LGBTQIA writers of Los Ángeles and their writing about the city and metropolis have been around for more than a half a century. The first famous book that depicts the community is 1963’s City of Night by John Rechy. It’s a frank depiction of the life of a young Mexican American gay hustler. Large sections of the book take place in the gay bars, alleys and streets of mid-century Hollywood and Pershing Square downtown, the city’s oldest park, once known as one of the country’s most infamous cruising spots.

From there came other writers such as Joseph Hanson and Terry Wolverton who became prominent figures in the city’s literary community in the 70s, 80s and 90s, writing fiction and poetry. Hanson is most famous for writing the Brandstetter series of detective novels featuring one of the first openly gay detectives in literature, Dave Brandstetter.¹ Handson was also involved in the early days of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, where he co-founded the Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop, which has become the West Coast’s longest-running free poetry workshop.²

Terry Wolverton, on the other hand, moved to Los Ángeles in 1976 and enrolled in the Feminist Studio at the Woman’s Building.³ The Woman’s Building was a non-profit arts and education center located on Spring Street in Chinatown, focusing on feminist art and served as a venue for the women’s movement. Wolverton spent, according to Wikipedia, “the next thirteen years at the…Building where, in addition to writing and performing, she was also instrumental in the Lesbian Art Project, the Incest Awareness Project, the Great Lesbian Art Show, a year-long performance project called ‘An Oral History of Lesbianism,’ and a White Women’s Anti-Racism Consciousness-Raising Group.” Plus, “[from] 1987 to 1988, she served as the non-profit[’s]…Executive Director.”

However, as the years went by, the racial make up of the literary community grew more diverse and its LGBTQIA writers continued to have various levels of involvement with the community and various levels of engagement in exploring L.Á. and SoCal in their writing. Some, like Wendy C. Ortiz and traci Kato-Kiriyama, have or continue to host reading series or open mics as an extension of their artivism.

For 11 years Ortiz hosted Repsodomancy Reading Series she co-founded (2004-2015) and kato-kiriyama is the director/co-founder of the Tuesday Night Project and Café Series in Little Tokyo.⁴ Others, like Ryka Aoki, engage in the community, mostly, when they release a book. They read at many of its independent bookstores, literary arts organizations, reading series and/or open mics. And a poet like Alex Petunia, doesn’t write much, if at all, about Los Ángeles, as they write about more personal topics and themes, in Petunia’s case, about self-care, self-love and nature in in terms of spirituality.

The following is a list of many of the LGBTQIA writers of Los Ángeles, past and present, that make up the literary community and/or its literature and helped shape it and continue to help shape what it is today.

John Rechy

John Rechy is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels, are written extensively about gay culture in Los Ángeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. “City of Night is notable for its exposé approach to and stark depiction of hustling, as well as its stream of consciousness narrative style.”⁵

Though he is probably the best-known gay male Latino writer in the United States, Rechy’s “gay-themed work reflects little of his Mexican-American heritage, except for the surnames of some of his characters.”⁶

Joseph Hansen

Joseph Hansen was an American crime writer and poet, best known for a series of novels featuring the openly gay insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter who still embodied the tough, no-nonsense personality of the classic hardboiled private investigator protagonist.

He was born on July 19, 1923, in Aberdeen, South Dakota. When Hansen was ten, the family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota; later, the family moved to Altadena, California, where a sister lived. Hansen was married to artist Jane Bancroft, a lesbian, from 1943 to her death in 1994. He said their relationship was that of “a gay man and a woman who happened to love each other.”⁷ They were married for 51 years.

L.Á. poet Bill Mohr said in an LA Review of Books article about Hansen’s poetry, “Of all the writers who contributed to the LA poetry renaissance in the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Hansen probably gave the most and got the least in return.”

