Karen Ocamb

My father was in the Air Force, and we moved around a lot. Even when we settled in Westport, Connecticut, after he retired, it was sort of like a landing place. But being a part of the West Hollywood Cityhood movement and feeling like I had what we wound up calling “a family of choice,” made me feel that West Hollywood was my first home ever. Actually, though, I had moved to West Hollywood by accident.
        My life had been sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But by 1983, I had turned thirty-three years old and was three years clean and sober, living in New York City, when my girlfriend and I were thinking of leaving. 
        New York City was filled with homeless people who were impacted by the economic hardships of the Reagan years. I had been at CBS News since 1973, right out of college. I saw where my career path as an assistant producer was going—become a producer, earn enough money, and retire. I wasn’t really out-out yet—I had been living in a glass closet. And that was also difficult for me, so I decided to explore this whole other side of me. I asked myself, “What do I want to do with my life?” I decided I was going to move to Los Angeles and be a playwright for Equity Waiver Theater. My girlfriend and I wound up driving across the country in her VW bus. It was a very sixties kind of thing. 
        When we got to Los Angeles, we had a home base in Westwood while we looked for an apartment. My girlfriend said the West Hollywood area was really cool because of the Whisky a Go Go and Laurel Canyon [where Joni Mitchell and friends made music]. We started driving up and down the streets, and at some point, we wound up on Laurel Avenue [in unincorporated West Hollywood]. There was a one-bedroom apartment available next to the lovely historic building where F. Scott Fitzgerald had written. So that’s why I moved to West Hollywood. 
        There was something in the air. There was something in the land that encouraged freedom, that encouraged people getting to know each other in almost a deeper, less superficial way.
        I had been in Twelve Step/Alcoholics Anonymous programs in New York City and found all kinds of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings at the pink Methodist Church at Fairfax and Fountain, right down the street from my apartment. The church was really dilapidated, but it just oozed love. People were coming to those meetings thinking that if they got clean and sober, that they'd get well from AIDS. 
        After one of those meetings in 1984, I heard all this commotion coming from a room downstairs. The door was open, so I poked my head in and there were all these older people on the phone saying, “We have this [ballot] initiative, and we want to make this unincorporated part of the county a city.” Then, this guy, Larry Gross—who was head of the Coalition for Economic Survival (CES) came up to me and said, “Can I help you?” 
        He was oddly both abrupt and welcoming at the same time. He explained rent control to me, which I really had no idea about. It was novel to me because I thought businesses and corporations ruled the world. I listened to Larry about the whole concept of Cityhood: it was not just about rent control. It was about people power, not only to vote for elected officials but to have a real direct impact on policy—creating our own social services and having our own laws to ban discrimination based on HIV and sexual orientation. I realized that Cityhood was something that not only impacted me but also all these seniors who had lived here for years. 
        Meanwhile, I had been taking acting classes with Salome Jens [an actress who taught acting in Los Angeles] and producing the 1984 Summer Olympics coverage for CBS affiliates out of Television City [in Los Angeles]. I got paid a nice little amount for that job, so when it was over, I could leave journalism. I had worked under Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather at CBS News, so it was a lot to let go of. But I told myself I was free to do my playwriting, and I could now be an activist [for the Cityhood campaign], which was a conflict of interest as a journalist. I’d been an activist in the 1960s as a student against the Vietnam War. 
        As a volunteer on the Cityhood campaign, I did whatever I was asked to do: hand out flyers, walk precincts, talk to people. I felt like I was part of something that was larger than myself. And I felt I was being of service, especially in terms of my AA friends and my friends with AIDS, who were scared of dying. The seniors may have had white hair and lines and taken a little longer to get someplace, but they were just remarkable, brilliant, funny, committed, energetic. Many of those seniors had careers in the entertainment industry in some fashion. 
        I also had the extraordinary luck of meeting one of those remarkable seniors, Frances Eisenberg, after the Cityhood campaign when I moved to the same apartment building on Harper Avenue as her. Frances was a CES volunteer and former kindergarten teacher who was very into the labor movement, a Jewish intellectual. She had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Drinking tea together, she’d tell me stories about how W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife would come to her apartment to meet with her and her husband.
        The Cityhood campaign showed me how politics could be a uniter—that all these people who were disparate, who were of their own tribes—seniors from the entertainment industry and Jewish intellectuals, younger renters, some homeowners, and the gay community—learned to come together over a common language and a common goal. And that was really exciting. 
        After we won Cityhood, a lot of us who were involved with the campaign wanted, in some way, to continue our involvement with the new city. It was like, “We won. Now what?” A lot of us still had the energy and excitement and wanted to help shape policy. I wanted to be an outspoken supporter of services for people with AIDS. 
        We were all elated. West Hollywood was, as Bob Craig from Frontiers magazine [a gay publication] said, “Like a gay Camelot.” It felt that way. We had elected a gay-majority City Council. To have an out lesbian being the mayor was like, “Whoa, has there ever been anything like this?” I remember going to one post-Cityhood meeting, and there was talk about the City needing a General Plan [the document that shapes the physical, economic, and human resources goals and objectives of the City], and I was like, “What does that mean?” 
        In early 1986, when the City Council started a group made up of residents and business owners to give input into the City’s future General Plan, Mayor John Heilman asked me if I wanted to be appointed to the General Plan Advisory Committee (GPAC). I said, “Yes, I want to be of service.” John became mayor in 1985 after Valerie Terrigno was indicted for embezzlement of nonprofit funds.
