Cooper Do-nuts FINALE

I’ve written about Cooper Do-nuts for two years, but has anyone listened? Of course not, as simple truths are both unacceptable and unwelcome to fact-denying government ideologues and their gullible subjects. Oh well! See the previous posts: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Congratulations to Tony Hoover of DLANC and the Evans family for getting the “Cooper Do-nuts/Nancy Valverde Square” motion passed. On the day before the vote, I stated it would pass unanimously, and of course it did (be sure an attend the ceremonial plaque unveiling/Square dedication, on the LAPD lawn at Second & Main, Thursday, June 22, at 9am. The ceremony will be repeated Saturday, June 24, at 11am).

Naturally, City Council passed the motion despite every word of said motion being untrue. I’m not being hyperbolic, or “challenging,” or whatever, I’m just stating fact. Are the Council corrupt, or inept? You might argue it’s equal measure of both, and who would I be argue with you.

All of the motion is fanciful? Really, Nathan? Yes, really. It is composed largely of outright fabrication, sprinkled with assertions and suppositions unsupported by facts or logic. Don’t believe me? I’ll tell you what, let’s go through the motion now, line by line. (This I do at the risk of becoming “late Lenny Bruce.” That reference being: Lenny Bruce made history as an acerbic, insightful commenter on society, but at the end of his career he had been cancelled by The Man so many times he spent his time on stage tediously reading from legal documents. So, shall we wade into similarly tedious waters? Let’s go!)

First, a bit of background on how the “Cooper-Valverde Square” motion came to be. It began a year +½ ago, with Tony Hoover’s December 2021 DLANC letter to Council, which asserted “The first recorded instance in the LGBTQIA+ community of gender-transgressive persons resisting arbitrary police arrest occurred at Cooper’s Do-nuts at 215 S. Main Street in Downtown LA in 1959” thus let’s have a big memorial square there.

Mr. Hoover and his brethren-in-government were then disabused of this notion, having learned no such thing happened at Cooper’s in general, and particularly not at Second and Main. Thus a year and change later, de León’s subsequent new & improved motion to Council alludes to the purported uprising only in passing. They’ve shifted focus to a new concept, that Cooper’s was the place Los Angeles’s gender nonconforming found sanctuary, oh and by the way, an important woman named Nancy Valverde ate donuts there.

This is the motion that passed Wednesday June 7:

The motion consists of two main paragraphs. As you can see, the first is about Cooper Do-nuts; this paragraph is comprised of unsupportable claims and fanciful untruths. 

Its second paragraph, concerning Nancy Valverde, is similarly composed of untruths, which I hesitate to call lies, because the author may have honestly thought the stories contained therein were truths. I’m being diplomatic when I say these four sentences are, at best, highly inaccurate statements regarding improbable events of dubious background. 

So! Let’s do this, line-by-freakin’-line:

PARAGRAPH I.

Sentence 1. “Cooper Do-nuts, formerly located at 215 S Main Street in Downtown LA, distinguished itself as a safe space for the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Distinguished itself when and how and according to whom? We have one account of Nancy Valverde and her betrousered ladyfriends hanging out there because it was near her barber school. Otherwise, there are zero accounts of Coopers having any sort of relation to the LGTBQIA2S+ community, save for some unsupported assertions, sixty years after the fact, by a grandson. 

Go read the guidebooks to gay-friendly LA from the 1960s—e.g., Bob Damron’s Address Book—and tell me, in the multitude of listings, is Cooper’s there? 

Of all the Cooper Do-nuts locations, I’m willing to believe the one at 441 South Hill may have been frequented by gay men, given its proximity to Pershing Square. Perhaps, as well, the one at 628 South Olive, for the same reason. But 215 South Main? Away from The Run and across from the Archdiocese and the Union Rescue Mission? Nope, I reject that totally. Similarly, the Cooper’s locations at 316 E 5th and 807 W 3rd, no, never happened. 

2. “Despite the neighboring businesses, a strip of bars known as ‘The Run’, catering to gay men, gender non-conforming individuals were often excluded from these establishments for fear of the bars losing their licenses as a result of LA Municipal Ordinance No. 5022, a city-wide ban on cross dressing between 6pm and 6am.”