Hansen helped organize the first Gay Pride Parade in Hollywood.⁸

Gil Cuadros

Gil Cuadros was a Chicano American gay poet, essayist, and ceramist known for his writing on the impact of AIDS. He grew up in Montebello, California and attended Schurr High School. Cuadros worked at a photo lab where he met his lover, John Edward Milosch. In 1987, Milosch died and Cuadros was diagnosed with AIDS.⁹

Cuadros won the Brody Literature Fellowship, in 1991 and he was one of the first recipients of PEN Center USA/West grants to writers with HIV.¹⁰ Cuadros’ only book, City of God was published in 1994. Joshua Guzman in his thesis writes that Cuadros’ literature made an impact on the history of AIDS by providing a testimonial that “explores the impact that AIDS has had on the gay Chicano community.”

Eloise Klein Healy

Eloise Klein Healy was born in El Paso and grew up in rural Iowa. Her collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the 2003 Lambda Literary Awards in Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from The Publishing Triangle.¹¹

She was involved in the Woman’s Building in the 1970s and 1980s in various capacities, most notably as a teacher and on the Board of Directors. Healy became the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2012. She was instrumental in directing the women’s studies program at Cal State Northridge, started the MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles where she is professor emeritus, and founded Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press.¹²

Terry Wolverton

Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman’s Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the “Best Books of 2002” by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.¹³

Wolverton moved to Los Ángeles in 1976, enrolling in the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building. She spent the next thirteen years at the Woman’s Building where, in addition to writing and performing, she was also instrumental in the Lesbian Art Project, the Incest Awareness Project, the Great American Lesbian Art Show (GALAS), a year-long performance project called “An Oral Herstory of Lesbianism,” and a White Women’s Anti-Racism Consciousness-Raising Group. From 1987 to 1988, she served as the nonprofit organization’s Executive Director.¹⁴

Michele T. Clinton

Michelle T. Clinton was born in 1955 and grew up in South Central Los Ángeles. A performance artist and poet, prominent in the Los Ángeles literary community in the 1980s and early to mid 90s, Clinton described her work in a Salon.com interview as “an attempt to assimilate the racist & sexist violence in my body. The poems struggle to answer the question: How does the individual/community survive and continue to function in the face of systematic atrocity?”

Clinton’s work is about and is influenced by, sexuality, gender, feminism, bisexuality, sexual violence, racism, racial bias, Los Ángeles, queer identity, mental health and spirituality. In her signature book Good Sense & the Faithless she frequently refers to the particular politics of bisexual identities, seen in such poems as “Politics of the Bisexual Deep Fry” and “We’re All Gringos on this Bus/Ode to the Am. Butch.”¹⁵

She was active with the performance and literary arts scene at Beyond Baroque in Venice and Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica and led a multicultural women’s poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation.

Alex Espinoza

Alex Espinoza was born in Tijuana, Mexico to parents from the state of Michoacán and raised in suburban Los Ángeles in the San Gabriel Valley. In high school and afterwards, he worked a series of retail jobs, selling everything from eggs and milk to used appliances, custom furniture, rock T-shirts, and body jewelry. After graduating from the University of California-Riverside, he went on to earn an MFA from UC-Irvine’s Program in Writing. His first novel, Still Water Saints, was published by Random House in 2007 and was named a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection.

Publishers Weekly said of Espinoza’s novel Still Water Saints, “Poignantly rendered are Azúcar, a transgendered dancer who is given an unexpected chance at motherhood while mourning the loss of a friend, and Rodrigo Zamora, a Michoacán teen illegal recovering from a traumatic crossing.”

Wendy C. Ortiz

Wendy C. Ortiz is an American essayist, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, psychotherapist, and poet. She was born in Los Angeles, California in 1973 and lived in Olympia, Washington for eight years after college before returning to Los Angeles, where she still lives. She was co-founder, curator and host of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series, which began at the Good Luck Bar in Los Ángeles in 2004 and continued through 2015. Ortiz’s memoir Excavation (Future Tense Books, 2014) is about how she was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Ángeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power teenagers wish for, regardless of consequences. Her teacher—now a registered sex offender—continually encouraged her passion for writing while making her promise she was not leaving any written record about their dangerous sexual relationship.

