The Brief

Today, a simple internet search lets those in the LGBTQ+ communities find each other and welcoming establishments. But it wasn't always so easy.

Even as gay culture was beginning to gain wider visibility in the 1960s and '70s, especially in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, knowing who would be friendly was hard. That’s where gay travel guides came in.

They worked like the Green Book guides designed to make travel safer for Black people or the vacation guides to steer Jewish people to friendly locations. For gay people navigating potentially fraught encounters, these pocket-sized guidebooks listed bars, hotels, restaurants, and even churches across the United States that were either frequented by the gay community or accepting towards gay patrons.

The most well-known guidebook of the time was the Bob Damron Address Books. These yearly guides were published by its eponymous author, a Los Angeles native who penned the first issue in 1964.

A picture of Bob Damron, the man behind the Damron Address Books, on display at the Muzeo in Anaheim

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Courtesy atomicredhead.com

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About the Damron Address Books

There were several different types of gay travel guides throughout the 1960s. By far the most popular, and the one to set the standard for the genre, was the Damron Address Book.

Bob Damron was born in Los Angeles in 1928 and later moved to San Francisco where he opened several gay bars, becoming a prominent businessman in the community.

The guides he would later become known for, which started as a side project, were of a collection of gay bars he would visit on his trips across and outside of San Francisco. The first Damron Address Book was published in 1964, and Damron would add new listings of LGBTQ friendly spaces every year.

An issue of one of the Damron Address Books, a 1991 issue of the Gayellow Pages, another well-known gay travel guide, and a ticket from the San Diego Eagle, a gay bar

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Courtesy Clark Silva

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Damron's guides were distinguished from his contemporaries, especially in the early years by one key difference: He made a point to visit every location he included.

Eric Gonzaba, assistant professor of American Studies at Cal State Fullerton, said that gave Damron a connection with owners and patrons and made it possible for him to keep the new editions of the book as up to date as possible.

Another unique feature of Damron’s guides was his letter coding system.

If a bar listed in the guide had a “B” next to it, readers would flip to the front of the guide and see that “B” indicated that that particular bar was “frequented by Blacks” or gay African American men. Other letters would notify if a place was more popular with lesbians (what was originally signified with a “G” for “girls”, but has been updated to an “L”) or if customers were both gay and straight with the signifier “M” for “mixed clientele,” said Gonzaba.

“His letters didn't always have to do with clientele,” said Gonzaba. “Sometimes it was very practical information. If you were a gay person and you wanted to go to a bar and play pool, he included the letters “PT” for there being a pool table there.”

A national project to map the gay guides

The entrance to the Mapping the Gay Guides exhibit at the Muzeo in Anaheim, Southern California

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Courtesy atomicredhead.com

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And it's that level of detail that's now the basis for a new digital history project called Mapping the Gay Guides. The joint project between Cal State Fullerton and Clemson University is using every business and place mentioned in the Bob Damron Address Books from 1965 to 2005.

“We're building these online maps to see if we can learn something about the gay community and the history of the LGBT community in the United States,” said Gonzaba.

Gonzaba said Damron's guides provide great context, giving those studying the history a better understanding of both these gay spaces and the cities they were in.

Along with Amanda Regan, his project co-director and a Clemson University assistant history professor, Gonzaba has already mapped Damron’s books through to the 1980s, publishing the results online for public viewing.

Where to see an exhibit on these guides

Mapping the Gay Guides is also the focus of a new exhibit at the Muzeo in the city of Anaheim. The exhibit, now open through June 23, specifically showcases LGBTQ+ friendly spaces cited by Damron that are located in Southern California, including Orange County, Long Beach, and San Diego.

“I think a lot of people maybe know, or expect, a lot of gay history from Los Angeles,” said Clark Silva, co-curator for the exhibit. “But I think it was good for us to show kind of the gay history of the communities that we're in and around” outside of Los Angeles.

The exhibit starts with a prehistory of gay culture before the guides were in print. This includes information about police raids and the difficulty of navigating through life while in the closet, said Silva.

After the Supreme Court ruling of One, Inc. vs. Olesen in 1958 that gave free speech protections to the gay press and gay publications, travel guides and other LGBTQ+ print material exploded, including the Damron Address Books.

A display of other gay and lesbian print material at the Mapping the Gay Guides exhibit

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Courtesy Clark Silva

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However, Gonzaba said that what visitors of the exhibit will notice is that these gay guides have very little indication that they are for the gay community.

Another thing Gonzaba wants people to notice is their size.

