Marna Deitch

Angela Brinskele, Camelia Brieanne Heins, and Julia Tanenbaum interview West Hollywood local Marna Deitch about lesbian community spaces along Santa Monica Boulevard. She begins by describing The French Market as a “safe haven” where LGBT people could meet friends or dates. Deitch also discusses Peanuts, where she began working in 1990. She describes its transition from a lesbian bar to a nightclub with different club nights, including the lesbian strip night Michelle’s Triple X, which she suggests became more welcoming to the Black and Latino community in response to how white the other clubs were.

She also worked for nearly a decade at The Palms, which she remembers first entering in 1985 as an intimate neighborhood lesbian bar. She describes how The Palms changed as club promoters transformed lesbian nightlife during the 1990s. She describes fierce competition between lesbian club promoters, who called fire marshals on each other's clubs. She remembers arriving in West Hollywood in 1985 and the culture clash between politicized New York lesbian feminism and the West Hollywood lesbian social scene, where she was asked at The Palms whether she was butch or femme and found more sexual freedom.

She also tells a story about how she became a sign language interpreter. After seeing interpreters at the West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival, she took a class at Connexxus which sparked her eventual career in interpreting. She also used this skill to communicate with Deaf patrons while bartending. She also tells the story of interpreting for a week on the Ellen sitcom shortly before Ellen’s coming out.

In a follow-up interview, Deitch discusses how and why she moved to West Hollywood, traveling cross country on motorcycle in 1985. After most of her family died, AIDS took many of her closest friends, and her friend Gene disappeared and was found dead in the Hudson River, Deitch and Gene’s partner George decided to leave New York for California by motorcycle. She describes hearing the city was a champion of renters', seniors', and gay rights, and decided to move there. She found community immediately by going to the Gay and Lesbian Center, joining a softball team, and going to The Palms, where word had already spread about her. She describes later realizing that a 1986 cross-country motorcycle trip had followed much of Route 66, and recounts five cross-country motorcycle trips and riding in all fifty states. George, who they later learned had AIDS, left their first trip in Texas and died two years later. She kept riding, and describes the life that followed as a gift from the family and friends she lost.

She also remembers the closeted lesbian celebrities who came to The Palms and Peanuts, and offers her own explanation for why the lesbian bars closed. As straight Hollywood bars became more welcoming in the early 2000s, she argues, lesbians did not stop supporting their community so much as start “putting our money into other places,” giving up their own spaces in exchange for that freedom.