Added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 29, 2022

GOOD NEWS: On August 8, 2023, the LA City Council voted to designate the Morris Kight House as an LA Historic-Cultural Monument, ensuring it would be protected against the proposed demolition by its owner. Visit savemorriskights4thstreet.com to find out more about how this contentious preservation battle went down, and get more background at the LA Conservancy website.

It’s nearly impossible to find parking in the neighborhood just northeast of MacArthur Park. Parking is prohibited on the major thoroughfares, and the narrow side streets are choked with residents’ vehicles; navigating it is a downhill slalom race, with double-parked cars instead of ski poles. 

These days there aren’t a lot of reasons for non-residents to visit this part of Westlake (aside from the quirky Grier-Musser Museum). Yet for a five year period in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the unremarkable craftsman house at 1822 West 4th Street was one of the landmarks of gay LA. This was the home of Morris Kight, a pioneering activist of the gay rights movement. Kight’s house was more than just his residence. It was also a think tank, a clinic, and a meeting place for the LA chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, a group of gay activists with a radical approach to creating political and social change for their community. 

Kight had an incredibly long and fruitful career as an activist, and there’s way too much to say about him for one blog post. So we’ll focus on his early years in LA, and what he achieved while he was living in the house at 1822 West 4th Street.

Before LA

Morris Kight was born in 1919, and grew up in a small Texas town called Proctor. From an early age, he had a taste for social justice. One story has a 16-year-old Kight being detained by the cops for seating a Black couple at his family’s diner, in violation of a law against race mixing. 

Kight studied political science and public administration at Texas Christian University. During his university years, Kight was accepted into the US Career Service Training School, and spent much of World War II as a civilian administrator, helping to plan new governments on the islands occupied by the US military in the Pacific Theater. At the same time, Kight was a staunch opponent of war, active in protests against genocide and chemical warfare. 

Kight moved to New Mexico after WWII, where he helped organize public health services for the indigenous population out there. He also volunteered for a state program designed to eradicate venereal disease. Though he was married to a woman and had two kids during his time in New Mexico (not uncommon for gay men at the time), Kight also connected with the gay communities in Santa Fe and Albuquerque. It was here that he first learned about the Mattachine Society – an early gay rights organization, founded in 1950 in LA – from California actors working in the Albuquerque theaters that Kight frequented.

Kight’s Flight to Los Angeles 

In 1957, Kight moved to the hilly Bunker Hill neighborhood of LA, close to a network of gay-friendly bars and cruising spots. By this point he was a full-time activist for a variety of social, political and labor causes. He led demonstrations and hunger strikes to protest the Vietnam War. He co-founded the Dow Action Committee to protest the chemical giant’s production of napalm which was causing so much horror during Vietnam; as a result of the nationwide protests, Dow stopped making napalm in 1969. It’s regarded as one of the first successful boycotts of a corporation. 

All the while, Kight was developing a loose network of healthcare workers, attorneys, counselors and social workers sympathetic to the needs of LA’s gay community. He printed out business cards with his address and phone number, and would give them out to people he met, effectively creating an underground social services net for LGBTQ Angelenos. 

The gay rights movement of the 1950s was dominated by “homophile” organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, groups that were focused on expanding a sense of community for LGBTQ folks, and working towards greater acceptance by mainstream society. 

Kight considered the homophile societies elitist and overly conservative in their aims. He was more inspired by the radical spirit of activism emerging in the ‘60s, with the Black Panthers, the Peace & Freedom Party and the anti-war protests. Toward the end of the decade many queer activists were turning to more confrontational tactics, aimed at ending institutional discrimination of gay people, creating new economic and social opportunities and creating real political/legal change. Keep in mind, gay sex was illegal in California until 1975. 

The Gay Liberation Front LA

After the gradual razing of Bunker Hill in the ‘60s, many in the gay community shifted westward to MacArthur Park. Morris Kight moved to the house at 1822 West 4th Street in 1967, and within a couple of years the house had become the epicenter of an increasingly radical gay rights movement.

1969 in particular was a turning point. Early in the morning on March 9, a gay man named Howard Efland was brutally beaten by the Los Angeles Police Department’s vice squad, and he died at the hospital an hour later. Three months later, the Stonewall uprising in New York City found patrons of a Greenwich Village gay bar fighting back against a police raid, tipping off a week of protests. Both of these events had a huge impact on Kight’s outlook.  

Soon after Stonewall Kight joined with his colleagues Don Kilhefner, Jon Platania, Brenda Weathers and Del Whan to form the LA chapter of the brand new Gay Liberation Front (GLF), one of the first few chapters nationwide. They met in Kight’s house every Sunday, initially with a small group of about 18. By April of 1970 membership had ballooned to 250. 

The principle goal was to disabuse lesbian, gay people of any notion of alleged inferiority. And convince them to feel positive about themselves. And they did. There have been vast changes, but the foremost change has been in ourselves. We have changed the quality of our lives because we have changed the quality of our life experience.

-Morris Kight, from a 1992 interview for KCET’s Life and Times

Kight parlayed his decades of experience as an organizer into honing the GLF into an effective force for radical activism. He knew that if you want to rally people around your cause, especially early on, there has to be a concrete, achievable goal. The GLF found one in Barney’s Beanery, a popular West Hollywood bar and restaurant that was infamous for a “FAGOTS STAY OUT” sign that had hung up behind the bar since the ‘50s. Kight and his colleague Troy Perry, a preacher who ministered to LA’s gay and lesbian population, led three months of GLF picketing, boycotts and sit-ins. They’d invite the press to cover the protests, chanting “More deviation! Less population!” and “We’re not afraid anymore!” while the cameras were rolling. Eventually the Barney’s Beanery owner took down the offensive signs; it was put up and removed several times over the next 14 years, until it came down for good in 1984, right after West Hollywood incorporated as a city. Kight kept the sign in his house for years. 