C.B. Lee

C.B. Lee is a Chinese-Vietnamese-American author based out of Los Angeles, California. Their parents are immigrants from Vietnam and China. Lee is openly bisexual and also open about their struggles with mental illness.¹⁶ Their debut young adult novel, Seven Tears at High Tide, about a boy who gets rescued and falls for a selkie, was published by Duet Books in 2015. It won the 2016 Rainbow Award for Bisexual Fantasy & Fantasy Romance in 2016 and was a finalist for the 2016 Bisexual Book Award in the category Young Adult and Speculative Fiction.

Lee’s book Not Your Sidekick was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in the category of LGBTQ Children’s/Young Adult. School Library Journal said of the novel, “the real strength is in its matter-of-fact representation of LGBTQ and first-generation American identities. While the meanings of these identities are explored, they are not the focus of the book and are simply part of the character-and world-building.”

Steven Reigns

Steven Reigns is a Los Ángeles poet and educator and was appointed the first Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. He edited My Life is Poetry, showcasing his students’ work from the first-ever autobiographical poetry workshop for LGBT seniors.¹⁷ Reigns has lectured and taught writing workshops around the country to LGBT youth and people living with HIV.

His poetry collection A Quilt for David was published by City Lights in September 2021 and is the product of ten years of research regarding dentist David Acer’s life. The collection is set, according to Amazon, “in the early 1990s” when “eight people living in a small conservative Florida town alleged that Dr. David Acer, their dentist, infected them with HIV. David’s gayness, along with his sickly appearance from his own AIDS-related illness, made him the perfect scapegoat and victim of mob mentality.”

Vickie Vértiz

The oldest child of an immigrant Mexican family, Vértiz was born and raised in Bell Gardens, California. With over 25 years of experience in social justice, writing, and education, having worked at 826LA, she now teaches creative writing, writing for Chicanx studies, writing for gender studies, summer bridge writing for Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) students, and composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Vértiz’s latest poetry collection Auto Body, according to a review from the Poetry Foundation, “draws on the ostentatious beauty and raw power of Los [Á]ngeles car culture to interrogate constructions of gender and family dynamics within a Latinx context.”

traci kato-kiriyama

traci kato-kiriyama (they+she; based on unceded Tongva land in the south bay of Los Angeles) is a South Bay/Torrance native who became a storyteller and an Artivist in the Japanese and Little Tokyo communities of Los Ángeles. As a storyteller and artivist, they are grounded in collaborative process, collective self-determination, and art+community as intrinsically tied and a critical means toward connection and healing. They have presented for over 25 years in hundreds of venues throughout North America as a writer, actor, poet, speaker, guest lecturer, facilitator, Artist-in-Residence, and organizing/arts & culture consultant. They are the Director/Co-Founder of Tuesday Night Project and Tuesday Night Café, the longest running Asian-American public art series/open mic in the country.

Kato-Kiriyama is the author of Navigating With(out) Instruments (Writ Large Press, 2021), a book of poetry, micro essays and notes to self that uses “her present—political unrest, family love and loss, her own cancer diagnosis—to join the traumas of the past generations with the hope of the future ones. The book is framed by the history of US colonialism and war mongering, to urge readers to protect and to share their legacies, both personal and communal, as a means of global survival.”¹⁸

Ryka Aoki

Ryka Aoki is a poet, composer, professor of English at Santa Monica College, and novelist. She grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, the setting for her novel Light From Uncommon Stars. The novel explores portrayal of women and its use of speculative fiction tropes to explore the meaning of womanhood in the modern day. One goal Aoki has with her writing is that through writing for a general audience instead of only trans people, she can help others see transgender people as human. In an interview with The Mary Sue Aoki described the novel as being in part influenced by the story of Ted Ngoy, the Cambodian American entrepreneur known as the “Donut King”, stating that she wanted “to open my own literary donut shop.”