        GPAC was a mix of renters, homeowners, and businesspeople. There were some long-speaking big mouths on GPAC, but I listened to them. Maybe it was just left over from being a reporter. There was sort of an overriding premise on GPAC that we wanted the new city to be like an urban village and that we wanted to serve our people. Not that we were going to replicate Greenwich Village, but we wanted walkability, affordability, and to say good morning to our neighbors. 
        Some people talked about getting rid of the railroad tracks on the Santa Monica Boulevard median strip and making it into a green lawn. It was like, “Of all the things in the world, is that what we should spend our money on?” But again, it went to the concept of an urban village where you needed greenery. I remember how we [renters] found common ground with the homeowners and businesspeople on GPAC, who tended to be more conservative, laissez-faire capitalists than the renters. We said to the homeowners, “Oh, by the way, having good city services will raise the value of your homes.” We said to the business owners, “Gay people in particular don’t really have families or children for the most part, so we have a lot of disposable income … we’re loyal customers and having a national gay presence will attract tourism into West Hollywood.” 
        One of the more far-out ideas that came out of GPAC, that I liked a lot, was to have a house for people with HIV/AIDS. It took a very long time to happen—the religious right was surging, thanks to President Ronald Reagan—but the house wound up being on Harper Avenue. The other thing we did was to acknowledge the issue of alcohol and drugs, especially in the gay community, where many people died from overdose or suicide.
        As the AIDS epidemic got more intense by 1986, to have the City help with things in our [gay] community in some way, shape, or form was important because when we were under Los Angeles County, they did nothing about our issues—though L.A. County Supervisor Ed Edelman tried. The City funded [gay community leader] Morris Kight’s Aid for AIDS, which gave money to people who’d been kicked out of their homes, evicted. I mean, the whole fight against landlords who were evicting people with AIDS was really important. 
        The City’s nondiscrimination ordinance was very important. I remember one of the first cases that took advantage of that ordinance was filed in 1986 by Gloria Allred [the renowned antidiscrimination lawyer]. This guy [Paul Jasperson] who had been going to a nail salon for years, was told, “No, no more appointments, get out,” when he was overheard at the salon telling a friend on the phone that he’d recently been diagnosed with AIDS. That was when everybody thought you could get AIDS from sharing utensils. [The case was still going through the courts when Jasperson died sixteen years later.] 
        Sometimes the support from the City just came in the form of waiving the rental fee so we could have our own spaces—like the AA meetings and at Jim Kepner’s International Gay and Lesbian Archives [now the ONE Archives], and the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in the [City-owned] Werle Building. All those ideas came out of the original concept of an urban village and how we could serve our people. 
        After a special election was set in 1986 to replace Mayor Valerie Terrigno, people from AA and CES suggested I run for City Council. Heilman said to me, “We need another lesbian on the City Council.” And I’m going, okay, but I hadn’t really identified myself as a political identity that way. My connection to the West Hollywood gay community was really through my AA meetings. I got a lot of encouragement to run, but I decided not to. I remember one lunch at Hugo’s Restaurant where some people told me that if I were on the City Council, I’d have to listen to Jeanne Dobrin complaining all the time. I actually had gotten along with her on GPAC, but I decided not to run because I had gone back to being a reporter-writer and it would have been a conflict of interest. 
        In late 1988, Heilman asked me to cohost a West Hollywood TV cable show called Out and About: Gay and Lesbian West Hollywood with Burt Burlant. I thought, “Oh, guess I have to officially come out now.” The show was very popular, and I met Bob Craig, who was the publisher of Frontiers magazine, and Frontiers news editor Aslan Brooke. 
        That show is how I decided to focus on gay journalism. I had a responsibility—a duty to my people. I still do. Working in journalism, where I knew that I was advocating for the rights of gay people and people with AIDS, was a whole other thing for me because under Cronkite and Rather, you didn't advocate for one side or another. But nobody else was covering Black gay people or Latinos, and they were getting AIDS, too. 
        It was my job to write about the gay community fairly. I took it upon myself to cover the spectrum of issues, including the conservative Log Cabin Republicans club. 
        My first piece for Frontiers was about a hunger strike at the green space at Crescent Heights and Santa Monica Boulevard. AIDS activists Wayne Karr and Lou Lance—both of whom had AIDS—were striking for parallel tracking and compassionate use of experimental AIDS drugs [where, along with Food and Drug Administration testing, people with AIDS were willing to be guinea pigs].  
        I tell my LGBTQ+ people, “Greenwich Village is a gay neighborhood. Chelsea is a gay neighborhood. San Diego has their own gay neighborhood. Castro is a gay neighborhood. But we have a whole city—and we helped create it.”  Not only that but [since Cityhood] there are a lot of straight people who move here so their kids can have a diversity of human experience. I remember around 2011, some gay men made an election issue out of not wanting “families with their strollers,” and said, “Get out of here, straights.” I was pissed and I apologized to the straight women. But guess what? There are gay people who want to have families and strollers, too. 
        I like the fresh blood we have in the City now [2025]—like Mayor Chelsea Byers and Councilmember John Erickson. He reminds me of some of us back in the day when we’d get involved very early on and stick with it, and had progressive ideas, but at the same time listened to what other people had to say. I also like the fact that John Heilman is still on the City Council for continuity, so we’re not always reinventing the wheel. 
        The City made its mark. I mean, this “Pink Pony” song [by Chappell Roan], for instance, talks about West Hollywood, and it’s a very popular song. Sheryl Crow talks about Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. All these years later, everybody talks about West Hollywood.