First of all, Cooper Do-nuts didn’t “neighbor” The Run. The Run didn’t extend nearly that far north. 

Also—as I pointed out publicly before the Council vote—there WAS NO Municipal Ordinance No. 5022. MC 5022 hadn’t existed since 1936. (How is it that you work for the City and know nothing about your own damn laws?)

De León’s Hoover-penned motion is attempting to refer to MC 52.51, the section of Municipal Code that stipulated against masquerading. Yes, under MC 52.51 an individual could be charged with cross-dressing without a permit, which neither constitutes a city-wide ban (“between 6pm and 6am” or any other time), nor involved businesses being punished. Have you wondered what the law actually said? Let’s read it now:

3. “Cooper Do-nuts, however, remained a safe haven for all members of the queer community regardless of gender presentation.”

As I said with Line 1, there’s no evidence of this, save for a) an Evans grandson just, you know, says so, and b) Nancy Valverde said she enjoyed being a patron there during her stint in barber school, at a time when women were thrown in prison without due process for wearing slacks, and c) John Rechy’s contentions that “gay people got together at Cooper’s Do-nuts” (and when he stated that, he was specifically referring to the Cooper’s on Main near Sixth, which after it was proven that location did not exist, Rechy then stated things didn’t happen at Cooper Do-nuts). To be clear, no transwoman, MtF, cross-dressing man, or AMAB person has ever come out and claimed Cooper Do-nuts was a “safe haven.”

4. “Many also claim Cooper Do-nuts was the site of the first LGBT uprising, occuring [sic] in May 1959 after Los Angeles Police Department officers reportedly attempted to arrest two drag queens and two gay men suspected of sex work and were met with a barrage of spoons, coffee cups, donuts, and coffee thrown by Cooper Do-nuts patrons, forcing the officers to flee without making the arrests.”

Um, no. There is no “many claim” because precisely zero actually claim this. There was, once, a single witness to the event (who also said it happened blocks away), who has specifically stated the whole thing most assuredly did not happen at a Cooper’s. So there you go. I should mention that this one-and-only-person-in-the-history-of-everything who told the story about the riot? His name is John Rechy, and he makes things up for a living (and then makes up reviews about the stuff he made up). 

Atop which, when giving interviews, John Rechy tends to just, you know, say stuff, specifically, stuff that’s wrong. For example, in this Los Angeles Magazine interview Rechy states “the Mattachine Society, the people who were going to jail for publishing One Magazine…that had articles about stuff going on around gay people…and the publishers were arrested. They went to jail.” Certainly sounds like an authoritative statement from someone who was there at the time, but that doesn’t mean it is in the least bit true. No-one was arrested for content and dissemination, and certainly no-one went to jail; the ONE editors were subjected to law enforcement interviews (by FBI agents) about some of their sources, but they declined to cooperate—no arrests, detainment, charges, or imprisonment. And yet because 1000x more people will read Rechy’s interview than will ever read this post, what he said will become the unquestioned (and unquestionable) canon till the end of time.

With Rechy being the lone riot source, it’s important to remember, those who were not there (much less, even born yet) subsequently “claiming” an uprising happened, when backed by no evidence and no eyewitness accounts, aren’t claiming anything; they’re just making stuff up. (And no, despite what you’re told, Nancy Valverde never claimed it, either. She said once, in 2019, that she heard secondhand that something happened, though there was no mention of Cooper’s.)  

5. “News of the incident spread throughout “The Run”, prompting angry Angelenos to fill the streets to protest this particular injustice and the ongoing discrimination endured by the queer community in LA.”

Damn, that’s a bold fabrication out of nowhere. Seriously…the Cooper riot story has been repeated ad infinitum and every time the telling gets inflated and elaborated upon, but this is some next-level concoction. Consider: in the seventeen years the riot story has existed, de León’s motion of May 2023 is literally the first time any one on earth has made this fantastic, spurious claim. Amazing.

PARAGRAPH II.

Sentence 1. “Contemporaneously, Nancy Valverde and her friends Audrey Black and Delores Newton were students at Moler’s Barber College at 265 S. Main Street a few doors down from Cooper Do-nuts which quickly became Nancy and her friends’ regular spot.”

