They called it Casa de Estrogen, though no one seems to know for certain who came up with the name. Located in Los Angeles’s Koreatown at 188 South Catalina Street, the eight-unit apartment building — a two-story Spanish colonial revival built in 1924 — housed an array of lesbian, queer and punk artists, musicians, filmmakers, performers and writers throughout the ’90s and ’00s. Among the first wave of inhabitants, some of whom met through the West Coast music and leather scenes, were musician Carla Bozulich, model and actress Jenny Shimizu and artist Catherine Opie, who was invited by a piercer named Cross. A subsequent wave, not fully aware of their predecessors, included artist Every Ocean Hughes, writer Eileen Myles, and filmmaker, artist and performer Wu Tsang. Sublets and apartment swaps kept the cost of living low even as Los Angeles rents began to climb. The property changed hands several times over the years. Last sold in 2012, the apartment building still stands today.
The house was a hotbed of queer creative production, much of it done collaboratively among friends. The best-known examples may be Opie’s photographic portraits of queer people, taken at the height of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic, in which she drew on tropes from art historical portraiture to assert not only her subjects’ beauty but also their monumentality. Some of these images were recently on view in a solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London and are currently up at the Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany. But Casa de Estrogen was also the setting for Shimizu’s first professional fashion shoot by Michel Comte, the birthplace of an early video artwork by Hughes with filmmaker Leilah Weinraub and the place where the final issue of the genderqueer art journal LTTR was collated. Its occupants danced at now-historic venues, joined activist groups like ACT UP and Queer Nation, rode around on motorcycles and played with gender and body modification.
Here, those who passed through Casa de Estrogen reflect on the community, creativity and sense of possibility that defined their milieu.
Catherine Opie, 65, artist: I moved to Casa de Estrogen in 1991. It was the lesbian offshoot of gay-boy living in Silver Lake and Hollywood, where the founders of Club Fuck, a leather community club and performance space, lived. I’d just broken up with my girlfriend Pam Gregg, an artist and curator. For $500 a month I rented a one-bedroom with a patio and an avocado tree; for another $250, I rented an additional unit as my studio and built a darkroom there. I ended up being the apartment manager. For the ten years I lived there, it was a predominantly all-lesbian apartment building. We were butch, and we were working on motorcycles and wearing greasy jeans. It was as if I’d moved into a utopic community. This was a time when queers got together and pooled resources. We were all broke. If one person didn’t have food in the fridge, you could just pop in a couple of units over, and somebody was cooking dinner.
Connie Samaras, 75, artist: Cathy’s place was a center of dyke activity. You know how architecture can have its own personality? This was an embracing place. It loved its tenants.
Jenny Shimizu, 59, model and actress: Everybody would come to Casa de Estrogen. I lived there in the early ’90s. Back then I was known as Chicken. I was go-go dancing nearby at Club Fuck, an S&M club where dykes in leather jockstraps would dance. I also did MTV music videos and went to trade school for auto mechanics. I worked on cars behind the apartment building, but I never charged girls. I lived on the top floor with Cross; we split $400 rent for a one-bedroom with a parking space. Cathy lived below us. Ellie [Seelow], a chef, lived with Pam [Gonzalez], a fine art restorer; Carla [Bozulich], who was in the band Ethyl Meatplow, lived with Mynka [Draper], who became a costume designer. Hye Soo, a hot tattoo artist, was there too. We were all friends. People in the house were mostly dykes, but you didn’t have to be; it was more about an in-your-face fearlessness. We hung out with Hell’s Belles, a girls’ motorcycle group. Housewives followed us when we rode through Beverly Hills — they loved a lady in chaps. Sometimes I cruised down Melrose in chaps and a jockstrap.
