![]() This is still a quite welcoming, liberal community, though, and with a longstanding feminist scene, too. Gay residents are still most definitely a presence in Santa Monica, but with nowhere near the presence they have in West Hollywood, Silver Lake, and some other parts of Los Angeles. With encroaching gentrification and police crackdowns, the area lost much of its vogue among queers by the '60s. Just off the beach a huge gay bar, the Tropical Village, drew everybody from navy men to closeted celebrities to resident authors Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender. Today, you'd never know that this primarily straight, white, and professional area was an early bastion of gay society, a land of bathhouses, cruising, and nude sunbathing. ![]() From the '30s until the '50s, the section of Santa Monica just south of where Wilshire Boulevard hits Pacific Coast Highway was known as Queer Alley.
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