Hollywood Forever

I’ve always loved walking around in cemeteries, not because I’m really that goth, but because they are carefully designed to be places of rest. They are also places of misrecognition. You are never sure how the dead are being remembered, or misremembered. As a queer and trans person, I’m always aware that gravestones may not say the right name, or place the person with the right family. You’d be surprised how many headstones just say “Mom” and “Dad.”

Hollywood Forever is a cemetery in — you guessed it — Hollywood, that might be interesting to anyone who cares about old movies. Situated between the Paramount Pictures lot and a view of the Hollywood sign, the cemetery is a shrine to stars of the silent era — Valentino, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Cecil B. DeMille.

I googled different maps of the cemetery to find all of the stars, but eventually gave up on that quest and just walked around without a goal in mind.