In 1954, experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger unleashed Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. What his 38-minute opus lacked in narrative, it more than made up for with a flamboyance of style. And though made in the heart of Hollywood, the short film was far removed from the movie-making glamour and machinery of Los Angeles. In fact, Pleasure Dome, which loosely unfolds a fete hosted by the Great Beast itself, unpacked an alternative L.A., one steeped in the avant-garde, the occult, and the magickal.
This history and vision of the city—running concurrent if not underground of its leading industry—fills “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation,” an exhibition presented at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries in L.A. as part of Getty’s PST Art. Co-curated by Alexis Bard Johnson, Kelly Filreis, and Quetzal Arevalo, the show explores how the occult, queer, and science fiction scenes mixed, mingled, and shaped visual culture in the metropolis between the 1930s and ’60s.
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
“While the exhibition is physically divided into ‘occult’ and ‘sci-fi’ rooms, we wanted to emphasize that the figures involved in these communities were deeply intertwined and inspired each other,” the curators told me in a joint interview over email, “whether that is directly within their shared social networks, or indirectly through the production and circulation of films, magazines, photographs, and artworks.”
Pleasure Dome offers a prime nexus: the film emerged from Anger’s occult leanings—particularly his interest in Aleister Crowley’s esoteric philosophy Thelema—and featured a cast of characters who were active in L.A.’s underground. Amongside them was Samson de Brier, the queer actor and occultist in whose home the movie was filmed; Curtis Harrington, filmmaker and a queer cinema pioneer; and Renate Druks, painter of the supernatural.
Renate Druks, Self-portrait (state of mind) (1967). Courtesy of The Ranch, Montauk.
Within a deep red gallery, “Queer L.A.” unearths Harrington’s early experimental films and Druks’s enchantingly surreal paintings, as well as Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, created by artist Frieda Harris in the 1930s (it’s still in print). They lead into a deeper space in which are arrayed relics from the Scottish Rite Temple—a Masonic house of worship on Wilshire Boulevard, now the Marciano Art Foundation—including the recreation of a massive painted backdrop originally made by the same artists who worked on 1939’s The Wizard of Oz.
Viewed together, these objects bring to life a society joined by philosophy as much as creative expression, making it an especially tolerant venue, the curators said, for queer folk and avant-gardists with unconventional lifestyles.
“Directly challenging social and religious institutions, the occult provides queer people opportunities for self-determination, the reinvention of identity through nicknames and alter-egos, costuming and ritual performance,” they added. “They are both based around processes of inner transformation and self-discovery.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
The era’s sci-fi fandom also provided such an outlet. In researching the exhibition some five years ago, Johnson and ONE Archives director Joseph Hawkins were mystified to find that the archives, amassed by writer and gay rights historian Jim Kepner, contained “so many science fiction materials in [an] otherwise primarily LGBTQ+ collection.” The curators would later discover Kepner’s intersecting interests in activism and science fiction: he was a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), collected a host of sci-fi ephemera, and edited Toward Tomorrow, a leftist sci-fi magazine.
Kepner’s sci-fi bona fides touch off the sci-fi segment of “Queer L.A.,” which untangles the many threads of the fandom through costumes, fanzines, paintings, and other historic artifacts. Margaret Brundage’s original artworks for the 1930s covers of Weird Tales paint her heroines in fearless and sapphic light; Morris Dollens’s photomontages juxtapose his photographs of the male form against otherworldly landscapes; while a pair of garments made and worn by science fiction fans Forrest J Ackerman and Myrtle Douglas to a 1939 convention represent what the curators call the earliest cosplays in recorded history.
Margaret Brundage, A Rival from the Grave (1936). Courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art.
The sci-fi fandom, the organizers emphasized, was not an innately queer space, but like occult communities, it “became for some a place where members could be more freely ‘out.'” They added: “This led to the rich visual culture explored throughout the exhibition that embraced hidden codes and rituals, inside jokes, and aesthetics that were intentionally difficult to assimilate into larger society.”
Morris Scott Dollens, The Forest and the Far Land. Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
Again, the sci-fi and occult realms were often not discrete. The curators highlight the life and work of writer and songwriter Lisa Ben, whose papers are held in the ONE Archives. Ben was behind Vice Versa, the first known lesbian magazine in the U.S., that ran from 1947–48, and was active in science fiction communities, where she was known as Tigrina the Devil Doll. Her songs and poems further embraced the occult (1941’s “Hymn to Satan,” for one) in defiance of her Christian roots.
Jim Kepner, cover of Toward Tomorrow no. 2 (June 1944). Courtesy of ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Los Angeles.
“Kepner and Ben,” said the curators, “are great examples of how the imaginative possibilities of science fiction allowed its fans to think more expansively about their own lives and beliefs.”
That such expressions flourished in a postwar L.A., too, was significant as the period saw virulent censorship and surveillance targeting art or individuals deemed even remotely subversive by the city’s vice squad (circumstances that the nation is once again facing down). The secrecy necessitated by this work posed a stark contrast to the self-discovery it represented—a tension woven through “Queer L.A.”
Installation view of “Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. Photo: Min Chen.
But perhaps what’s at the heart of the exhibition is a wall printed with a vast “name map” that links its major figures together. Fashioned like a family tree, it locates connections between sci-fi fan Ackerman and Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard via the LASFS; between Kepner and author Ray Bradbury via the zine Voice of Imagi-Nation; and between chemist Jack Parsons and Crowley via Thelema. Pleasure Dome produces no less than six branches.
The Hollywood Walk of Fame it is not. But this network is more resonant for capturing the breadth of artistic output fueled by “the search for identity, belonging, and alternative forms of knowledge,” in the curators’ words. That search, as the map illustrates, unearthed a community.
“Sci-Fi, Magick, Queer L.A.: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation” is on view at USC Fisher Museum of Art, 823 Exposition Blvd, Los Angeles, California, through November 23.