L.A.’s Long, Strange Tryst With the Democrats

The Playboy Mansion party hounds are hopping with anticipation. An ex-prostitute turned onetime Libertarian Party hopeful is urging call girls to “minimize their risks” when scoping out the action around Staples Center because “an election year is a very hot year.” The L.A.-based Advocate, the nation’s oldest gay- and lesbian-oriented newsmagazine, is busily interviewing out-and-proud convention delegates. And a USC sexologist is declaring that, in Los Angeles next week, America will be seeing its own “sexual future.”

In case you were too busy watching Britney Spears’ navel to notice, the Democrats are coming to town. And, boy, has L.A.’s sex life, along with the nation’s sense of erotic right and wrong, changed since the party of Bill Clinton last bedded down here en masse.

Marilyn Monroe was already John F. Kennedy’s main Hollywood squeeze, but Beverly Hills’ own Monica Lewinsky was barely a gleam in her parents’ eyes when Los Angeles welcomed the virile JFK and his best and brightest to the brand-new Sports Arena in 1960. Though still ruled by an elite junta of straight white men, the Democratic Party was about to usher Americans onto the sexual New Frontiers. The pill went public the year Kennedy beat Richard Nixon, and thereon followed an impassioned coo heard ‘round the world that ultimately would beget the Summer of Love, the Stonewall riots, Ms. magazine, Roe vs. Wade, “Deep Throat,” the bathhouses of Castro Street in San Francisco and the birth of test-tube baby Louise Joy Brown.

Forty years later, to the consternation of some in Middle America, sexuality and sexual civil rights issues have burst from America’s bedrooms, boardrooms and closets, and many once-taboo matters have moved front and center in the nation’s political consciousness: AIDS, art and censorship, sexual harassment, domestic violence, Internet privacy, even public breast-feeding. More and more it appears that any measure of the U.S. body politic must encompass its erogenous zones. And any tour of America’s erogenous zones must begin, or perhaps end, in Los Angeles.

“I think America is really seeing the future here in L.A., including the sexual future,” says Vern Bullough, a history professor at USC and author of some 30 books about sexuality. “I think the rest of the United States is following close behind us. When you have Bob Dole talking about Viagra, you know things have changed.”

Of course, it’s always been California’s sun-bleached vanity to see itself as the cutting edge of all sensual endeavor, the place where the continent turned inward to contemplate its own frazzled eros.

Yet even a casual investigation of the city--from the “exotic dance” parlors near Los Angeles International Airport to West Hollywood’s gay and lesbian coffee-house scene to the bare-midriffed women of “Coyote Ugly” casting come-hither stares from Sunset Strip billboards--confirms L.A.’s stature as a hothouse of sexual frankness and tolerance, a strip-malled Amsterdam-on-the-Pacific. The last time the Democrats came here, Los Angeles was one of the most prudish cities west of the Bible Belt, despite the lore of its “Hollywood Babylon” nights.

Today L.A. presents a landscape of boundless erotic possibilities and lifestyle alternatives that probably would’ve shocked JFK and his Hah-vad cohorts right out of their wingtips.

Playboy Mansion Will Be a Hot Spot

Like smog, the aphrodisiac of power will hang over Los Angeles next week. For some Democratic Party faithful, the Playboy Mansion will be an unavoidable stop on the Thomas Guide of sexual politics, L.A. style.

“Listen, how could you envision a convention being in town the size of the Democratic National Convention without thinking what role the Playboy Mansion is going to play?” says Cindy Rakowitz, vice president of promotions for Playboy Enterprises. Indeed, lately rediscovered by Young Hollywood, the mansion has been pronounced L.A.’s hottest spot by no less an oracle than Vanity Fair.

Maybe a little too hot for Al Gore’s taste. Last month, the rambling Gothic-style Holmby Hills estate where company founder Hugh Hefner works and plays became the locus of a Democratic Party family feud. Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the Orange County Democrat, was rebuked by some party colleagues for planning to host a Tuesday fund-raiser for Hispanic Unity USA, a political action committee, at the bunny homestead. Leading the critics was Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, son of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and nephew of JFK--not a clan normally associated with monastic living, a Playboy spokesman noted dryly last month.

“I must say we were surprised” at the uproar, says Richard Rosenzweig, executive vice president of Playboy. “We have supported President Clinton, we’ve supported Gore, we’ve supported a number of other Democratic candidates over the years.” He ticks off a list of past fund-raising honorees at the mansion, including former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley and former California Gov. Jerry Brown. Playboy magazine has also interviewed figures such as Jimmy Carter, whose confession of “lusting in his heart” after women other than his wife helped trip up his ’76 run at the White House.

Gore, who has spent the last few months carefully distancing himself from Clinton’s libidinal legacy, has said through a spokesman that he won’t attend or otherwise “condone” Playboy’s event. Sanchez, meanwhile, says she’s been deluged by Democrats seeking invitations.