Well, ok. I won’t nitpick the “few doors” line despite Moler being near the opposite end of the block. I will hammer home that if Valverde was at school “contemporaneously” i.e. May 1959, there was no Cooper Do-nuts at 215 South Main. Because the building was torn down in January 1958, and was still a parking lot in May 1959. A new one opened in the late fall of 1959 (and I might its address was 213, not 215, the address in de León’s motion). 

So we’re told Valverde only patronized Cooper Do-nuts because she attended a nearby barber school in 1959 when she was 27 years old. Yet according to the Los Angeles LGBT Center, she didn’t go to barber school. Well, which is it?

2. “As a masculine presenting woman, Nancy was routinely arrested for violating Ordinance No. 5022 and thrown into Lincoln Heights jail in a section known derisively as the ‘Daddy Tank’, reserved for women suspected of being lesbians.”

Again, no, Valverde was NOT charged with violating Ordinance 5022 because it didn’t exist, and hadn’t since she was four years old. 

But let’s say she was arrested for violating its successor code MC 52.51. Nevertheless, there was no“Daddy Tank” at Lincoln Heights jail. LA’s Daddy Tank is actually quite famous, the topic having been treated in numerous scholarly papers, and was the scene of lesbian protests; it existed at Sybil Brand. 

3. “Determined to address this discrimination, Nancy, with the help of a clerk at the LA County Law Library, found rulings that supported her defense that wearing men’s clothing was not a crime.”

Valverde states this happened in 1959. 

The rulings she purportedly found were certainly not some esoteric knowledge. Valverde, we are told, began being arrested for cross-dressing in 1948; the law against female-to-male cross dressing was tossed out in 1950, which was front page news. Nine years later she didn’t remember that happened?

This was of course huge news among any slacks-garbed females. (What, you say maybe Valverde and her friends didn’t read the Times? Every newspaper, major and minor, carried the story, e.g. the Valley Times, the Citizen News, the Daily Press Journal, the Daily News, the Mirror, etc., as can be seen here and here.)

So: women-dressing-as-men was deemed legal in 1950. Valverde certainly knew that in 1950…but then somehow forgot this fact…and in 1959 and had to go to the Law Library to rediscover this knowledge?

Point being, there’s a problem with this narrative, which only gets more problematic and improbable:

4. “Nancy informed her lawyer, Arthur Black, of what she learned and he was able to use these findings in her defense. Nancy’s tenacity and perseverance led the way to ending laws targeting LGBTQIA+ individuals, particularly gender non-conforming persons, in LA.”

Interviews with Valverde, and subsequently de León’s motion, states she informed her lawyer Arthur Black in 1959, but: Arthur S. Black wasn’t admitted to the bar until 1962. 

The way we have been told the story, Valverde was arrested repeatedly, as early as 1948, on a law subsequently reversed by Superior Court judges in 1950. But for nine years she kept getting arrested on something a judge could not legally charge her, up to and including jail terms as long as three months, until she “discovered” this incredible bit of information that was, inarguably,  known to every lawyer in Los Angeles. Apparently it then took her three years, from 1959 to 1962, to find the one and only lawyer who somehow wasn’t familiar with the law, take this knowledge to him and enlighten him, which thereafter, somehow, ended her routine arrests…twelve years after that law was no longer enforced.

The reason Arthur S. Black gets added to the story, apparently, is that he’s the attorney who had that infamous “masquerading ordinance” 52.51 finally and completely overturned in 1963. Now remember, said masquerading ordinance hadn’t applied to women for thirteen years, but was enforced in a “men shall not dress like women without a permit” spirit of the law until dealt its death blow in October ‘63. 

Charles Melvin Martin (1941-2014) was in drag on the corner of Soto and Fourth Street, late August of ‘63, and got popped for it. Martin hired newly-minted lawyer Arthur Black, who argued that this particular section of our Municipal Code was made invalid because it contradicted California State Penal Codes, which thus voided local application of the Municipal Code. The well-known 1950 case law Valverde “discovered” in 1959—whereby Appellate Court jurists legalized women in men’s clothing—was not involved here at all; rather, the 1963 Appellate Court jurists conceded that our law was superseded by State PC sections 185 and 650.