Ron Athey, 64, performance artist: I hung out at Casa de Estrogen for a decade beginning in the early ’90s. We stuck together. We encouraged each other. It was a beautiful, horny, gorgeous, stylish time: the time of butch women and queers carving their own context. A group of us associated with Casa, maybe five of us, got tattoos of a dagger with a bull’s head in the handle, after “bulldagger,” a term for a butch lesbian. They got it on their forearms, and they voted to allow me to get one on my shin. When I reviewed the book “Dagger: On Butch Women” [1994, edited by Lily Burana, Roxxie, and Linnea Due] for LA Weekly, they illustrated the article with Cathy’s photo of those tattoos. So much was kicking off: BDSM fashion and tattoos, techno dance from the [industrial/new wave] label Wax Trax! in Chicago. Supposedly, Jenny Shimizu was working on her motorcycle outside when an agent saw her. That’s the glamorous legend anyway.
Jenny Shimizu: I was “discovered” by a casting agent when I was riding my motorcycle outside the bar with Alice Temple and Tony Ward that night — three people on one bike! Within weeks, Michel Comte came to Casa de Estrogen and took my first pictures there: me in the garage with the bikes, me working on cars. I left Casa de Estrogen in 1992 when Calvin Klein brought me to New York.
Steak House, 62, film and television producer: I lived in LA until 1993 and spent a lot of time hanging out at Casa. I was also a go-go dancer at Club Fuck. I got arrested when they raided it in 1993. A group of us went to trial to fight the suit. They were claiming I gave a guy a blow job. I had “DYKE” tattooed on the back of my neck; in the courtroom they showed my tattoo to prove that, well, that’s probably not what I was doing. Those days, Opie took our pictures. All these years later, I’m on a T-shirt at [London’s] National Portrait Gallery [“Dyke,” 1992].
Pig Pen/Stosh Fila, 60, scenic artist and performer: Opie’s photo of me [“Pig Pen,” 1993] was just up at the National Portrait Gallery in London. I’ve finally made it, because now I’m a refrigerator magnet.
Catherine Opie: Friends and people passing through Casa de Estrogen allowed me to photograph them. I had no idea I would become an international artist. I made a lot of portraits there, including formal portraits of Ellie, Chicken and Cross. I made “Self-Portrait/Cutting” [1993] in my living room with Judie Bamber, Connie Samaras, Mike and Sky. Later, in the “Domestic” series [1995-98], there’s a photo of a lesbian garage sale in front of South Catalina Street.
Connie Samaras: I handled the camera for “Self-Portrait/Cutting.” Judie’s job was to carve this scene — the stick-figure girls and their house — into Cathy’s back. Her hand was shaking like crazy. Mike and Sky were taking care of Cathy.
In 1992, civil unrest broke out in Los Angeles when the officers charged with brutally assaulting Rodney King, a Black man, were acquitted — around the time a Korean American shopkeeper who fatally shot a Black teenager was convicted without prison time. Property damage in Koreatown, where Casa de Estrogen was located, was particularly severe.
Jenny Shimizu: Cathy took lots of photos in her apartment. She made marauders look like royalty. She took all this stuff — the house, the freeways, us feeling the politics of sex — and turned it into poetry, with no shame. The same fearlessness that everyone had, she brought it to the camera. When she was photographing the [1992] riots, though, we were like, “Can you be careful please?!”
Catherine Opie: A lot of Koreatown burned down during the Rodney King uprising. Some of us in the apartments were armed because people were trying to burn down the building.
Pig Pen/Stosh Fila: During the riots, Opie was walking her dog and the National Guard put their guns on her, right outside Casa.
Jenny Shimizu: One time, the cops came to Casa de Estrogen with a warrant for my arrest because I had thousands of dollars’ worth of parking tickets. I think they looked at the tattoos, the body piercings and the Sharpie crosses on the wall and decided I was a Satan worshiper. I was in jail for a week. At Casa de Estrogen, any weird thing ended up turning into a life lesson. I saw firsthand how horribly women in jail with AIDS were treated; cops threw them into solitary confinement with some aspirin. When I got out, I got ahold of AIDS activists who got help for a couple of these women.
Steak House: I was in Ron Athey shows. I think that some of the intensity of that time’s performance art came out of the pain and frustration of watching young people die.