The Sanchez spat underscores certain sexual tensions that the Republicans are usually better at sweeping under the rug. But last week’s GOP ruckus over whether vice presidential candidate Richard Cheney was trying to cover up his daughter’s sexual orientation shows the Democrats don’t have a monopoly on politico-sexual psychodramas.

“Call it Kinsey’s Revenge,” says Alan Wolfe, director of the Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College and author of the forthcoming book “Moral Freedom.” “When a country changes, it doesn’t matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, you’re going to get just as many Republican as Democratic parents of gay children, or parents with pregnant daughters or promiscuous teenagers. Sexuality has that quality that it can never be confined to any partisan [group].”

Still, whether the Democrats like it or not, since the 1960s they’ve been widely perceived as “the party of the sexual revolution.” Not that everyone’s welcoming them to L.A. with open arms.

“I know from other conventions the Democrats are usually pretty cheap,” says Norma Jean Almodovar, a former “sex care provider” who collected nearly 90,000 votes when she ran for lieutenant governor on the Libertarian ticket in 1986. “Maybe the Republicans just tend to know value when they see it.”

However, the Democrats appear to be the party of choice within segments of the San Fernando Valley--land of “Boogie Nights” and headquarters of the booming $8-billion adult film and video industry, whose political philosophy usually tends more toward Ayn Rand than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But not with a graying U.S. Supreme Court that may soon require three new appointees.

“I’ve always been registered as a Libertarian,” says Devinn Lane, an adult film actress, Penthouse model and Pierce College student, but “I definitely will be voting for Gore. One, because he definitely has more liberal views and he will have a tendency to fight for our rights. If we’re going to go, then it’s just a matter [of time for] everybody else--gay and lesbian rights and the adult industry rights and abortion.”

Also, says Lane, as the 28-year-old mother of a 12-year-old daughter who worships Smash Mouth and Blink-182, she firmly supports posting content warning labels on music CDs, a la Tipper Gore. “You’re going to have music out there with some questionable language.”

If Lane’s professional, political and parental leanings seem hopelessly convoluted, they fit what opinion polls have shown to be a growing national disinterest in moral absolutes--especially those imposed from the top down. With few burning issues in Washington, Americans have turned to more intimate matters. Their beliefs have become more experiential than ideological. It’s a political ethos that Angelenos have implicitly endorsed for decades.

“There is a moral majority, but it’s a moral majority that wants to decide questions of morality for themselves,” says Alan Wolfe. “It means essentially that people are free to decide how they want to live and to answer questions [for themselves] that traditionally been answered by institutions like churches or other bodies of knowledge.”

As America increasingly filters its politics through its leaders’ media-magnified sexual personas--from Bill Clinton and Barney Frank to Bob Packwood, Clarence Thomas and Henry Hyde--the Democrats seem to be the party most in step with the nation’s relativistic mood and its passion for public penance. If Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator, Clinton is the Great Confessor. His impeachment trial provoked not only intense shame but intense catharsis; his unflaggingly high approval ratings suggest that, in some voters’ minds, Clinton died for our peccadilloes, like Elvis, then was granted partial political resurrection. Whatever their feelings of pity, contempt or outright loathing for the man’s cavortings, millions of Americans seem to have identified with Clinton’s public sexual strip-search, the front-page revelations of his “human stain,” to use the title of Philip Roth’s latest novel.

“I think Clinton understands the messiness of being human,” says Taylor Marsh, whose resume parallels America’s own erotic mutations. A former beauty queen raised in an ultraconservative Missouri household, she is a self-described “feminist sex activist” and Internet sex columnist. She also hosts the monthly “Erotica Discussion” nights at Hustler Hollywood on the Sunset Strip. (“I was Mae West on the inside and Miss Missouri on the outside,” is how she describes her youth.)

“Clinton knows how bright he is,” Marsh continues, “but deep in his soul he has some sexual healing that he needs to go through, that he has some sexual urges that take him in an opposite direction [from] his intellect. Whole people are messy and incongruous and terribly, terribly flawed.”

We now pick up the long, winding and terribly, terribly flawed road to the Democratic National Convention as it passes through West Hollywood. A crowd gathers on the sidewalk outside Micky’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, a gay/lesbian/transgender bar where half a dozen TVs pipe in the day’s “Big Brother” installment and a G-stringed male dancer shimmies horizontally along a copper-colored pole.

No, Toto, we’re not in Philadelphia, where the GOP did its best last week to milk the Federalist backdrop of men in powdered wigs and garters. But we do still pay attention to politics.

“I think that if the right [wing] wins, we’ll most definitely have something to worry about,” says 21-year-old USC history student Brian Tuttle as he swigs from a Sex on the Beach cocktail and tucks a George Washington into the dancer’s minimal attire.

