Op-Ed: West Hollywood Babylon

I came to West Hollywood in my twenties desperate to get out of survival mode. I was a moody artist kid with street scars tired of just surviving, looking for belonging, maybe even to fall in love. I grew up believing the local origin myth that here you could remake yourself. I didn’t know what I was walking into—the political cliques, the social pecking order—but even in that first season I felt the hierarchy like ritual foreshadowing.

Still, I came ready to be initiated.

For those with eyes to see, West Hollywood is an esoteric city hiding in plain sight. I learned to read the place: the streets hummed, shadows cut sharp, and the parades flipped the rules on purpose. Under the neon, a pattern came into focus: history in the architecture, policy in the performance. Initiation isn’t a metaphor here; it’s real, and it happens in public.

First Oath: Harry Hay and the Secret Lodge

The story begins in 1950. Harry Hay—a former member of the Communist Party and a disciple of esoteric thought—founded the Mattachine Society, widely recognized as one of the first sustained organizations advocating for gay rights in the United States¹²³. Far from a mere political entity, the Society mirrored the structures of secretive fraternal orders, with hierarchical cells, anonymity, and coded language².

From there, the spiritual current surfaced more openly. While formal O.T.O. membership for Hay isn’t documented, his later co-founding of the Radical Faeries (1979), a gay-centered spiritual movement organized around ritual circles, shows his engagement with esoteric currents. Early Faeries materials have been reported to quote Aleister Crowley, and co-founders later launched Treeroots to promote gay-centered spirituality that explicitly included ceremonial magic².

The symbols of the era (logos, emblems, and the rainbow lineage) weren’t accidental. The Progress Pride Flag, introduced in 2018, can be read as echoing a Masonic apron: stacked chevrons suggesting initiatory passage, modern design for an old rite the city keeps repeating. From the start, the city’s fight for visibility learned to speak in rites: proof that here initiation isn’t private theory but public practice.

Architecture as Ritual Device

If politics sets the script, the city’s form sets the stage. West Hollywood’s most theatrical instrument is architectural. The Pacific Design Center—César Pelli’s “Blue Whale” (1975), later completed by adjoining green and red buildings—turns sunlight into script. The central courtyard is often read as a sundial suggesting celestial orientation, while the green building’s crown reads as a pyramidal form, a shape long associated with illumination, ascent, and graded knowledge in Western esotericism⁶.

Near the PDC’s more monumental gestures lies another, more intimate invocation of symbolic architecture: in Plummer Park, Richard Turner’s 2001 fiberglass-and-concrete sculpture “The Riddle of the Sphinx” anchors the community center courtyard. The sphinx — perched on a stone cube base inscribed with an ancient riddle — quietly mediates between youth and age⁷. Intended or not, these complexes behave like a sequence of thresholds: sidewalk to plaza to interior—separation, preparation, admission. 

These gestures aren’t isolated. American cities have long encoded symbolism in plan and form: Philadelphia’s ritual squares, Washington, D.C.’s diagonals and grand vistas from the L’Enfant–McMillan plans, and New York’s Beaux-Arts axes. West Hollywood plays that tradition at an intimate scale; substituting glass for marble, neon for torch.

Saturnalia on Santa Monica Boulevard

From form to festival, the thread holds. What once hid in whispers now marches with permits. West Hollywood Pride and the Halloween Carnaval transform the boulevard into choreographed public rites. They echo Saturnalia, celebrated in Rome from the third century BC, as temporary inversion, licensed revelry, and ritual excess without boundaries⁴. The Dionysian rites of Bacchanalia were curtailed by the Roman state in 186 BC⁵ for their subversive influence.

In Weho, the energy is welcomed and routed down Santa Monica Boulevard; with mapped routes, focused lighting, staffing, and timing that keep the inversion safe. Norms loosen. Pleasure is paced. The parade isn’t escape; it’s curriculum, an annual lesson that belonging here comes through public inversion.

