Slim-k-d - Untitled

"We do not have the responsibility of making gay life look good to straights so that they will accept us. I am not at all interested in promoting a cleaned up image to a straight world which is twice as corrupt and ten times as sick."

Vito Russo

Photography by Betty Lane, 1978

Wee Kirk o’ the Heather Wedding Chapel, Las Vegas (1940-2020)

Photo: Undated, mid 50s. ‘51 Studebaker.

This was an adobe home built in the mid 20s at 213 South 5th Street, later 231 Las Vegas Blvd S. When U.S. Route 91 connected through Las Vegas via 5th St in the late 20s, chapels, motels, and other businesses catering to tourists opened along the road.

Mrs. J. Edwards Webb began performing wedding ceremonies in her front room either in the late 30s or early 40s. It came to be known as Webb’s Wedding Chapel and/or Wee Kirk o’ the Heather. According to the chapel when they were still open, “The city decided they needed a business license, so in 1940 they got a license and chose the name Wee Kirk.”

The earliest reference we can find to “Wee Kirk” is a listing in the RJ, 5/5/41. The name might come from the popular Wee Kirk o’ the Heather in Glendale CA, built in the 20s as a replica of a 17th century church in Scotland.

Wee Kirk was modified in the 50s: a steeple was added to the top of the building and the front room was enlarged. Nearby Graceland Chapel aka Gretna Green also started as a home, was converted into a chapel in the same era as Wee Kirk with similar modifications made in the 50s.

Wee Kirk's original sign was remade with neon at some time in the late 40s or early 50s. It was and replaced in the 70s or 80s with a signboard seen in the ‘84 photo below.

Wee Kirk closed during the 2020 pandemic and was demolished 10/3/2020.

Undated circa '40-'43. L.F. Manis Collection, UNLV Special Collections & Archives.

Circa '44

Postcards, circa 40s

Undated photo c. '50

Postcard, circa 60s – with the steeple

4/18/84 – Photo by Jane Kowalewski. Clark County Historic Property, Wee Kirk O' the Heather Wedding Chapel, Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas.

After all, good old Xi said he might consider not sending the US all the components they are so heavily dependent on anymore… so…

Tens of thousands of protesters mustered in cities and towns across the country on Saturday to sound off against the Trump administration's cuts to the federal government and its polices.

Carrying homemade posters and chanting "Hands Off," the protesters came out to the more than 1,200 rallies nationwide despite rain in many cities, according to organizers.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), spoke at the Washington DC rally, "Their tariffs are not only imbecilic — they're illegal, they're unconstitutional, and we're going to turn this around."

Paul Osadebe, a lawyer for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, spoke during the rally in Washington, saying the oligarchs do not "value you, or your life, or your community. ...We're seeing that they don't care who they have to destroy or who they have to hurt to get what they want."

Multiple protests rallied in all 50 states — major themes included, 'Hands Off': our Bodily Autonomy, our Schools, our LGBTQ Rights, our Freedom of Speech, our Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, our Wallets, our Jobs, our Civil Rights, our Clean Energy, our Democracy.

And, importantly, there were no reports of any major disturbances or arrests at any of the over 1,200 rallies.

This is the living embodiment of a government that is "of the People, by the People, and for the People."

Democracy is a beautiful thing.

The Santa Anas

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather”. My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.” In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.