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Editor\u2019s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles<\/a> as our theme this month. This is our first piece, you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city here<\/a> and check here<\/a> for info on the conference including accommodations. <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cSunshine or noir?\u201d as the late, great Mike Davis famously asked of Los Angeles. \u201cSunshine\u201d serves as \u201cthe boosterish impulse to frame the city as a white Anglo-Saxon paradise, all palm trees and pristine coast and limitless potential for success, wealth, and glamor,\u201d Jack Hamilton<\/a> wrote, exploring this dynamic in a 2022 remembrance of Davis. \u201c\u2018Noir\u2019 is, effectively, the rejection and critique of this tendency; the artists and thinkers that Davis categorized as noirs believed that what is superficially promised by the sunshine proponents in fact is just a veneer over vicious exploitation, injustice, and inequality.\u201d The dichotomy certainly captures some of the city\u2019s essence\u2013-a municipality bathed in light, but with a strong undercurrent of darkness.<\/p>\n To be fair, Davis\u2019 Marxism, one might argue, leads him to dialectics such as the sunshine\/noir juxtaposition that some even admiring critics find limiting. In a review of Jon Wiener and Mike Davis\u2019 Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties<\/em>, The Metropole<\/em><\/a> recounted historian Eric Avila\u2019s critique of Davis:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a rigorous adherence to this binary: no in-betweenness, no ambivalence,\u201d historian and Los Angeles writer Eric Avila noted in a 2010 essay. \u201cClass war is not\u00a0a<\/em> means, but\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>means of understanding Los Angeles\u2019 history.\u201d Ethnic identity, race, geography, sexuality, gender, and numerous other factors \u201cthat mediate social relations are secondary iterations.\u201d For Avila, Davis\u2019s pessimism reigns too prominently: \u201cLesson: Hope is futile. Mike Davis\u2019s Los Angeles devours our aspirations, consuming our collective dreams along with the desert land.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Criticism acknowledged, and the reductive nature of binaries noted, Davis\u2019 \u201cSunshine or Noir?\u201d still serves as a means for understanding this month\u2019s L.A. theme. Within this framing, one might suggest the city\u2019s Westside, most famously Hollywood and places like Beverly Hills and Santa Monica which are not actually in Los Angeles but often aggregated as such, operates as the sunshine, while its Eastside, neighborhoods like Silver Lake and Echo Park, form its noir.<\/p>\n In recent years, Silver Lake has gotten more than its share of shine. Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons published Gay L.A.:\u00a0 A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics and Lipstick Lesbians<\/em><\/a> (2006) which highlighted its role in creating space for Los Angeles\u2019s gay and lesbian communities<\/a>. Daniel Hurewitz followed with Bohemian Los Angeles: The Making of Modern Politics<\/em><\/a>(2008), a work that delves into Silver Lake\u2019s role in the creation of the Mattachine Society and how it shaped the formation of identity politics.<\/p>\n In Bohemian Los Angeles<\/em>, Silver Lake (known as Edendale during the 1930s) serves as the book\u2019s key setting, a space where communists, artists, and homosexuals resided within each other\u2019s orbits and reached a certain equilibrium of politics, sexuality, and sociability very much apart from the conservative currents of the city during that era. More recently, Under the Silver Lake<\/em><\/a> (2018), a neo-noir starring Andrew Garfield as a pathetic nostalgia-addicted hipster trying to chase down a fever dream of a girlfriend furthered, somewhat controversially<\/a>, its bohemian reputation for a new generation.<\/p>\n\n