West Hollywood Women. Then. Now. Always

Today is International Women’s Day and I’m betting many of you didn’t even know it (men I’m looking at you).

Yes, as you would expect, West Hollywood has a full month of events to show for it, all of it important and well-deserved. But here’s the thing about this city: it doesn’t need a designated month to make the case. It’s been making it since before most of us got here.

One of the things I’m most proud of as a longtime resident is being able to point to so many women who helped to shape our great city. Women who have truly earned icon status. Most never held elected office. Never ran for anything. Never had a glamorous title. They simply showed up. To City Council meetings, AIDS wards, planning hearings, protest lines, and kept showing up until something changed. That’s a different kind of power, and in West Hollywood, it’s always been the truest kind. The list is long and by no means is the one below exhaustive. I just thought today was a great day to give a few their flowers and take a minute to shine a light. So for the uninitiated or the uninformed here’s a quick look at some of West Hollywood’s truest divas, past and present.

Any list of WeHo’s Women must include the late, great Ivy Bottini. Ivy had already lived several lifetimes of activism by the time she got to West Hollywood, then still an unincorporated hamlet of gays, strays and theys. She co-founded the first chapter of NOW in New York in the 1960s, designed the logo the organization still uses today. Betty Friedan expelled her from the women’s movement for raising the lesbian question too loudly. So Ivy moved to Los Angeles, co-founded AIDS Project LA in the middle of an epidemic and spent 22 years in West Hollywood showing up to City Council meetings well into her 90s. Her tree and plaque stand in the Matthew Shepard Triangle at Santa Monica and Crescent Heights. She died at 94 in 2021. The City lowered its flags. It was the right call.

Jeanne Dobrin. Where do we begin? How about how she didn’t miss 40 years’ worth of Council meetings. Holding court for four decades, paying close attention, taking notes, filing lawsuits against developers who thought they could steamroll our residents. Holding councilmembers accountable. She showed up in her pajamas once, and honestly, good for her, because that’s the energy we needed then, we need now. A fighter til the end. She was 99 years old when she died in 2020 and she was still paying closer attention to West Hollywood than most people half her age.

Then there was Ruth. Ruth Williams that is. Ruth moved to West Hollywood in 1948. What kicked her activism into gear was pretty simple: she was a single mom who was pissed that her boys couldn’t safely play in Plummer Park. She became one of the most active members of the Coalition for Economic Survival, fought hard for cityhood, and when the city was born she didn’t stop. Rent stabilization commissioner. Public Safety Commission. Thirty-six years of service. The City lowered its flags when she died in June 2022. That tells you everything.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Karen Ocamb didn’t start as a journalist. She started as a caregiver, because when the AIDS crisis hit, that’s what you did if you were paying attention and had any capacity to help. The writing came later, born out of necessity and fury, because mainstream outlets weren’t touching these stories and somebody had to. She became one of the most important chroniclers this city has ever produced. She still lives here. Still writing. That’s worth something.

Lynn Hoopingarner. If you’ve ever watched a Planning Commission meeting, and bless you my child if you have, you know the name. She’s logged more hours in those chambers fighting for responsible development than most commissioners have served on the dais, period. And Margot Siegel was doing homeowner advocacy before this city even existed. When the WeHo Stories oral history project came calling for its first serious donor, she didn’t hesitate. The project got made because Margot said yes.

And then there’s the indomitable Genevieve Morrill. Fifteen years as president and CEO of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, fighting for businesses that too often felt like nobody at City Hall gave a damn. She made council members squirm when standing up for West Hollywood’s businesses and didn’t lose a minute of sleep over it. She decided last year would be her last leading that charge; it was time, she said, to write the final book of her story, and bid farewell. But not before hitting send on an email that ended with a line that was pure Genevieve: “running a business is one of the hardest things anyone can do… this shit is not for the timid.” She recently received the Ray Reynolds award from the Chamber and will be receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Women in Leadership dinner on March 25.

Our trans sisters must not be forgotten. Bamby Salcedo came to Los Angeles from Guadalajara with nothing and built something remarkable. She founded the TransLatin@ Coalition in 2009 to fill a gap nobody else was filling — trans Latina immigrant women who were falling through every crack in every system. She served as a Public Safety Commissioner for the City of West Hollywood and co-chaired the City’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. She’s testified before Congress, been invited to the White House, and her GARRAS fashion show — the name means claws, which tells you everything about her energy — has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the trans community. She turned pain into purpose on a scale most people can’t imagine. West Hollywood is lucky to have her.

When you look at who’s actually running our great city today, and I mean really running it, the list is long. Sitting at the top is Jackie Rocco. She didn’t just parachute into the City Manager job either. She earned it over 18 years, Parking Division, Economic Development, Public Works, senior administration, corner office at 8300 Santa Monica. That’s how you do it. Councilmember Chelsea Byers just wrapped her year as mayor, the youngest woman to hold that title in this city’s history. She took the gavel during the January wildfires and ICE raids, and faced the many twists and turns of city life with aplomb. Councilmember and former mayor Lauren Meister is in her final term and anyone who’s paid attention knows exactly what her steadiness has been worth. From neighborhood watch captain to council chambers, she (and her sister Debbie) have spent decades fighting to keep this city from being swallowed whole by out-of-control development, and frankly, from losing its soul.