Divas as Deities

West Hollywood’s esoteric current runs straight into pop. Here, divas are cast as goddesses, and their shows often read like modern mystery plays of initiation. That pattern has history. Ancient goddess cults made archetypal powers visible: Inanna/Ishtar with temples and processions; Isis with public festivals and private initiation; Cybele with drums, bright costume, and ecstatic rites. Mystery traditions paired the parade outside with vows inside: the crowds watched, the initiated crossed a line. Modern esoteric circles kept those symbols in circulation so pop performers could pick them up without need for translation.

In West Hollywood, stars step into that stream. Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Katy Perry regularly deploy goddess imagery upon the world stage. One example (among countless others) is Perry’s ride on a mechanical lion during the 2015 Super Bowl Halftime Show, visually invoking the Babylonian war/sex goddess Ishtar conquering the lion. Many of these artists live in or near WeHo and eagerly align with their LGBTQ fan base, showing up at Pride, local benefits and clubs, and leaning into the goddess myth on purpose.

And a new wave keeps it current. Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” name-checks West Hollywood and works as a contemporary gay anthem, anointing Roan in the Madonna–Gaga line as an acolyte of that myth. Call it pop if you want. Here, the crowd and the star complete the same lesson: initiation made public.

Androgyny Exalted

In esoteric traditions, the androgyne is a sign of wholeness. In Plato’s Symposium, humans begin as double beings split apart, always seeking reunion. In Hermetic and alchemical texts, the Rebis, a crowned figure joining sun and moon, marks the “conjunctio”, the union of opposites that completes the work. West Hollywood carries that idea into civic life. Parades, proclamations, and street banners consistently present transgender and androgynous identities as a noble, often spiritual, ideal: the “both/and” as a model of completion.

On the ground, it’s mixed. Policy can do real work, such as funding health clinics, social services, supportive housing and safety programs. At the same time, Weho’s political machinery reduces people into symbols. Trans residents are put at the front of photo ops and culture-war fights, then pushed to the back when budgets tighten or support gets hard. Put plainly: the ideal is exalted, and it is also used. People live in that gap; sometimes helped and sometimes hurt.  At their best, people still pursue the spiritual wholeness that the androgyne archetype names.

For Those With Eyes to See

West Hollywood’s mantle is more than politics, it’s symbolic; tying together the secrecy of early activism, infrastructure that teaches how to enter, celebration that teaches how to belong, and cultural myths that frame initiation.

To me, this city isn’t just scenery: it’s a set of rites that work on you. I didn’t come out as a gay man here (I did that at fourteen), but over ten years in this town I shed the person I thought I had to be. There were breakups and breakthroughs, real friends and real work, and a few new scars from the usual politics and power cliques. 

The bargain isn’t safety; it’s passage.

For those with eyes to see, West Hollywood is an esoteric realm hiding in plain sight— cross the threshold, and the city will rename you in light.

Truth is not hidden, but men hide from it. The eyes to see are within, not without.

Manly P. Hall

Selected Sources

¹ Lillian Faderman — The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (2015). https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gay-Revolution/Lillian-Faderman/9781451694123

² Stuart Timmons — The Trouble with Harry Hay (1990). https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/trouble-with-harry-hay-stuart-timmons/1100617738

³ John D’Emilio — Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (2nd ed., 1998), University of Chicago Press. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3640270.html

⁴ Mary Beard — SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (2015), W. W. Norton. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631492228

⁵ Livy — Ab Urbe Condita, Book 39 (Bacchanalia decree), public-domain translation. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_39

⁶ E. C. Krupp — Echoes of the Ancient Skies: The Astronomy of Lost Civilizations, University of Arizona Press. https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/echoes-of-the-ancient-skies

⁷ Richard Turner — The Riddle of the Sphinx (2001), Plummer Park, City of West Hollywood Urban Art Program. https://www.weho.org/community/arts-and-culture/visual-arts/urban-art-program/city-owned-artworks/richard-turner-the-riddle-of-the-sphinx