I should add that in ending 52.51, Black hadn’t done anything ingenious or new; he basically copied case law from People v. James Arthur Lane, Jr. whereby San Francisco’s version of the same Municipal law (anti-masquerading Section 440 SFMC) had been similarly made void and invalidated by State law. 

At this point you might say, wellllll, perhaps the decision In re Martin (1963) 221 Cal.App.2d 14, contains some mention of Valverde, I mean, have you read the full copy of the decision, above and beyond the abstract?  I’m glad you asked that, because, can’t say we didn’t try. Journeyed to the Law Library, (yep, the very same one that Nancy Valverde purportedly went to), and pulled bound volumes of the Second District Court of Appeals in search of full case transcript of Crim. No. 9354. In the volume that covers 9350-9367, however, 9354 just ain’t there. Irritatingly, the cases bound within jump from 9353 to 9360. Next thing you know we’re on the phone to Sacramento, with the State Appellate Court’s head librarian, now tasked with finding the full text of the case for us. Perhaps we’ll discover out it’s full of mentions about Nancy Valverde! Spoiler alert: it won’t be, but, you can’t say research here lacks due diligence. 

If Nancy Valverde played any role in ending enforcement of LAMC 52.51, what was it? Even if her help existed, it appears to be vastly overstated—the 1950 Guynn and Granato precedents were not obscure. What’s funny is that if Hoover/de León et al. actually studied some gay history, they’d know this. Faderman & Timmons’ Gay L.A. points out that the Guynn and Granato decisions were included in an annotated volume of the 1956 L.A. Municipal Code. More to the point, Gay L.A. specifically discusses the perennially-misused 5022 vs. the actual law, which was 52.51…but gosh, what a surprise, our local government acting on behalf of gay L.A. can’t be bothered to learn about local government or read the basic textbook about gay L.A. appropriately titled Gay L.A.

To sum up, despite Valverde’s “tenacity and perseverance” she did not in fact help women, obviously, who were instead aided by panel of Judges Jess Stephens, Hartley Shaw and Edward Bishop, appellate division of the L.A. Superior Court in the widely-known People v. Guynn, 1950, CRA 2551 and People v. Granato 1950, CRA 2552. And Valverde didn’t help men, either, as LAPD continued to make arrests for LAMC 52.51 violations until the fall of 1963, when they were prohibited from doing so by In re Martin, which utilized neither Guynn nor Granato in the decision. In short, there exists no evidence that Nancy Valverde’s encounters with the LAPD or the courts eased the path for others similarly situated between 1948-1963. It doesn’t even add up that she even helped herself by “discovering” some widely-known case law, three years before she retained an attorney, who both knew said case law and then never used it in any related legal arguments.

**************************

Why, you might now be asking, would Council then vote for something so patently, provably, repeatedly fabricated? De León’s motion is devoid of fact and replete with falsehood, which Council likely knew (since I had, in fact, told them so, which is a matter of public record), so one may only assume Council read neither the motion nor my thoughts on the matter…but perhaps they were moved by the passion of the speakers, who addressed Council in chambers on June 7. Of all the speakers, the one with the most to say was Tony Hoover, Treasurer of DLANC, and who spearheaded the legislation. The speakers can be seen presenting to Council here, beginning at 56:00.

Tony Hoover spoke at length about the motion, his “passion project.” At 59:44 he goes off on Fletcher Bowron (whom he calls “Bowen”), about how Bowron “championed an ordinance, 5022 in Los Angeles…Fletcher Bowen felt that people who were gender non-conforming were horrendous to society and needed to be incarcerated. 5022 was a very, very, very harsh ordinance in this city…”

I guess it’s no surprise that a government employee, paid with taxpayer dollars, should have absolutely no idea about government. Bowron was a Republican it’s true, but a liberal pro-public housing politician (being liberal cost him reelection in 1953). He’s an important mayor, and if you’re going to smear him with absurd claims—famously transphobic Bowron despised gender nonconforming people and demanded their imprisonment! etc.—I’m going to need some evidence of this, Mr. Hoover. 