Although New York’s and San Francisco’s gay and lesbian enclaves often get more ink, Los Angeles has long been a pioneer in gay rights. The first openly gay organization in the country, the Mattachine Society, was founded here in 1950, a full 19 years before the Stonewall riots. Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian group, launched its L.A. and San Francisco chapters in 1954. The city of West Hollywood, incorporated less than 20 years ago, was the first U.S. municipality to elect a lesbian mayor.

Despite this year’s passage of Proposition 22, which called for California to legally recognize only heterosexual marriage, the political talk around here is guardedly optimistic. “I really think that this is our time to secure full civil rights,” says Gwenn Baldwin, executive director of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center in Hollywood, the world’s largest gay and lesbian organization. “The more Americans see gays and lesbians working next to them, being their neighbors, the more they see [the injustice of existing anti-gay discrimination]. I think the American public is ahead of the politicians in this.”

Baldwin says the center will host a Sunday reception for delegates and also is sponsoring a Tuesday event at the House of Blues. Would it be doing as much if the Republicans were in town? “We’d be doing everything we could to raise those issues,” she replies. “But it might be more of a challenge.”

Baldwin cautions against lumping gay and lesbian rights with issues like pornography, as if gay and lesbian voters were merely the sum of their biological imperatives.

“That’s a little ‘Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom-ish,’ ” she says, referring to the tortured analogies used by the nature program to link animal behavior with life insurance. “These issues are about civil rights and civil liberties, not about sexual rights and sexual liberties.”

While seconding Baldwin’s cautionary note, Judy Wieder, editor in chief of the Advocate and senior vice president of Liberation Publications, takes a somewhat different view. “Your sexuality is the distillation of many things that you feel,” Wieder says. “You’re not born with politics, but you’re born with some sort of sexual stuff in your body. And how you feel about marriage, how you feel about monogamy, about abortion, about adoption, about pornography, all of these are just side subjects to the way you think about sexuality.”

Thoughts, and feelings, about sexuality run strong and complex and occasionally dark as you move toward the shadow of Staples Center.

Margo St. James, founding director of Bay Area-based COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), a group that provides services to “sex workers” and lobbies for prostitution’s decriminalization, says she remembers the days when prostitutes rode in the police paddy wagon with gay San Franciscans arrested under ordinances less liberal than today’s.

Next week, she’s hoping some prostitutes will be demonstrating outside Staples, alongside the neo-Luddites and enviro-lefties who’ve vowed to attend. But she’s doubtful about who’ll actually show up.

“I didn’t get any real commitments,” says St. James with a mild laugh. “You know, these [prostitutes] are a bunch of anarchists, and I’m trying to make ‘em look like Democrats!” Besides “reproductive freedom” and what she calls “the social control of women,” other hot election-year topics cited by St. James include “repetitive stress injury from walking around too much in high heels.”

Tracy Quan, columnist for the Internet magazine Salon.com, and author of the forthcoming novel “Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl,” sees a natural affinity between politicians and practitioners of her sometime vocation. (She says she’s currently on extended literary sabbatical.)

“Prostitutes are very self-dramatizing,” Quan asserts. “Talk about political conventions: If you’ve ever been to a prostitutes’ convention, everybody is trying to top each other. The more horrible your story, the more cachet you have.” While she considers herself a Reagan Republican in some respects (“It was a great time to be a call girl”), Quan admits to sympathetic feelings for Bill Clinton.

“Most people who have feelings and who are sexually alive have made fools of themselves,” she reflects, “and most people haven’t had to have it all over the front of the National Enquirer. Even in the case of Rudy [New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani], it’s a horrible thing to say, [but] his affair made him more likable for about a week.”

Two blocks south of Staples Center, Susan Block is hosting “Democratic Sex,” an exhibition of “political erotica, gonzo art and flag fantasies” at her Speakeasy Gallery.

“It’s not just an American phenomenon, the world is becoming more sexualized,” says the chipper Block, a Yale-educated sex commentator and host of a long-running public access cable TV call-in show. “The world is becoming more sexualized and more democratic. We have had sex for a long time, and we’ve had democracy for a pretty long time too.”

Block, who leans “a little bit toward being a Democrat,” although “they can get into a bit of a political correctness thing,” says she votes “sometimes.” Block offers a tour of the exhibition, which includes doctored images of various Republicans inflagrante delicto and postcards of sex practices during the French Revolution. It was a pretty swinging era, she jokes, “until Robespierre and some of his friends” steered things in a more dire direction.

By contrast, America today seems engaged in a quiet sexual maturation of rising expectations, seeking a middle ground between excess and exploitation in one corner, and puritanical flagellation in the other. Until such time arrives, we are all strange bedfellows.

L.A.’s last Democratic National Convention unleashed sexual vibrations that still flummox our leaders and shake up our lives. Al Gore and his supporters will find those consequences awaiting them here Monday. The city, the venue and the politicians’ names have changed--except, of course, for the Kennedys. The human stain, the human heart of the matter, remains the only constant.