Brian Lin

Brian Lin grew up in Taiwan. What he remembers most fondly is the food. He can write a whole essay about all the white music he stopped listening to in his journey to unlearn white supremacy. He’s never let go of #andrewbird though, whose virtuosity and spiritedness have moved him since he came across “Mysterious Production of Eggs” at an Eslite bookstore in Taipei. His dad told him about his family’s first time coming to the US—how a customs officer tried to fuck with him. Plus, his dad told him about the family company’s long road to breaking even.¹⁹ He’s working on finishing the novel he’s been writing for the past seven plus years that, at times, he’s not been sure would ever see the light of day.

Gustavo Hernandez

Gustavo Hernandez was born in Jalisco, Mexico and grew up in Santa Ana. He still lives in Southern California. He said in an instinct interview that he “has memories of writing poems when he was in elementary school. Kids in class used to pay him (usually in Ninja Turtles stickers) to write poems for their girlfriends.” In the same interview he said about his personal and artistic influences, “My foundation as a writer was built by musicians. I grew up in the 90s. Introspective lyrics were everywhere, so artists like Tori Amos, Liz Phair, and Kristin Hersh had a big impact on me. As far as poets, the work of Joy Harjo and Ada Limón helped me find my way around when I first decided to start writing with an eye toward publishing.”

He is the author of the poetry collection Flower Grand First (Moontide Press, 2021) whose poems, according to David Lopez, “are points plotted on maps both physical and emotional—the rural landscapes of Jalisco, the glimmering plains of memory, the busy cities of California, and the circular paths of grief. The collection goes beyond the queer experience and dives into the intersections of identity, blending family, history, and resilience–often hard-hitting, but always with a subtle refrain.”

Brian Sonia Wallace

Brian Sonia Wallace is a poet, theatre maker, and cultural journalist born in St. Louis, raised in Culver City and lives in Los Angeles. He was the poet-in-residence in the Mall of American in June 2017 where he wrote responsive poems for people shopping in the mall, a practice he has employed in a number of different settings. Writing poetry for others began in 2012, when he set up a typewriter on the street with a sign that said “Poetry Store” and accidentally started his business: RENT Poet. He became West Hollywood’s fourth Poet Laureate from 2020-2023.

He is the author of the books I Sold These Poems Now I Want Them Back (Yak Press, 2016), The Poetry of Strangers (Harper Collins, 2020) and Maze Mouth (Moon Tide Press, 2023). He said in a Poets.org interview about the future of poetry in California that “California is the American capital of technology and media, and a laboratory of progressive policy. Poetry in our state has the potential to be a beacon for the world by availing itself of these tools—by being activist and embedded, and by communicating itself globally.”

Andrés Sánchez

Andrés Sánchez is a queer/trans Mexican poet, advocate, and traveler. They migrated to the U.S. at the age of 5 and grew up in Southern California and Las Vegas, NV. They are a teacher for Community Literature Initiative (CLI) in Southern California.

Their book This Body (World Stage Press, 2021) according to poet and nurse Alex Petunia, is a poetry collection that “ignites a stirring within us to seek healing beyond the scars of ancestral cycles through a genuine tenderness towards self.”²⁰

Alex Petunia

Alex Petunia is a nurse-poet from Chicago. As a kid, she was always close to pen and paper crafting scary stories, drawing and journaling to stay whole while growing up in a home with domestic violence. She didn’t start taking her creativity seriously until her 30s when she joined a femme/nonbinary writing group in L.Á. that met weekly. Later, Petunia enrolled in the Community Literature Initiative (CLI) Poetry Publishing class—CLI a program started by professor and South Central poet Hiram Sims—where she wrote her first poetry collection Tending My Wild (World Stage Press, 2021). She teaches with CLI supporting other blooming writers and also offers a free monthly writing workshop called Meditation Monday with the Los Angeles Poets Society.

