GAY HISTORY

Using artifacts that participants may have cast off as unimportant, the event brings to life such moments as the Black Cat gay rights protest of 1967, which predated New York's Stonewall riots.

They gathered outside a nightclub called the Black Cat one winter night in 1967, perhaps a few hundred men and women in all, joined together in a moment of happy subversion on a Silver Lake street. Weeks earlier, police had swept through the club and arrested 14 people after witnessing, at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, the "crime" of one man kissing another.

It's unlikely any of the protesters had been to an organized gay-rights demonstration -- there had never been one in Los Angeles before that night. Someone brought a camera and snapped a few pictures. Finally the demonstrators dispersed. They put away or threw away the signs they had made- READ MORE-