Ron Athey: There was so much caretaking, so much time spent in hospitals, so many funerals. Tragedy infused that time. Responsibility infused it. ACT UP and Queer Nation and activism intersected with this bodily modification phenomenon. I think because lives were on the line, this form of body culture became more popular: Establishing these queer looks became a type of activism in its own right, which later worked toward this nonbinary reality.
Catherine Opie: We were radicals. We were revolutionary. We were becoming fags because we were losing all our fag friends. We were transitioning already. We were owning our butchness. We were playing with gender performativity and fluidity. We were redefining what a positive queer leather community looked like at a time when laws were shutting us down.
Pig Pen/Stosh Fila: I remember Cathy shooting the mustache photos [“Being and Having” (1991), which features portraits of several Casa de Estrogen residents with fake facial hair] with this big camera. That’s when we would drive around on our motorcycles wearing mustaches in West Hollywood. I have a mustache now. I’ve always had a mustache, it seems. We would go to these bars, and they wouldn’t want us to come in. They’d tell us, “It’s ladies’ night.” We were like, “Yes, that’s why we’re here!”
Steak House: Now a lot of my friends have become trans or somewhere in the middle. Even I identify more as nonbinary these days; I was like, “Oh, someone got a word for what I am.” But I just want people to remember that butch dykes were cool. I know we still exist out there somewhere.
A new crop of artists, musicians and performers — many of them queer or trans — moved in at Casa de Estrogen. L.G.B.T.Q.+ people were increasingly represented in mainstream media; “The L Word” (2004-09), a television show set in West Hollywood, constituted a landmark event for lesbian visibility and featured a few of the portraits from Opie’s “Being and Having” in the opening credits.
Every Ocean Hughes, 48, artist: I got involved with the house through a queer musician I met my first week in LA. I didn’t know about the history of the building until Opie, who was a professor at UCLA, where I was in graduate school, asked me where I was living. The spirit must have remained, and we reanimated it. We were still doing [the queer art journal] LTTR when I moved to L.A. We collated the magazine in my living room and dyed T-shirts in the bathtub. I made an early video, “POW” [2005], with artist and filmmaker Leilah Weinraub in a tiny side room that I’d painted with chalkboard paint. I also announced that I’d be hosting a residency in the apartment, which I guess just meant I was open to houseguests since I had no resources. My only resident was the artist MPA. She arrived five hours late dressed as a bird.
JD Samson, 47, musician, artist, and D.J.: I found my way into that world via Every Ocean Hughes. Whenever I went to L.A. — visiting her or D.J.’ing or on tour — I would stay there. I had a band [called the New England Roses] with Beatrix Fowler and Sarah Shapiro. I remember being in this little sunroom in the apartment, blissed out making music together.
Wu Tsang, 44, filmmaker, artist and performer: I moved to L.A. because I was in a relationship with Every Ocean Hughes, and I moved in. We did an apartment trade with Eileen Myles for a bit, which is how Eileen ended up in Every’s apartment. I feel like this informal sharing economy is what made a lot of people’s lives possible over those years. When Every moved away, I inherited the apartment and lived there from about 2007 until I left L.A. I made “Wildness” [2012, a documentary about the Latino nightclub Silver Platter] during that time. I moved out when the rent got too expensive, but then I moved back because someone I was in a relationship with — the performance artist Tosh Basco — was coincidentally living across the hall in the same building. Not long after Tosh and I left L.A. for Greece, there was a fire in the house. It felt like the end of an era.
Tosh Basco, 38, performance artist: I sublet from a queer punk musician through a friend who homesteaded land and was part of a group of people who were train hoppers, anarchists, punk kids, sex workers. My rent was affordable because my roommate had gotten on the lease of the person before him. I think I paid around $600. Being a young queer person, it’s like things are rent-controlled even if they’re not, because someone will hold onto a lease for a long time and then sublet it out. When I left, I passed it on to another trans artist.
Steak House: Now you’d have to pay $2,000.
Jenny Shimizu: It almost doesn’t seem real. Is there anywhere now where a group could take over an apartment building like that? I think it’s true to call it a utopia. It was unbelievable. Like being raised by wolves.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