Petunia is a queer, multiracial human and as she says in a Voyage LA interview, her book “is my living dream. My poetry collection is all of me. Me, the survivor of a domestic violence home. Me, the mixed-race kid who met her father at age 10. Me, the burnt-out nurse navigating the broken healthcare system in pandemic. Me, the queer self understanding my own fluidity as I define it.”

Angela Peñaredondo

Born in Iloilo City, Philippines, Angela Peñaredondo is a queer Filipinx writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator and scholar. They are an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Humanities at California State University San Bernardino. They are the author of Maroon (Jamii Publishing, 2016), All Things Lose Thousands of Times (Inlandia Institute, 2017), regional winner of the Hillary Gravendyk Prize and Nature Felt But Never Apprehended (Noemi Press, 2023). Nature Felt But Never Apprehended synthesizes poetry, lyric prose, fragmented creative nonfiction, and visual art. They voyage through the junctures of gender and environmental injustices, and its connections between Philippines’ histories of foreign invasions and intimacies of survivorhood. Peñaredondo wields queer, diasporic mythmaking, affective experiences of ritual and prayer as an illuminating force in the tangles of intergenerational memory. 

Karo Ska

Karo Ska (she/they) is a South Asian & Eastern European non-binary femme poet, living on unceded Tongva Land. They migrated from Warsaw, Poland and eventually settled in the San Fernando Valley in 1996. Ska is the Library Manager at the Sims Library of Poetry in South Central, a former DSTL Arts student and a CLI graduate. Her first chapbook is gathering grandmothers’ bones (DSTL Arts Publication, 2020) and their full collection is loving my salt-drenched bones (World Stage Press, 2022). Alex Petunia says in a blurb of Ska’s full collection: “karo ska’s poetry collection loving my salt-drenched bones journeys the honesty of staying whole despite the ache of the past, the rawness of now, and the uncertainty of the future. Ska challenges society’s toxic definitions of identity and the lack of justice that exists for so many, including our dear planet. Ska’s collection echoes the ancestral resilience rumbling deep within the marrow of an empowered self.”

Sources

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2. Mohr, Bill. “Emotions Doesn’t Change Facts: Remembering Joseph Hansen.” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 5, 2014. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emotions-doesnt-change-facts-remembering-joseph-hansen/.

3. “Terry Wolverton.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Wolverton.

4. “Wendy C. Ortiz.” Wikipedia, June 19, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_C._Ortiz; “Bio.” traci kato-kiriyama. n.d. “About.” Accessed June 28, 2023. http://www.traciakemi.com/bio/.

5. “City of Night.” Wikipedia, May 7, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Night.

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8. “Joseph Hansen (Writer).” Wikipedia, June 10, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hansen_(writer).

9. “Gil Cuadros.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Cuadros.

10. “Gil Cuadros.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Cuadros.

11. “Eloise Klein Healy.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/eloise-klein-healy.

12. “Eloise Klein Healy.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eloise_Klein_Healy.

13. “Terry Wolverton.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Wolverton.

14. “Terry Wolverton.” Wikipedia, March 14, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Wolverton.

15. “Michelle T. Clinton.” Wikipedia, November 21, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_T._Clinton.

16. Lee, C.B. “Redefining Super.” Tumblr (blog), September 17, 2016. https://diversityinya.tumblr.com/post/150541308470/redefining-super; Vee. “Interview: C.B. Lee & Rachel Davidson Leigh.” YA Pride, March 28, 2020. https://www.gayya.org/2016/09/interview-c-b-lee-rachel-davidson-leigh/

17. “Steven Reigns.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/steven-reigns.

18. Navigating with (out) instruments – Amazon.com. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://www.amazon.com/Navigating-out-Instruments-Traci-Kato-Kiriyama/dp/1951628004.

19. Login • instagram. Accessed June 28, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/briantheory/.

20. Sánchez, Andrés. This body. Los Angeles, CA: World Stage Press, 2020.