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“As for novelist John Rechy, the excerpt  is from “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny,”  written about “a flaming drag queen”  while Rechy was renting a room on

Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles.

A highly revised version, titled “Miss Destiny: The Fabulous Wedding,”

appears in Rechy’s “City of Night.”

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“Between about 2nd and 6th streets–a few blocks from Pershing Square and an extension of the same world–Main Street in Los Angeles is a stretch of dingy bars, threefeature moviehouses,burlesque joints, army and navy stores, grimy restaurants, amusement halls–magazine stores with hundreds of photographs for sale of chesty unattainable tempeststorm [I saw her show in Reno, when she must have been about 60 years old. She still looked fabulous!] women in black underwear . . .colored lights strung like a cheap necklace along the street–gray rooming houses
squeezed tightly hotly together, long wobbly dark stairways leading into a maze of. . .lost. . .filthy cockroachspotted rooms for a buck a night where malehustlers and scores go in no questions asked and walk out into the rancid night in opposite directions, the air outside stagnant with the odor of onions and cheap greasy food, and rock-and-roll sexmusic blasting out from the many jukeboxes leering obscenely blinking manycolored along the block matching the frenzied activity in the bars, the hot shoeshine clipstands, the moviehouse toilets all hungry eyes and hot anxious dry tongues. And between these streets the frenzied activity is only moving back and forth going nowhere really, standing against the walls smoking peering anxiously to spot the bulls before they spot you,
darting in and of the two farthest-out bars hipwise on this street: Wally’s Cavern, and Harry’s: long crowded bars with accusing angry mirrors.”

I love this description of downtown Los Angeles circa 1961! Also, there was a theater that showed nothing but newsreels, and a few years earlier there would still be street cars before they were taken out, plus who knows whatever else!?

(Suggested by Larry H’s amazing blog — not sure he really wants to be credited in my blog for his research)

My memory of Pershing square when I was about 10 years old:

People on soap boxes giving speeches.

Tempest Storm in 1980:

Tempest Storm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tempest Storm

(born February 29, 1928) is an American stripper, burlesque star, and motion picture actress. Along with Lili St. Cyr

and Blaze Starr,

she was one of the best known burlesque performers of the 1950s and 1960s. She is regarded as having one of the longest careers as a burlesque performer, spanning more than 50 years. She still regularly performs as of the 2000s.