Ah yes, the evil Bowron, a mayor under whose watch 52.51 ended enforcement on gender nonconforming women (and for the millionth time, Mr. Hoover, there was nothing called “5022” anywhere near the time of Cooper Do-nuts or Valverde—though it’s even more ridiculous de León’s Legislative Deputy Sarah Flaherty calls it “Ordinance 5200,” thus further distancing the Establishment Narrative from reality). And besides, when Valverde got fed up with being incarcerated and allegedly had to go to the Law Library in 1959, Bowron hadn’t been mayor for six years.  

Hoover goes on to repeat the whole bit about how Valverde was arrested repeatedly because she wore pants, and was for this incarcerated for three months without due process. (Uh-huh. Valverde was deprived of her liberty, illegally and unconstitutionally, in direct repudiation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments—not for a day, but for months, just for wearing trousers—and she just took it for thirteen years? ACLU lawyers would have been all over that. Hell, the Kenny and Cohn legal team [lawyers for the Hollywood Ten, who battled HUAC], whose offices were on Bunker Hill would have taken her case pro bono.) 

We’re told these arrests and incarcerations went on and on “routinely” until Valverde did research in the Law Library, thus ending her persecution. This, despite the fact that what she found was common knowledge. Hoover goes on to state “she was able to end the enforcement of 5022 on herself in Los Angeles and potentially other people as well” …well, no, because 52.51’s enforcement against ladies in trousers ended a dozen years before her lawyer was even admitted into practice. On and on it goes, making less and less sense…

…and then Hoover calls Valverde “the Rosa Parks of the LGBTQ community,” a comment of such egregious mythologizing, I will let it speak for itself.

At which point Hoover begins on Cooper Do-nuts. He informs the Council it was located on The Run (again, it most certainly was not). He tells the Council that at that time you would lose your business license if you catered to the gay community (what statute was that? oh right, didn’t exist). At 1:02:42 he states that Cooper Do-nuts was unique in that they openly flaunted society’s strictures and hired gender nonconforming people as employees. Daaaannng, not even the Cooper family descendants make THAT claim. (Just for fun, let’s look at some of Cooper’s gender noncomforming employees, like these fellows and these guys.) 

Hoover states that Nancy’s barber school was “a couple doors down from Cooper Do-nuts,” an exaggeration I will freely admit isn’t the worst sin in the world—of course, as I showed above, her school was not “a couple,” but twenty doors away—I know, big deal, but, Hoover offhandedly stating this is emblematic of the broader, deeper bastardization of any potential truths that may lurk in the greater narrative. 

Then he brings up Cooper’s as a safe haven for “the victims of 5022.” Again, no 5022. There was 52.51, and its attendant statute 52.52, which read, to remind you, like so. And to further repeat, the idea that Cooper’s was a “safe haven for victims” began about a year ago, and out of thin air.

There were a half-dozen more speakers. All repeated the same talking points: Nancy’s bravery and determination ended 5022, CDN was a trans safe haven. Everyone had the good sense not to mention the thoroughly-debunked “riot” narrative…ohhh wait, at 1:06:30 a Mr. Paul Zappia states “in 1959 patrons of Cooper donuts rebelled against police…first known instance… etc. etc.” which caused my eyes to roll so hard you could hear them from space. 

That’s the long and the short of it. This corner is now made a monument, based wholly on hot air. The intentions of Tony Hoover, and the Evans family, might be the most noble in history, but this square will forever be stained with having sprouted from fallacies and mendacity. People will forever look at this monument to revisionist history and wonder well, if they can lie about that, what else aren’t they telling the truth about? 

De León’s Legislative Deputy stated “the intent is to honor and uplift the contributions of trans and gender non-conforming queer people and the allies.” Fine, if that’s your intent, might I suggest it not be evolved from “we have to create an LGBT monument in DTLA at any cost, truth be damned, let’s invent a bunch of stuff and throw it at the wall and see what sticks, and that’s how we’ll uplift these poor, poor people” because that particular course of action does a profound disservice to the actual history of this community, you dolts. This whole process is ugly and depressing.

Speaking of which, meanwhile, an actual site of a genuine documented gay rights activist will likely be demolished just because some Councilmember is in bed with developers. 

And that’s Los Angeles.

Special thanks to esteemed appellate attorney Robert Wolfe, author of numerous articles on Los Angeles’s legal history, for his knowledge and guidance regarding this matter