Los Angeles & Southern California - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [20]
But Angelenos aren’t all bad. Optimism, open-mindedness and outside-the-box thinking are the norm (studios execs excluded), and people tend to work hard. From illegal immigrants on the corner ready for a long day’s work and downtown office workers earning overtime for ballooning mortgage payments to Hollywood assistants holding dreary day jobs while cramming free hours with indie projects, everybody’s hustling. Griffith Park might be in flames, the Hollywood Hills crumbling and the ground shaking under our feet, but if it’s not blocking traffic, get out of the way. Yes, our reach may sometimes exceed our grasp, but isn’t that what LA’s for?
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Gay & Lesbian SoCal
From shiny Palm Springs to San Diego’s bohemian Hillcrest neighborhood, arty Laguna Beach and the booming LA enclaves of Silver Lake and West Hollywood, gay and lesbian SoCal is out and proud. High profile gay men and lesbians can be found at all levels of society, from government to business and the arts. The Advocate magazine, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), and America’s first gay church and synagogue all started in Los Angeles. Although California does not have same-sex marriage or civil unions, both the state and cities around the region allows registered domestic partnerships.
Gay Pride marches take place throughout the Southland. The largest is in SoCal’s gay capital, West Hollywood, with some 350,000 attendees. There are gay and lesbian groups for hiking, camping, swimming, volleyball, running, skiing and snowboarding, yoga and rodeo. Restaurants, coffee houses, bars, clubs, film festivals, houses of worship and theaters all cater to this burgeoning community.
Homelessness
Homelessness exists throughout the Southland (another local term for Southern California), in places you might expect (Downtown LA’s Skid Row) and in places you wouldn’t (Santa Monica’s beachfront). Some homeless are working poor, bankrupt due to high medical care costs, for example. Others have become addicted to drugs or alcohol, or suffer from mental illnesses. Homeless people are more likely to be victimized than cause you harm. Whether you give them money or not is up to you, though a donation to a local charity may help more.
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Mike Davis’ City of Quartz (1990) is an excoriating history of LA and a glimpse into its possible future; in Ecology of Fear, he examines the decay of the natural environment in the LA Basin.
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MULTICULTURALISM
There were different races even among the first settlers to LA in 1781, and today it is one of only two major metro areas in the nation without a majority ethnic group (the other is Honolulu). Across the region, immigrants from over 140 countries have put down roots, creating the largest populations of Mexicans, Koreans, Armenians, Filipinos, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and Vietnamese outside their home countries, plus America’s largest ethnic Cambodian, Japanese and Persian communities.
All this makes LA one of the most tolerant, cosmopolitan and open-minded societies anywhere. Although there are ethnic enclaves, it’s not uncommon to interact with people of 10 races or more in a single day in any corner of the city. You might drop off your shirts with a Korean dry cleaner, have your nails done by a recent Vietnamese immigrant, pick up groceries from a Mexican grocer and a treat from the Cambodian-run doughnut shop. Dinner might just as easily be sushi, falafel, enchiladas or steak-frites, or maybe pad Thai while a Thai Elvis impersonator entertains. Interracial families barely raise an eyebrow.
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In his column ¡Ask a Mexican!, OC Weekly columnist Gustavo Arellano