"A beautifully-crafted book that will serve as a benchmark work for years to come."--Vicki Ruiz, author of From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America"In beautiful style, Hurewitz engages the history of sexuality writ large. He provides a fascinating look at the development of bohemian Los Angeles, its overlap of artists and activists, and presents this material in a new light that tells the story of the emergence of homosexual civil rights movements through the art and politics of the day. This will certainly impact the direction of the field."--Nan Alamilla Boyd, author of Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965"An important and highly original book. It is at once a history of homosexual and homosocial thought and behavior, modernism and modernist expression, and radical political engagement. Its restorative, poignant character allows the reader to visit lost neighborhoods where social and political threads brought together a compelling group of people."--William Deverell, author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past"Hurewitz truly opens Los Angeles' closet door in this stunning history of the 'Red Hills' above Silver Lake where radical countercultures dreamed, cavorted, and agitated for a better world."--Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

List of Illustrations Introduction: Traversing the Hills of Edendale Prologue: A World Left Behind 1. A Most Lascivious Picture of Impatient Desire" 2. Together against the World: Self, Community, and Expression among the Artists of Edendale 3. 1930s Containment: Identity by State Dictate 4. Left of Edendale: The Deep Politics of Communist Community 5. The United Nations in a City: Racial Ideas in Edendale, on the Left, and in Wartime Los Angeles 6. Getting Some Identity: Mattachine and the Politics of Sexual Identity Construction Conclusion: The Struggle of Identity Politics Notes Acknowledgments Index