“They're meant to be tiny so they can fit in your pocket, and that tells you, one, that they were meant to be traveled with,” said Gonzaba. “But another thing that it tells us is that they were meant to be hidden, right? Because it was quite dangerous to be openly gay in the 1960s and even into the 1970s.”

The exhibit also displays the rich gay history of Southern California. Separated into specific cities, visitors can learn about the gay bars in L.A., the gay friendly hotels in Palm Springs, the bathhouses in Long Beach, the cruising culture in San Diego, and the gay churches in Orange County.

“I think people who come to the exhibit are surprised that it's not just a list of gay bars,” said Gonzaba. “That the gay travel guides talk about all sorts of businesses, all sorts of places of gathering that a lot of people just are unaware of.”

Both Gonzaba and Silva note that most of the Damron Address Books come primarily from the point of view of a gay, white, cis-male perspective.

"Bob Damron didn't make racial designations for places until later, so very early places aren't going to make the distinction between who comes to them," said Silva.

How to see the exhibit

When: The Mapping the Gay Guides exhibit is open now through June 23

Location: Muzeo, 241 S. Anaheim Blvd. Anaheim

Phone: 714-765-6450

Hours: Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Cost: General admission $10 | Anaheim residents $8 | Seniors and children 4-15 $7 | 3 and under are free

The importance of mapping one’s history

The advent of the internet and other cultural shifts have made the Damron Address Book, and gay travel guides on the whole, somewhat obsolete. Silva says those changes have fundamentally changed gay life.

“One of the issues that we talk about is the disappearance of places, and it's mostly through a mainstreaming of gay and lesbian and queer culture,” said Silva. “You don't have to have the gay bar anymore. Lots of bars, especially out here in Southern California, kind of move in between, straight bars having gay clientele, gay bars having lots of straight people come to them.”

Gonzaba said that by looking back at these guides, people can learn a lot about the different trends and historical geography of the gay community in the United States, something he says too few people know.

Gonzaba said when he travels, he finds a lack of historical knowledge about gay people in cities across the U.S. and abroad.

When he asks tour guides if they know about any of the local gay history there, most of the time people respond by saying there just isn’t any. Which Gonzaba, and most people in LGBTQ+ communities know isn’t necessarily true. People just haven’t been looking for it.

“These gay travel guides, they really show us that, at least for a lot of gay men and women, visibility was something that they wanted,” said Gonzaba. “They wanted to find one another for camaraderie, for friendship, and sometimes for sex. And that's a really important lesson that these gay guides tell us, is that people were constantly yearning to find one another.”

After copper wire theft left the Sixth Street Bridge in darkness for years, the city of Los Angeles has hired a Pasadena-based engineering firm to restore the lighting, a move aimed at improving safety for Boyle Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods.

City officials contracted Tetra Tech to relight the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown LA and the Eastside.

Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs led to nearly 2,000 streetlight service requests in Boyle Heights in 2024. Nearly seven miles of copper wire have been reported stolen from the Sixth Street Bridge.

Tetra Tech began working on the project’s design in January and is scheduled to restore the wiring to all lights along the bridge, including along roadways, barriers, ramps, stairways and arches before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Los Angeles that summer, according to a Feb. 18 news release from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office.

The firm – which was selected by the city’s Bureau of Engineering – will fortify the pull boxes, service cabinet and conduits to protect against copper wire theft. Tetra Tech will also install a security camera system to deter vandalism and theft.

“When our streets are well-lit, our neighborhoods feel safer and more connected,” Jurado said in the news release. “The Sixth Street Bridge plays a vital role in connecting Angelenos between the Eastside and the heart of the City.”

Jurado – who pledged to look into fixing the Sixth Street Bridge lights when she was elected in 2024 – said the partnership with Tetra Tech “moves us one step closer to restoring one of the City’s most iconic landmarks as a safe, welcoming public space our communities deserve.”

According to officials, the total contract value with Tetra Tech is $5.3 million, which includes work on the Sixth Street Bridge as well as the Sixth Street PARC project, which encompasses 12 acres of recreational space underneath and adjacent to the bridge.

The PARC project will make way for sports fields, fitness equipment, event spaces and a performance stage. PARC’s grand opening is anticipated later this year.

Because the work for the PARC project and the bridge is connected, the Board of Engineers recommended using the existing PARC contract with Tetra Tech to ensure completion ahead of the 2028 Games, officials said.

The cost for the design work on the bridge alone is roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, Jurado announced that her streetlight repair crew had restored lighting and strengthened infrastructure for more than 400 streetlights across her district, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and El Sereno. Next, they plan to tackle repairs in downtown L.A.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.