The domestic intelligence service is now not only going to start actively employing openly gay recruits, it is also hiring Stonewall (a group once associated with, and run by, former radicals such as Ms Mason) to advise the security services on how to encourage its spies to be more open about their sexuality and how to persuade more gay applicants to apply for jobs there.

Get the rest of the story from independent.co.uk.

The Brits Are Coming, The Brits Are Coming!

The Army has joined forces with leading gay rights group Stonewall to promote tolerance within its ranks. Head of the British Army General Sir Richard Dannatt said discrimination prevented the full contribution that is “vital for our success in operations”. Stonewall said it had yet to set up an action plan, but that it would initially focus on recruitment and retention of military personnel. Read more