I'm a lawyer in Illinois. I don't know California law and if you want absolutely correct answers to your questions, you should consult a lawyer who knows California law. But here are answers to your questions based on my experience.
(1) No, there is not much risk of a greater penalty if you are convicted after pleading not guilty versus a guilty plea. As a first time offender, the most you're going to get if convicted is probation. This will be true whether you plead guilty or not.
(2) See #1, above.
(3) Courts and police do not report crimes to employers. It's not part of their mission or power to do so. However, court records are public records, and employers can search court records whenever they feel like it. They generally only do it (if ever) before hiring someone.
(4) Lewd conduct statutes are generally not worded in a way that requires someone to have to have been present to witness the conduct and be offended by it. It's possible that courts in California could interpret such a statute that way (here's where you need the California lawyer), but I highly doubt it.
(5) Your orientation and prior acts have nothing to do with whether you did what you were accused of doing. If you were ever on trial for this, your lawyer would object to such questions, if they were even asked, and no judge would allow such questions in.
(6) There are legal referral services in every city and in a city as large as L.A., there is probably one that focuses on the gay community. Check gay newspapers or online to see if you can find a Gay/Lesbian bar association (the "bar" is another word for lawyers as a whole). They would be able to refer you to someone. I'm sure there are many lawyers who have handled dozens of cases like this.
(7) Unless you can produce witnesses to refute the police's charges, or show some procedural error on their part, it's your word against theirs. Things usually go the police's way in court.
It's quite possible that as a first time offender, they will go out of their way to AVOID prosecuting you. Courts are very busy, so they do what they can to devote their resources to the most serious matters (if only the police were the same way!)
At your initial court hearing, the judge may place you under court supervision for some period of time--say 6 months to a year--and put off sending your case to trial until that period of time is over. If you stay out of trouble for that period of time, the charges against you will be dropped with no further obligations (court dates, probation, fines, etc.) on your part.
Then after some period of time has passed and you have remained out of trouble, you will be eligible to have the record of your arrest expunged, which means that the police return the original documents associated with the arrest to you and delete records of the arrest from their computer database. This means that any background check on you will no longer show an arrest.
Again, it's really important that you talk to someone who knows California law about all of this. But there's no reason to panic.
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