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Some just happen to be located in gay neighborhoods and, if they’re welcoming, stand the test of time as hallowed totems of the community.
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Some look like your run-of-the-mill casual-dining restaurant, but the owners employ mostly gay waitstaff who know how to deliver the right amount of sass and a smile to get you to order that cinnamon bun that everyone at the table says they won’t eat but then devours within 20 seconds. Some “gay restaurants” have interiors decked out in rainbow flags, framed pics of Bea Arthur as her “Golden Girls” character Dorothy Zbornak and posters of exuberant drag queens advertising the next themed brunch.
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I’ve even had strangers toast me from across the room. “I like to come here on a lazy Monday afternoon, and I see neighbors who stop by to chat waiters I know by name will come say hi and give a genuine hug. “The Abbey’s best times are its quietest,” says 54-year-old lifestyle writer and WeHo resident Eric Diesel. “I always run into a dozen folks I know here before we walk around the corner to go drink at Akbar.”Īnd in West Hollywood, there are staples like Cafe d’Etoile, Saint Felix and even the Abbey, more famous as a raucous bar but one that’s also a community center for its patrons. “It’s got feel-good, kinda healthy food and a real classic neighborhood vibe,” Droege, an actor who lives in Beachwood Canyon, says. I came here with a group of friends recently, and they actually ate all the carbs on the table” - and the Kitchen, which counts Drew Droege, 42, as a loyal customer. In Silver Lake, El Condor is a favorite of 40-year-old screenwriter Adam Roberts, who resides in Atwater Village - “It’s low-key and has a festive atmosphere. In L.A., they include downtown hot spots Precinct and Redline. In essence the gay rights movement, one could argue, started not in a bar, with beer bottles crashing under the glow of neon, but in a tiny restaurant serving doughnuts 60 years ago this month. It laid the foundation for later uprisings at the Black Cat Tavern in Silver Lake (then Edendale), Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood, and then, most notoriously, at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, all of which occurred within the ensuing decade. That revolt is widely regarded as the first recorded event where people in the LGBTQ community took a stand against police brutality. The revolters, who included transgender people, gay men and “hustlers” - according to John Rechy, one of the men the police attempted to arrest, who detailed the event in his 1963 novel “City of Night” - continued their stand, the commotion blocking off that strip of the street through the night and into the next day. That’s when they decided to revolt.ĭoughnuts, coffee cups and wadded napkins were thrown at the police officers, who retreated at first but returned with reinforcements. One evening in May 1959, inside a doughnut shop called Cooper Do-nuts on South Main Street in downtown Los Angeles, three LGBTQ individuals were being arrested because their outward gender identities did not match the ones on their identification.