Over at the corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica, West Hollywood Sheriff’s Captain Fanny Lapkin has been running the West Hollywood station since August. East LA kid who wanted to be a pediatrician, wandered into the East LA Sheriff’s Station as a college volunteer and never really looked back. Smart decision, West Hollywood’s gain. And Lt. Ashley Turner, steady, reliable, always there. A familiar presence to anyone who covers public safety in this city: patient, direct, and genuinely connected to the community she serves. The City is lucky to have both of these women protecting us.

In case it wasn’t obvious. None of this was accidental. It started back on November 6, 1984, when Valerie Terrigno became the first openly lesbian mayor in America. Reagan had just swept 49 states. West Hollywood went the other way, because that’s our way, and oftentimes the way forward. Terrigno walked into Barney’s Beanery that first year and took down the “Fagots Stay Out” sign herself. Thank you Valerie. That was year one. Abbe Land came to West Hollywood in 1979 wanting to be an actress. She ended up being something much more useful. She stepped in when Valerie resigned, got elected to the Council in 1986, and served on and off until 2015, five times as mayor, 22 years total on the dais. She championed rent control, affordable housing, women’s advisory boards and HIV/AIDS services during the years when that fight was personal and brutal. West Hollywood’s fingerprints are all over her and hers are all over this city. And as Lindsey Horvath, Abbe’s protege proved, WeHo women never settle. She spent nine years on the City Council, served as mayor twice, founded the Hollywood chapter of NOW, helped launch the NOH8 Campaign, and built the City’s first domestic violence response team. In 2022 she became the youngest woman ever elected to the LA County Board of Supervisors. My suspicion is West Hollywood was just the beginning.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Forty-one years later women are still running the show and honestly that tracks. Women making history in West Hollywood isn’t a theme. It’s so much more than a month. It’s just our way.

Residents Who Carry the Torch and Fight the Good Fight

Then there are the residents who carry the torch, the women who show up to meetings most folks won’t even watch from the comfort of their couch on WeHoTV. These are the women who don’t hold fancy titles or office. Who seek nothing in return other than a city and its council that will respect its residents and put their needs and wants over special interests, developers and even their own. These are the women who do the homework, ask the uncomfortable questions, and stay past midnight when the agenda runs long.

Stephanie Harker and Cathy Blaivas spent years fighting to save Plummer Park’s Great Hall/Long Hall when the city wanted to tear it down. Showing up meeting after meeting, filing nominations, rallying residents, refusing to quit. They won. We all won. We have the tenacious and dedicated Anita Goswami who never misses a meeting that matters. One who recently sat down with a full project plan set before a Planning Commission hearing last month, found the math wasn’t mathing and brought it to the commission anyway, clearly, methodically, because someone had to. Elyse Eisenberg serves on the City’s Business License Commission, runs the WeHo Heights Neighborhood Association, and if something’s going wrong in her neighborhood or at City Hall, you’re going to hear about it and she’s gonna fight to make sure residents come first.

No list is complete without a nod to West Hollywood’s fierce champions for the disabled community. Yola Dore has been here since the 1980s. First appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to the LA Disabilities Board and has since served on West Hollywood’s Disabilities Advisory Board for decades. Yola inspired AB1620 — the first update to Costa Hawkins ever. That bill is now law. She got her HERstory Award last year. Take a bow, Yola. Well Earned. Richly deserved. And then there’s Myra “Mikie” Friedman, WEHOonline’s 2023 Person of the Year. Mikie’s been showing up to Council meetings longer than most reading this have been paying attention. Don’t get in her way. Mikie Friedman has more fight in her than most people half her age and twice her size. Former Disabilities Advisory Board member, always a champion for her community and West Hollywood as a whole. Both deserve their flowers and so much more.

This list doesn’t come close to covering it. For every woman named here, there are dozens more showing up quietly. City staffers who’ve spent careers making this place run, business owners who built something from nothing on a risky stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, residents who show up to meetings nobody’s watching, employees who do the hard work without the title or the recognition. West Hollywood has always been shaped by women. Most who do the work nobody hands them credit for. They’re not seeking it, but they sure do deserve it. At WEHOonline we see you. We salute you. We thank you.

Spitting some facts here: this city has always known a thing or two others are often still figuring out. One of them, without a doubt — when you get out of women’s way, they get it done. Forty-one years of proof and counting. Happy International Women’s Day. 

For a full list of Women’s History Month events happening throughout March, including a free health symposium, dance festival, poetry reading at the Mazer Archives, and the 29th Annual Women in Leadership Awards on March 25, visit weho.org/calendar.

The WeHo Stories oral history book tells the longer version of all of this, 28 people, first-person accounts, portraits by documentarian Barbara Grover. Available for a suggested minimum donation of $25 to Friends of the West Hollywood Library. wehostories.org or lacountylibrary.org/weho-stories.