Listening Room: Oral Histories

with Roland Palencia

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Roland Palencia
Amazingly, we're recording the history that happened before us, but we're not recording our own history because we were in many ways making history. It was a novelty to see so many queer Latinas and Latinos and to have that almost reaffirmation that you're not the only one, that there were a lot of people like you.

And so this is the very first flyer that we did and it actually, it was before we even had a name. If you can tell, it was just Latinos Unidos and I think that we took from this and eventually call it Gay Latino Unidos, and eventually Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos. So this is actually the handwriting of Jose Ramirez, who was the founder and then the rest of us, I think were more like co-founders. And this is a phone number of what used to be the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center and now it's the Los Angeles LGBT Center.

So that was a number, and as you can tell that there is no area code because at that time in LA, there was only one area code, so there was no need to put an area code. So you can just directly, so there was no 323, 310, none of that stuff. And the building was on Highland, between Santa Monica and Fountain. And it was a small building, but it was like a beehive, there was so much activity going on the whole time.

So Jose used to work there, and this is Jose Ramirez again. And every person in this picture has passed away, most of them from HIV and AIDS. But one, Arturo Alivez, who actually he just passed away last year. So he was the only surviving one out of this, everybody died of HIV and AIDS.

Most of the happenings and most of our events were in Silver Lake.

It's like the meeting  of West Hollywood and East LA, so we were not really comfortable in East LA as a metaphor for the East Side or on West Hollywood as a metaphor on the West Side because it was mostly white at that time and very it was rather prejudicial, the bars were. So, Silver Lake became that bridge and it was a place where the East and West met and where we felt most comfortable. As you can see, it was August 15th, 1981. In some ways, we were pretty good about putting not only the date, the month and the day, but the year, which is great because we're talking about 41, almost 43 years ago.

And so that said, these, our very, very first newsletter, so you can see that it was typed with a mechanical typewriter. And then we will make some corrections here and there by handwriting like a little comma. So this is Volume One, Number One, January, 1982. So we were funded probably around August, but January, at the beginning of the year, the next year, that's when we actually began our first newsletter.

[Music]

Roland Palencia
So this is a Latina happening, we had quite a few of those. And this is, I don't know what year this was, but it was in November and Flamingos World, either it was a Latino lesbian bar or it had a Latino lesbian day or evening, or what have you. But this was usually in the afternoon, pretty young, incredibly smart people connected to the Civil rights movement. Very feminist and men who are feminist in their consciousness. And I think that that's what allow us to have this co-gender work because we were able to actually really promote female leadership in the organization and women felt very comfortable, but obviously they also needed to have their own space, so the Lesbianas Unidas was created. And so there were people who also will not necessarily be, they will be more gender fluid and feel comfortable in GLLU in a way that it just became a home for the rejects kind of thing, even though obviously we were incredibly smart, incredibly bright, incredibly committed to our communities.

[Music]

Roland Palencia
I mean, literally very low tech, but high touch kind of thing because we literally distribute it and give it hand-to-hand to people. We go to the bars. That first flyer that I showed you was a mimeograph, I don't think you know what a mimeograph is, yeah. So basically, it's almost like how the newspapers, you write an original, and then you literally just put some ink and then you can roll it into a machine and you manually have to create a lot of these flyers. So we have to–so it was physical labor.

GLLU was like the glue between the Latino community and the gay community. And so we understood that whole aspect of Latino youth and the restlessness and the lack of opportunities and also the gangs and all that kind of stuff.

And I think that's why GLLU was so pivotal and so critical in terms of being part of that because we truly were the embodiment of those two communities. I was not part of the founding of Sunset Junction Street Fair, but we definitely participated and it was an incredible success. I think Sunset Junction easily had over 200,000 people in attendance and it was very, very distinct from Gay Pride in the sense that it was very openly gay, but in a very heterosexual environment. And I think that really transformed a lot of the perception among a lot of heterosexuals, but also a lot of perceptions about Latinos and people of color in the gay community. So it was like the Swiss knife of understanding. Like it had so many purposes.

But also, I think that there was something about the concept of GLLU that was so innovative, it really ignited the imagination of queer Latinas and Latinos, Latinx people at that time. And the fact that we also were young and energetic. And by the way, there were no elders in our community. There were elders, but there were no elders who were activists. People who were 27 were the elders.

[Music]

Roland Palencia
And unity, they named our newsletters, Unidad. Unity was a big thing for us. I think that what we wanted is, first of all, you're not alone. You don't have to give up any part of who you are. You can come whole and complete as you are, meaning all your identities, all your experiences were very legitimate in our eyes. It was a very high touch environment in the sense that there was nothing digital, so we had to meet in person, you had to meet in person. And I think that gave us a real advantage of connecting heart to heart, mind to mind. Our radio was our social media, it was our high tech arm because it went beyond an event that had 200, 300, 500 people. We could theoretically reach thousands in one single event kind of thing, that was kind of like an extrapolation of our gatherings. But now it became a forum with the potential to reach so many more people. 

[Music]

Roland Palencia
We were a crop of activist, it was like the first activist generation, queer Latinos who were openly, openly, right, reclaiming their queerness, their Latiness and also making a radical state in about society. I think it is also, even though not everyone was a leftist, there was that dominant ideology of being very progressive, very leftist, because many of us came from some movements that were about challenging the system. And so it wasn't just like a social gathering group, there was an agenda of being progressive and really challenging oppressive institutions in a very clear way.

I was in a Marxist group called the Revolutionary Youth League, and it was a very Marxist-Maoist. Marxist-Maoist-Leninist Thought, what they call MLMTT. And it was called the Revolutionary Youth League and I was a member of that in my, I don't know, probably 20 when I joined or something like that, or 19.

They basically said that I couldn't be gay and be in the organization. And I remember very clearly that I said, okay, I'm not going to have sex with men because I believe in this ideology, blah, blah, blah. But of course, I will have sex with men and then they will find out, and then they will tell me either you have to choose to be a communist or to be a homosexual. I said, I'm going to be a homosexual and I'm just going to be progressive somewhere else. And I think that because we are not accepted or fully understood, sometimes we might be accepted but not fully understood.

And especially at that time, it's a little bit different now, but it's still, there's a yearning for being with people who you don't have to translate anything. You can speak in code language and they totally understand you and they celebrate you for that. And as much as our families love us, in many cases, I certainly felt loved by my family, but they don't live my experience. So being able to create a community of people who have lived in your experience is very critical.

And the queer experience is very unique, is not something that heterosexual people obviously go through, even though now there's a lot more openness. So I think that extended families have been very critical for us. But I would say that that's in some ways, that's the key to be able to transcend a lot of the clannish tendencies that we might have because many of those extended families included all queers of many color, white, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern. So I think that it's almost like we have the seed as queer people to be able to unite people, different ethnicities and racists and even sexual orientations or of gender identity because we know how to do that, we know how to go beyond the blood lines.

I would love for an anthropologist to actually look at our model and for people to figure out how do we replicate this model of family that is not related by blood, but that is very, very much connected and very much, in many cases, taking the place of families in ways that families themselves cannot provide for these people who were technically strangers to each other. It's almost like modern nature's ecology, very, very diverse but everyone seems to generally get along in that ecology. It's true, certain animals eat other animals, but for the most part, they know they're part of an ecology and then they seem to work it out.

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Credits:
“Palencia, Roland” Interview by Ángel Labarthe del Solare. 19 October 2022. Together On the Air, ONE Archives Foundation. Digital audio file.