The GLF held some 65 demonstrations throughout LA within its first six months of existence, rallying at churches, synagogues, consulates and bars. They even protested a psychiatric conference for hosting a speaker who advocated “behavior modification” for gays and lesbians.

Christopher Street West March

The house on West 4th Street is also where the GLF and Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Church organized the Christopher Street West march to commemorate the anniversary of Stonewall. Rev. Bob Humphries came up with the name, based on the street in Greenwich Village where the Stonewall Inn is located. 

The story of how they got the thing permitted is a saga on its own. LA’s Chief of Police Ed Davis compared homosexuals to “thieves and burglars,” and the Police Commission demanded that the organizers secure a $500,000 bond for potential property damage, and another $1 million to compensate the police for protecting the marchers. The ACLU got involved with a lawsuit, the Police Commission dropped their conditions, and a permit was granted with just two days to spare. It’s claimed that it was the world’s first ever legally permitted gay pride parade.

The inaugural Christopher Street West parade set off from the corner of Hollywood Boulevard & McCadden Place on June 28, 1970, with an estimated 30,000 people in attendance. The GLF made their aims explicitly clear on their parade float, featuring a gay person pinned to a cross and a sign emblazoned with the words “In Memory of Those Killed by the Pigs.”

The tradition continues today, albeit with a different name, the LA Pride Festival & Parade. In 1979 it moved from Hollywood to what’s now West Hollywood. It’s still run by the non-profit Christopher Street West Association.

I had never seen more people with hats and dark shades on in my life. I was surprised that more of them didn’t get in the streets with us, but people were worried. They had jobs. They were concerned about being on television, being photographed. And yet, it was the best feeling in the world.

-Troy Perry, co-founder of Christopher Street West, in a 2015 piece for LAMag.com

Gay Services Community Center

Of Morris Kight’s many achievements, the one he was proudest of was founding the Gay Community Services Center (GCSC).

As mentioned earlier, Kight gave out his contact info to anyone who needed help, and anyone who could offer help. He made good use of his extensive rolodex when he formed the Gay Survival Committee with fellow activist Don Kilhefner in early 1970. The Committee was a group of GLF members committed to offering help to gay people that needed it. It started as a gay crisis help line and clinic, operating out of Kight’s house. GCSC volunteers would take up to 200 calls a day about housing, healthcare, recovery, legal advice – the kind of thing often denied LGBTQ people by traditional social service providers. Doctors would treat men with VD in the back room of Kight’s house, which became known as the “clap shack.” 

By April of 1971 the Gay Survival Committee had transformed into the Gay Community Services Center, and soon moved into an old Victorian house on Wilshire Boulevard, where they invited in a couple thousand gays and lesbians each week. They opened a VD clinic and a mental health clinic, and in 1974 became the first organization with “gay” in its title to be granted non-profit status by the IRS. 

The GCSC moved to Highland Avenue by the end of the ‘70s, began to pay full-time staffers and receive public grants to help fund its services. In 1980 the name changed to the Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center; today it’s known as the Los Angeles LGBT Center, with nine facilities through the city. It’s said to be America’s largest social services entity dedicated to helping queer people.

Post-4th Street

Kight was kicked out of the house on 4th Street in 1974 by a homophobic landlord; as Kight explained to his friend Morty Manford, “Having a renowned gay liberationist on his property has finished freaking that poor man’s mind.” Once ensconced in another craftsman on McCadden Place, he kept on advocating and organizing for the rights and advancement of the gay community, this time with a more explicitly political focus. Over the next decade he co-founded the Stonewall Democratic Club to lobby for politicians friendly to the cause; he joined an Advisory Committee on Gay People convened by President Jimmy Carter; he was appointed to the LA County Human Relations Commission in 1979, one of the first openly gay men with such a high-profile position in county government. 

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A few months after Kight died in 2003, Los Angeles dedicated the corner of Hollywood Boulevard & McCadden Place as “Morris Kight Square.” It was the same intersection where the Christopher Street West parade began in 1970. There’s a plaque embedded in the concrete from 2005, and another one from 2020, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Christopher Street West. 

You’ll find another plaque dedicated to “The Venerable Morris Kight” underneath a magnolia tree on a small triangle of grass at Santa Monica & Crescent Heights, now known as the Matthew Shepard Human Rights Triangle. Kight used to water the plants there. 

There are a lot of places in Los Angeles where you can trace the steps of Morris Kight and his legacy of activism. Historically speaking, the house at 1822 West 4th Street is the crown jewel among them. It’s where Kight and his colleagues laid the groundwork for the modern gay rights movement in LA.

Sources & Recommended Reading

+ Arnold, Shayna Rose: “We’re Going to Do a Parade. This Is Hollywood.” (LAMag.com, 2015)

+ Bernadicou, August with Chris Coats: “Don Kilhefner” (LGBTQ History Project)

+ Cherry, Mary Ann: Morris Kight: Humanist, Liberationist, Fantabulist: A Story of Gay Rights and Gay Wrongs (Process Media, 2020)

+ Eggert, Kate & Krisy Gosney: Morris Kight House’s NRHP nomination form (draft)

+ Marcus, Eric: “Morris Kight (season 3, episode 8)” (Making Gay History: The Podcast)

+ “Morris Kight Residence” (LAConservancy.org) 

+ “Napalm and The Dow Chemical Company” (PBS.org)

+ Rapp, Linda: “Morris Kight” (GLBTQ Archive) 

+ Wallace, Kelly: “Discover LGBTQIA Los Angeles: Morris Kight Residence” (LAPL Blog, June 28, 2021)