The Numbers (Los Angeles Gay Bar/1976-1995)

The Numbers — Los Angeles Gay Bar Tee

From 1976 to 1995, The Numbers operated at 8029 Sunset Boulevard, a discreet gay bar and restaurant hiding in plain sight on one of the most famous streets in Los Angeles.

Opened by Donald E. Cook, The Numbers wasn't your typical neighborhood gay bar. You entered through the rear parking lot and descended a mirrored staircase into a dark, surprisingly elegant room with upholstered booths, tables, a long bar, and strategically placed mirrors that made it possible to survey practically the entire place without leaving your seat.

The crowd was equally distinctive. The Numbers became famous as a hustler bar, attracting handsome young men—some of them adult-film performers—along with older, often affluent customers looking for company. Somehow the whole thing also had the atmosphere of an old-fashioned supper club, complete with food and table service.

Even John Waters remembered the place fondly, describing its combination of mirrored stairs, older gentlemen, hustlers, wigs, and wonderfully strange Los Angeles characters as something straight out of John Rechy’s City of Night.

And that connection may have been intentional. The bar’s name echoed Rechy’s 1967 novel Numbers, about an aging gay hustler returning to Los Angeles and obsessively cruising men to prove he was still desirable. For anyone familiar with gay literature of the period, The Numbers was one hell of an inside joke.

For nearly twenty years, it remained one of Sunset Boulevard’s more unusual queer institutions—discreet on the outside and an entirely different world once you made it down those stairs.