The last five decades marked the golden age of gay nightlife as bars and clubs served as the primary social venues for marginalized gay men and lesbians in Los Angeles. The performance stages within these spaces became theaters for drag queens, actors and other performers to speak to the values and struggles of their audiences, while the dance floors granted patrons license to embody the meaning of songs and to renew themselves through improvised movement. These businesses incubated new subcultures like disco clones, lipstick lesbians, fetish queers, and queer punks that represented interventions in gay and lesbian identities. Through interviews, periodicals and extant club artifacts, I reconstruct the narratives of these entertainments not only to establish the legacy of their artists and entrepreneurs, but also to expose the mechanism by which gay nightlife has transformed sexual norms and popular culture in the United States.

This dissertation examines how the gay and lesbian communities of Los Angeles have deployed nightlife to define, contest and promote themselves in the years following the birth of gay liberation. The circulation of bodies throughout the club space demonstrated the agency of participants in their interactions with various artists as well as the potential for creative and sexual connections among individuals. Gay clubs constitute spectators as co-producers of entertainment with paid performers, and empower political dissenters and sexual deviants to experiment with performance modes and corporeal experiences. Within the artistic and social laboratories of the clubs, these performances of glamour and deviance interrogated queerness and heteronormativity alike and functioned as catalysts for radical change in nightlife and beyond.