Rita Gonzales

Angela Brinskele and Camelia Brieanne Heins interview Latina lesbian activist Rita Gonzales about lesbian and Latino community spaces along Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Junction. She begins by describing the AIDS organization Bienestar’s first small office near Sunset Junction and her involvement with the board. She remembers dancing at Peanuts and The Palms in the 1980s and meeting friends at Little Frida’s. She also describes the LGBT bookstore A Different Light at Sunset Junction.

Although Gonzales spent time in West Hollywood, she describes feeling more comfortable in more racially diverse bars in Silver Lake and the San Fernando Valley. She also talks about an organization she joined, Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos (GLLU), which was a Latino LGBT response to exclusionary LGBT spaces and politics. She discusses her radicalization after she was harassed during a Dinah Shore weekend. She also describes the impact of gentrification on the Sunset Junction and Silver Lake communities and shares her understanding of how the street festival began, while noting that she doesn’t know its full history. Throughout the interview she returns to the disappearance of many of the lesbian bars and dance spaces that were important to her.